The central argument in Principles was that the present is the key to the past – a concept of the Scottish Enlightenment which David Hume had stated as " all inferences from experience suppose ... that the future will resemble the past ", and James Hutton had described when he wrote in 1788 that " from what has actually been, we have data for concluding with regard to that which is to happen thereafter.

He and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers developed what he called a ' science of man ', which was expressed historically in works by authors including James Burnett, Adam Ferguson, John Millar and William Robertson, all of whom merged a scientific study of how humans behave in ancient and primitive cultures with a strong awareness of the determining forces of modernity.

The focus of the Scottish Enlightenment ranged from intellectual and economic matters to the specifically scientific as in the work of William Cullen, physician and chemist, James Anderson, an agronomist, Joseph Black, physicist and chemist, and James Hutton, the first modern geologist.

While the Scottish Enlightenment is traditionally considered to have concluded toward the end of the 18th century, disproportionately large Scottish contributions to British science and letters continued for another 50 years or more, thanks to such figures as the mathematicians and physicists James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, and the engineers and inventors James Watt and William Murdoch, whose work was critical to the technological developments of the Industrial Revolution throughout Britain.

* Buchan, James, Crowded with Genius: the Scottish Enlightenment ; Edinburgh's Moment of the Mind ( 2003 ).

A central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, a founder member of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, and active in the Select Society, his protégés included James Boswell, David Hume and Adam Smith.

Secularism draws its intellectual roots from Greek and Roman philosophers such as Marcus Aurelius and Epicurus ; medieval Muslim polymaths such as Ibn Rushd ; Enlightenment thinkers such as Denis Diderot, Voltaire, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine ; and more recent freethinkers, agnostics, and atheists such as Robert Ingersoll and Bertrand Russell.

Scottish Enlightenment thinkers developed what Hume called a ' science of man ' which was expressed historically in works by such as James Burnett, Adam Ferguson, John Millar and William Robertson, all of whom merged a scientific study of how humans behave in ancient and primitive cultures with a strong awareness of the determining forces of modernity.

The focus of the Scottish Enlightenment ranged from intellectual and economic matters to the specifically scientific as in the work of William Cullen, physician and chemist, James Anderson, agronomist, Joseph Black, physicist and chemist, and James Hutton, the first modern geologist.

While the Scottish Enlightenment is considered to have concluded toward the end of the 18th century, disproportionately large Scottish contributions to British science and letters continued for another fifty years or more, thanks to such figures as James Hutton, James Watt, William Murdoch, James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin and Sir Walter Scott.

Academics and graduates of the University include many distinguished figures, including: physicist James Clerk Maxwell ; Thomas Reid, the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense and an important figure in the Scottish Enlightenment ; philosopher Robert Adamson ; Regius Chair in Logic, Lord Rector, educationalist and philosopher Alexander Bain ; and theologian William Robinson Clark.

These late experimental narratives show Brown exploring the interface of fiction and history at the end of the revolutionary era, at a moment that both follows the great Enlightenment historians ( e. g., David Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon ) and prefigures the emergence of the 19th-century historical romance form in writers like Walter Scott or James Fenimore Cooper.

As mathematician John Playfair, one of Hutton's friends and colleagues in the Scottish Enlightenment, later remarked upon seeing the strata of the angular unconformity at Siccar Point with Hutton and James Hall in June 1788, " the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.

The Scottish Enlightenment was well represented in the person of Rev Dr James Meek, the Minister.

Historial Gilbert Osofsky has argued that Phillips's nationalism was shaped by a religious ideology derived from the European Enlightenment as expressed by Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.

* Scottish judge James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, begins publication of Of the Origin and Progress of Language, a contribution to evolutionary ideas of the Enlightenment.

The most notable technological innovation of the Midlands Enlightenment, however, was the 1775 development by James Watt and Matthew Boulton of the industrial steam engine, which incorporated four separate technical advances to allow it to cheaply and efficiently generate the rotary motion needed to power manufacturing machinery.

This argument has been taken a step further by some, like intellectual historian James Schmidt, who question the idea of ' the Enlightenment ' and therefore of the existence of a movement opposing it.

* Schmidt, James, What Enlightenment Project ?, Political Theory, 28 / 6 ( 2000 ), pp. 734 – 57.

Though its roots may be traced back as far as the Enlightenment ( Marquis de Sade ) and the Victorian era ( Algernon Charles Swinburne's scandalous Poems and Ballads of 1866 ).

* Sheng Yen, The Poetry of Enlightenment: Poems by Ancient Chan Masters.

He taught a number of important Enlightenment figures including Principal George Campbell, Dr Alexander Gerard, and Dr. James Beattie, and strongly influenced James Macpherson, the godfather as it were of Ossian, and Adam Ferguson.

* Marin, P. The Myth of Cato from Cicero to the Enlightenment ( forthcoming )

* " Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment "

The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment ( 1994 ) 338 pp online edition

In The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment ( 1994 ), Goodman argues that many women in fact played an essential part in the French Enlightenment, due to the role they played as salonnières in Parisians salons.

The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment.

During the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks established an institution called Proletkult ( the Proletarian Cultural and Enlightenment Organizations ) which sought to put all arts into the service of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

* Goodman, Dena, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994 )

In 2011, Hwa Dong Cultural Foundation and The Prince ’ s Charities Foundation in UK completed the project of filming “ The Arch of Enlightenment ,” a documentary of restoration of Gwanghwamun Gate.

In 1994, Dena Goodman published The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment.

The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment.

* Lenman, Bruce P. Enlightenment and Change: Scotland 1746-1832 ( 2nd ed.

" The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment ," The Journal of British Studies Vol.

* Hopfl, H. M. " From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment ," The Journal of British Studies, Vol.

" Why the Scottish Enlightenment Was Useful to the Framers of the American Constitution ," Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol.

* Philipp, W. ' Physicotheology in the Age of Enlightenment: Appearance and History ', Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 57 ( 1967 ), 1233-1267.

* Thomas Ahnert, Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment: Faith and the Reform of Learning in the Thought of Christian Thomasius ( Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006 ) ( Rochester Studies in Philosophy ).

" Barthold Georg Niebuhr and the Enlightenment Tradition ," German Studies Review, February 1980, Vol.

"' Aufklärung ', freemasonry, the public sphere and the question of Enlightenment ," Journal of European Studies, March 2008, Vol.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment, Isobel Grundy 1999. Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol.

* Goodman, Dena, Enlightenment Salons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol.

* Kelly, Jason M., The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment ( New Haven and London: Yale University Press and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2009 ).

* Barry Rodrigue and Daniel Stasko, “ Changing the Future with the Past: Global Enlightenment through Big History ,” The Journal of Globalization Studies 1, ( 2 ), Winter 2011, pp. 30 – 47.