" Isaac Newton, John Locke, and many other men and women in England and Europe began to... believe that universal laws, discovered through observation, governed every part of human life. Today, we often talk about these ideas as "Western ideas." Sometimes, we talk about the years when these ideas became popular as the "Enlightenment. "

― Susan Wise Bauer , Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners (The Story of the World, #3)