The Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution represent a watershed in the reimagining of reality. In the early 17th century, European thinkers began to challenge the authority of the medieval Scholastic tradition, which explained nature through inherited doctrine, sensory impressions, and appeals to purpose or final causes. Seeking a new and more secure foundation for knowledge, René Descartes, in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), turned away from this framework and began by doubting everything that could possibly be called into question—his senses, received teachings, even the existence of the external world. From this method of radical doubt, he arrived at the certainty of his own thinking (“I think, therefore I am”) and built a philosophy that sharply distinguished the thinking mind from extended, mechanical matter, opening the way for a fully mechanistic science of nature.

Descartes stabilizes this strict mind–body dualism, insisting on a separation between subject and object and, crucially, initiating an epistemological turn that reshaped Western thought. By making rational inquiry and inner certainty the foundation of knowledge—rather than relying on tradition or mere sensory experience—Descartes placed the reasoning mind at the center of philosophical investigation. This epistemological shift laid the groundwork for modern approaches to truth and doubt, defining how individuals come to understand themselves and the world around them. It fundamentally transformed how humans relate to reality. By establishing this separation between the immaterial mind (subject) and material reality (object), Descartes set the stage for later worldviews in which nature is no longer experienced as alive, purposeful, or spiritually significant. Instead, physical reality would increasingly be approached as something to be studied, measured, and controlled—stripped of mystery, inner life, and shared sacred participation. As meaning and value were gradually relocated from the world into the mind, nature came to be interpreted as neutral, inert matter; any sense of enchantment or spiritual connection became a matter of personal belief rather than common reality. The cosmos would increasingly be understood as an objective domain, governed by impersonal laws—open to human comprehension and control, but closed to deep participation and wonder.

Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) boldly extended this emerging mechanistic approach and became a foundation of modern science. Newton’s laws of motion and his law of universal gravitation described nature as a vast system operating according to fixed, discoverable mathematical principles. These equations unified terrestrial and celestial mechanics—everything from an apple falling to the ground to the motion of the planets followed the same intelligible patterns. Newton’s conception of matter was active yet governed entirely by rational forces, displacing earlier mystical or animistic views with strict causal relationships. Under Newtonian physics, the universe came to be pictured as a rational and impersonal system, in which events could—in principle—be calculated and explained by mathematical reasoning.

This paradigm encouraged a practical distinction between empirical description and questions of meaning or value, and reinforced the sense that the natural world consisted of value‑neutral matter open to human mastery and control. Newton’s legacy was not just scientific: it shaped Enlightenment thought across disciplines, supporting the belief that objective reality could be systematically understood, managed, and predicted—making the world less mysterious and more functional, yet also preparing the way for a profoundly disenchanted outlook.

David Hume, a pivotal figure of the Enlightenment, whose A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748) reworked the legacy of Descartes and Newton, challenged and revised the foundations of reason and scientific certainty. Hume argued that our knowledge is ultimately rooted in lived experience and mental habits—rather than pure reason or mathematical laws. He insisted that we cannot derive values or deeper meanings directly from facts, since meaning and morality arise from human interpretation and emotion, not from the nature of the world itself. What had been, in Newtonian culture, a practical distinction between scientific description and questions of value becomes, in Hume, a principled separation between what is and what ought to be. Hume’s skepticism marks a turning point in Western thought: the world becomes less enchanted and more transparently subject to human understanding, but it also reveals the limits and uncertainties of that understanding. His influence deepened the separation between fact and value, helping to shape a modern outlook in which meaning and value appear as human projections rather than features of a rational or sacred cosmos.

Together, Descartes, Newton, and Hume set in motion a trajectory toward a disenchanted worldview—a cosmos increasingly understood through impersonal, objective laws and seen as separated from inherent meaning or value, yet marked after Hume by a deep awareness of the limits and uncertainties of such understanding. Descartes and Newton shifted significance from the world itself to rational inquiry and mathematical explanation, inaugurating the modern project of understanding nature as a value‑neutral domain. Hume then marks the point at which modern philosophy and science become conscious of their own limitations: certainty gives way to probability, and objectivity to critical scrutiny of method. While the pursuit of universal truth persisted, Hume’s legacy ensured that claims to knowledge remained open to question, and that meaning and value were recognized as products of interpretation rather than reflections of a rational or enchanted cosmos.

In this way, the modern outlook becomes both disenchanted and self‑critical, preparing the need for later attempts to restore or reimagine meaning, value, and participation in a rationalized world.