Western Civilization The European Enlightenment Researchers show the European Enlightenment came about as the result of the new natural science ideas of Isaac Newton, the political and social theories of great thinkers like Hobbes, and the psychology of John Locke. Much of Newton's thought comes from the thirteenth century science of men like Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler. Hobbes's political and social theories can be traced back to the Northern Renaissance, and the psychology of Locke comes from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There were many contradictory turns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, first, with the overthr