the Enlightenment

noun

: a movement of the 18th century that stressed the belief that science and logic give people more knowledge and understanding than tradition and religion

Examples of the Enlightenment in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Though often misremembered as a boy’s adventure book, Gulliver’s Travels is both summation and rejoinder to the Enlightenment and how innumerable sins can result when the idolatry of reason leads to humans being treated as objects. — Literary Hub, 28 Oct. 2026

The harder question is one the West has been quietly answering the same way for three hundred years, and the answer sits at the heart of the Enlightenment. — Stephen Messer, Fortune, 16 Oct. 2026

In it, a twelve-year-old boy, Cosimo, rebels against his aristocratic family, and the Enlightenment’s false divide between nature and culture, by climbing a holm oak and spending his life in the canopy. — Eric Klinenberg, New Yorker, 17 Aug. 2026

But Musical Bodies is not limited to this characteristically Western dichotomy and the Enlightenment discourse that fostered it. — Jonathon Keats, Forbes.com, 31 July 2026