![]() ![]() The Churches taught that the vast majority of mankind would go to hell and suffer endless torments. ![]() Rousseau remarks chillingly in Émile (1762): ‘One half of the children who are born die before their eighth year’, and adds that this is nature’s means of eliminating the weak and ensuring that the strong survive.Īt the very least, however, philosophy could free people from imaginary sources of misery. When Josiah Wedgwood had his leg amputated in 1768, he sat in a chair, lightly sedated with laudanum, and watched his leg being sawn off. As anaesthesia would not be practised till the 1840s, surgical operations were a form of torture. Medical science, as opposed to theorising, made little progress during the Enlightenment. A simple calculation shows that pain predominates in life: ‘The sum total of painful sensations must in every man be greater than the sum total of pleasurable sensations.’Īnd there were many sources of unhappiness that philosophers could do nothing about. The Milanese Enlightener Pietro Verri argued that happiness was not something positive, but consisted only in the cessation or diminution of pain. The utmost we can hope for in this world is Contentment if we aim at anything higher, we shall meet with nothing but Grief and Disappointments.’ ‘Enquiries after Happiness, and Rules for attaining it,’ said Joseph Addison, ‘are not so necessary and useful to Mankind as the Arts of Consolation, and supporting one’s self under Affliction. They were sharply aware of the difficulties – illness, bereavement, misfortunes of all kinds – that frustrated the individual’s desire for happiness. Instead, they believed that a benevolent God must wish his creatures to be happy, and have planned the universe in such a way as to make happiness possible.Įnlighteners, however, were rarely Pollyannas. Enlighteners no longer saw the world as a vale of tears on which human beings had to endure suffering so that a tiny minority could be rewarded with happiness in heaven. This was the culmination of a century of Enlightenment thought in which eudaemonism, the belief that the attainment of happiness is the purpose of human life, became increasingly central. The preamble to the American Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson and revised by Congress, declares that all men have certain ‘unalienable Rights’, including ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’. ![]()
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