Scholars generally relied on ancient authorities, church teachings, common sense, and reasoning to explain the physical world. In time, scholars began to use observation, experimentation, and scientific reasoning to gather knowledge and draw conclusions about the physical world.

The discoveries of Johannes Kepler and Galileo gave the theory credibility and the work culminated in Isaac Newton’s Principia, which formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that dominated scientists’ view of the physical universe for the next three centuries.

Two major sources that guided most Europeans’ thinking about the nature world was the Bible and the teachings of Aristotle. Aristotle was a Greek philosopher that had written about nature in the 300s B.C.E. Thomas Aquinas combined Aristotle’s thinking with Christian faith, in the late middle ages.

The ideas and source of the Scientific Revolution came from the beliefs of the Roman, Greek, and Muslim scholars who preceded them. The ideas and technologies were passed around the Mediterranean area through trade.

In the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, the development of new methods and approaches for examining the body led to the emergence of new ideas about how the body worked. New ‘scientific’ forms of medicine emerged, leading to the development of new medical theories of disease.

The Age of Enlightenment influenced many legal codes and governmental structures that are still in place today. The idea for the three branch system outlined in the U.S. Constitution, for example, was the brainchild of Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu.

Impact. The ideas of the Enlightenment played a major role in inspiring the French Revolution, which began in 1789 and emphasized the rights of common men as opposed to the exclusive rights of the elites. As such, they laid the foundation for modern, rational, democratic societies.