Enlightenment thinkers believed that the use of reason would lead to extraordinary progress in all human endeavors. Building on the “scientific revolution” of the seventeenth century, they explored the natural world through experiment and close observation. They believed that the universe was governed by precise, knowable laws, and their pursuit of those laws was known at the time as natural philosophy.

Scientific ideas were debated in scholarly societies such as the American Philosophical Society (founded by Franklin) and the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts (directed for many years by Dashkova). The goal of these academies was to make theoretical knowledge useful to individuals and governments. Academy members conducted experiments, charted the heavens and the earth, and shared new ideas in letters and journals.

What Was Natural Philosophy?

Until the emergence of what we now call science in the mid-1800s, the study of the natural world was called “natural philosophy”—which is why Franklin named his scientific society the American Philosophical Society. Natural philosophy was one of three branches of a discipline that also included moral and metaphysical philosophy. The word “scientist” would not replace the term “natural philosopher” until the 1830s.

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