The community development, livelihood and the people’s way of life are the material consequences of Europe’s new involvement with the world as it new ideas and political thought dawned to its land. Robert’s described the early European diet remains as one of the most varied in the world. The discovery of spice trade routes ushered new agricultural products like coffee, tobacco, tea and sugar resulting to an improved taste, habit and housekeeping of the European majority. Potato products played an important role in sustaining the improved lifestyles of many European countries as a result of an increased population.
Scores of drugs were added to the European pharmacopoeia, mainly from Asia (Robert 527). According to Robert (528) the birth of new knowledge of the world with European mentality could not be easily disregarded. European minds were changed, due to increase in the number of books about discoveries and voyages in both East and West in the early seventeenth century, though Europeans only begun to show the impact of knowledge of the anthropologies of other people towards its close.
The effect of such developments according to Robert were magnified due to the fact that they took place in an age of printing, which makes the novelty of interest in the world outside Europe hard to evaluate. , Europe contributed to the deep intellectual development in the early eighteenth century at the deepest level. Robert’s History of the World, has a vivid description of “savages” in a pleasant manner as who lived moral lives without the aid of Christianity had provoked reflection; an English philosopher John Locke, used other continents type of morality to prove his theory that not all men shared God- given innate ideas (527).
The Body History is the compilation of the past events and a tool used to measure and evaluate past actions and decisions made by an individual, groups, nations or people and use it to outline their move towards the future and how these factors might affect their successes or failures. As Europe undergo massive developments in terms of politics, society, economics and philosophy, the people were enlightened as Europe’s intellectual mainstream–the Enlightenment slowly entered their lives.
Hooker (1996) defines Enlightenment” as an intellectual movement of the 18th century where certain thinkers and writers in London and Paris believed that they were more enlightened than their compatriots, so they set out to enlighten them. Their beliefs anchored on the fact that human reason could be used to combat ignorance, superstition, and tyranny, thus, build a better world. In 1996, Hooker (1996) describes “Enlightenment,” as a historical category that refers to a series of changes in European thoughts and letters.
In this period the writers, philosophers and scientists were in conformity that they were breaking from past’s obscurity, darkness, and ignorance and replace their thoughts with the “light” of truth. Hooker (1996) listed below the Enlightenment’s main components: “ *The universe is fundamentally rational, that is, it can be appreciated through the use of reason alone; *Truth can be arrived at through empirical observation, the use of reason, and systematic doubt; *Human experience is the foundation of human understanding
of truth; authority is not to be preferred over experience; *All human life, both social and individual, can be understood in the same way the natural world can be understood; once understood, human life, both social and individual, can be manipulated or engineered in the same way the natural world can be manipulated or engineered; *Human history is largely a history of progress; *Human beings can be improved through education and the development of their rational facilities; and *Religious doctrines have no place in the understanding
of the physical and human worlds. ” There are two distinct developments in Enlightenment thought according to Hooker and these were the scientific revolution which resulted in new systems of understanding the physical world; and the redeployment of the human sciences that apply scientific thinking to what were normally interpretive sciences. The development of empirical (practical) thought and the mechanistic (use of machines) world views were the two great innovations present in the scientific revolution (Hooker).
Hooker explains the first development—Empiricism–being based on human observation and a reliable indicator of the nature of phenomena and with a repeated human observation that can produce reasonable expectations about future natural events. While the second point (the redeployment of the human sciences ) regard universe as a machine that act through natural and predictable rules, thus when the world is understood as a machine, then it can be manipulated and re- engineered for the benefit of humanity in the same way as machines are.