![]() ![]() ![]() To her credit, Professor Margaret Jacob dared to “discard the map provided by Cassirer and others, at moments finding their taxonomy so idealized as to mislead. Not until the end of the last century did an academic historian discover Freemasonry. Well? What roused it, and why was its effect so pervasive? In his discussion of the “Age of Revolution”, Professor Carl Becker identified the enlightening impulse as the “arisen intellect”. In this respect, they resemble Isaac Newton’s Principia in the sense that he described the force of gravity without explaining what it is. These analyses all imply the existence of a generative impulse, but leave it to their readers to imagine how this energizing current reached and worked in the minds of the18 th century’s citizenry. I shall speak throughout,” he continued, “of the philosophes and call the totalities of their ideas, their strategies, and their careers, the Enlightenment, and I shall use these terms to refer to what I call a family, a family of intellectuals united by a single style of thinking.” Whew! Arthur Herman undertook to explain how “the Scottish Enlightenment created the basic idea of modernity.” Cassirer explained “the unity of conceptual origin and of its underlying principle.” Martin traced “the formation during the eighteenth century of western man’s creed of progress and democracy.” Noting bias in the analyses of his peers, Professor Gay vowed to “respect the differences among the philosophes. They are also prominent factors in the enlightening influence Fellowcraft exerted throughout Europe during this famous period of social progress.īury aimed to provide a broad-based survey of the history of the idea of progress. These concepts, not its connection to the Occult, allowed Freemasonry to spread during the 18 th century. While this is true, the roots of Freemasonry are in universal concepts of civic virtue. I suppose this can owes to the well-documented fact that Freemasonry has connections to the Occult. An abundance of information confirms it and was available to them, but they lacked the inclination to use it. Why have eminent intellectual historians excluded Freemasonry from their analyses? A noted geologist once exclaimed upon spying a rock outcrop while walking in a Massachusetts wood, “if I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it!” In terms of this logical fulmination, if historians had believed Freemasonry was a factor in spreading enlightenment, they would have seen it. ![]() In this discussion, I will show explain that Freemasonry was a primary instrument not just in the growth of scientific knowledge, but also in opening the public mind to the “enlightened” view of man and nature. ![]() Given the significance of Freemasonry as an enlightening impulse during the 18 th century these omissions provide a good reason to rethink the history of that revolutionary age. It may be understandable that Robert Darnton would fail to notice Freemasonry during his tour through the lower strata of Enlightenment-era French literature, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982). Nor is it found in Arthur Herman’s The Scottish Enlightenment – The Scot’s Invention of the Modern World (2001), this omission in spite of the fact that “fellow craft” originated in Scotland. The word does not appear in either volume of Peter Gay’s long two-volume dissertation, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (I – 1966, II – 1969). Nor did Kingsley Martin, whose French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1962) “stands next to Cassirer”. Ernst Cassirer, whose The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1951) is still considered by many as the most profound commentary on the subject, said nothing about Freemasonry. Bury did not mention that almost half of the 18 th century enlighteners he discussed in The Idea of Progress (1932) either were Freemasons or traveled in masonic circles. Many, perhaps all, of the leading intellectual historians writing during Malone’s lifetime also ignored it. Malone was not alone in ignoring Freemasonry. Not even the word appears in Dumas Malone’s detailed reconstruction of Jefferson’s five years in France. Those who build their knowledge of Thomas Jefferson with information provided by academic historians who wrote during the last century do not know that most members of Jefferson’s French circle were Freemasons. To read the document via PDF, please click here. ![]()
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