These phenomenal age paved way to the age of "enlightenment" where there was a loosely organized intellectual movement, secular, rationalist, liberal, and egalitarian in outlook and values, that flourished in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The name was self-bestowed, and the terminology of darkness and light was identical in the major European languages. The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on reason as the primary source of authority and legitimacy, and came to advance ideals such as liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.
