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Enlightenment: Ideas
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Ultimately, the Enlightenment fell victim to competing ideas from several sources. Romanticism was more appealing to less-educated common folk and pulled them away from the empirical, scientific ideas of earlier Enlightenment philosophers. Similarly, the theories of skepticism came into direct conflict with the reason-based assertions of the Enlightenment and gained a following of their own.
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Polish literature was greatly influenced by the country's close contact with western Europe, especially with France and England, during the Enlightenment. Polish writers were inspired in particular by the idea of saving the national culture from the disastrous effects of partitions and foreign rule.
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This view asserts that the Enlightenment was the point when Europe broke through what historian Peter Gay calls "the sacred circle,"[9] whose dogma had circumscribed thinking. The Enlightenment is held to be the source of critical ideas, such as the centrality of freedom, democracy and reason as primary values of society. This view argues that the establishment of a contractual basis of rights would lead to the market mechanism and capitalism, the scientific method, religious tolerance, and the organization of states into self-governing republics through democratic means. In this view, the tendency of the philosophes in particular to apply rationality to every problem is considered the essential change. From this point on, thinkers and writers were held to be free to pursue the truth in whatever form, without the threat of sanction for violating established ideas.
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If he had a 'left-handed' hippocampus, that would have made enlightenment much easier in neural terms. The positive amygdala and the non-verbal hippocampus would already be closely interconnected (now being on the same side of the brain). The thresholds that the episodes in his enlightenment would cross will be much lower. The period of his practice, when he trained himself to stop indulging in fear and sadness, would ... have been much easier in this case, too. More positive cognitive and emotional responses to things would have fed back on each other, leaving one hemisphere neatly out of the picture. Supressing negative ideation and emotion in a brain with a 'reversed' or 'left-handed' brain part means taking activity away from two parts on the same side of the brain.
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