The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.

Knowing others is wisdom knowing yourself is Enlightenment.

Emancipation came to the colored race in America as a war measure. It was an act of military necessity. Manifestly it would have come without war in the slower process of humanitarian reform and social enlightenment.

Modernity the child of the Enlightenment failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

In the post-enlightenment Europe of the 19th century the highest authority was no longer the Church. Instead it was science. Thus was born racial anti-Semitism based on two disciplines regarded as science in their day - the 'scientific study of race' and the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel.

The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science especially in the schools of America.

There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naive.

I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and honestly I may as well just start it again now because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.

From Caesar's legions to the Napoleonic wars. From the Reformation the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution to the defeat of nazism. We have helped to write European history and Europe has helped write ours.

History shows that our way of life is the stronger way. From it has come more wealth more industry more happiness more human enlightenment than from any other way.