The Renaissance was the gift of various world voyages undertaken by adventurous and inquisitive persons being funded by kings, monarchs and emperors. Prior to launching of voyages Christians had faught crusades from 1095 A.D. eight times with Arabic tribal communities. This encounter expanded the intellectual and knowledge horizons of Europeans who had through that they themselves were humans and the world civilisation was limited to Europe.

Having found the Arabian type drives as some sort of archaic humans, they thought that there were probably humans living elsewhere in the world. This fact is related to the Biblical story enshrined in the old testament that there had occurred a Biblical flood which had swept away Moses, The devout disciple of Jesus Christ and countless Christians on the bases of Biblical account orthodox Christians of that time believed that Moses must not have died along with his disciples. This phenomenon insighted some adventurous sailors of Europe to set their voyages in search of such population.

Renainssance and voyages prepared the ground for waiting of Christian the history, but late on natural history piled up so much that automatically a cleavage occured between divine history and natural history. Accounts of lands and peoples through the sea voyages come up which contributed to the growth of intellectualism. Knowledge of other lands and peoples became essential for European conquest and colonisation. During this time French writers contributed to the growth of objective history and growth of humanism. Locke, Hobbes, Montesque and others put forth the distinction between divine right and natural rights of man.

The missionaries, such as Jose de Acosta, Joseph Lafitau and others prepared on account of inhabitants of the New world. They conjectured that the inhabitants of the New World were archaic Christians as their living environment had mutilated their earlier style of life. However, whatever similarities they had found between Europeans on the one hand and the people of the New World on the other were attributed to the influence of environment on their life. Nevertheless they traced the similarities among the people of the New World to the ancient Christian holy land. Thus the Renainsance historians indirectly contributed the idea of social progress.

ADVERTISEMENTS:

A focus on the ideas directed attention to group achievements than to the doings of individual kings and heroes. During this time Voltaire, Turgot and Rousseau emphasised, William Robertson and Montesque in different ways divided human history to there phases, viz, savagery, barbarism and Civilisation. Rousseau questioned the correlation between civilisation and progress and he wrote that the belief in progress as realised in civilized state that ultimately prevailed. Scottish philosophers established the natural science of mankind.

They pictured the savage as a representative of early style of man. They emphasized that the savage developed from the sense perception to the general consciousness of science. During this time Auguste Comte developed his idealistic programme with its organic conception of society and history. His ideas opposed planned social change. He subordinated the positivistic method to his idealistic organismic concept.

The fields of social order or structure were described by him as social statics. Society was conceived by him as an organic whole analyzable into three elements, such as individual family and society . He emphasized that the basic social behaviour is biologically inherent. Societies anchored a human nature.

His concept of positivistic programme of the reorganisation of society on the basis of science was anchored in liberal and reformist circles. He said that every society passed through three stages, theological, metaphysical and scientific. Likewise every individual also passed through those stages. He drew an idealistic programme of social mobility of a universe, society and individual that passed uniformly through those stages.

ADVERTISEMENTS:

It seems appropriate here to refer to the emergence of certain intellectual tendencies which changed the static view of the universe. There is no doubt, the philosophy and philosophers of thought are at the back of this movement.