The Enlightentment era was a movement in Europe when people started to break away from Catholic ideas and develop their own. For the first time in years, people started question everything, including religion, out oud and asked questions on topics nobody has ever wondered about such as different scieneces. Philosophies about life and societies were springing up, soon creating social science. A rational view was also growing in popularity. John Locke and Mary Wollstoecraft were two brilliant authors that vastly influenced the Enlightenment and whos literature is still studied today. In John Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding", he claims that we are born with a tabula rasa mind, that our minds are a blank slate, not yet filled with good, bad, correct …show more content…
Our morals, along with our knowledge, are not yet developed and we have yet to develop them as we live. "Our observation, employed either about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking..." (Locke). We do not know what is true until we experience it through our five senses. This describes the common phrase, "seeing is believing." We know something is true is we see it happen before our eyes, along with feel, hear, etc. Since our knowledge comes from experience, it is limited to what we can physically confirm with out senses. We can only make true statements about what we see and no further assumption of something if we have no physical evidence to make a connection with. Unlike other Enlightenment authors, Locke denied the idea that we are born with innate knowledge, knowledge that we inherited at birth and not learned for ourselves. If you could tell people what to believe and what they know instead of letting them find out for themselves, it will be easier to