The modern view of man and his freedom has shaped itself gradually in recent times; the present is ever the child of the past. The most important factor in this development was undoubtedly the _Reformation_. It emancipated man in the most important affair, religious life, from the authority of the Church, and made him independent. “All have the right to try and to judge what is right and wrong in belief,” so _Luther_ told the Christian nobility of the German nation; “everybody shall according to his believing mind interpret the Scriptures, it is the duty of every believing Christian to espouse the faith, to understand and defend it, and to condemn all errors.” Protestantism means even to the modern man “the thinking mind’s break with authority, a protest against being fettered by anything positive, the mind’s return to itself from self-alienation” (_Schwegler_, Geschichte der Philosophie (1887), 167): “it puts out of joint the Christian Church organization, and overturns its supernatural foundation, quite against its will, but with an actual, and ever more plainly visible, effect” (_E. Troeltsch_, Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus fuer die Entstehung der modernen Welt (1906), 29). The first step towards full autonomy was taken with energy; the emancipation from external authority then progressed rapidly in the domain of politics, sociology, economy, and especially of religion, to the very elimination of everything supernatural. There came the English individualism of the seventeenth century. The liberty of “individual conviction,” termed also “tolerance,” in the sense of rejecting every authoritative interference in the sanctuary of man’s thought and feeling, was extolled; of course at first only as the privilege of those who were intellectually superior. Soon the Deism of a _Herbert of Cherbury_ and _Locke_ was reached; it was the religion of natural reason, with belief in God and the obligation to moral action. Whatever is added by positive religions, and therefore by the Christian religion, is superfluous; hence not dogma, but freedom! _Locke_, indeed, denied to atheists state toleration; but _J. Toland_ already advised full freedom of thought, even to the tolerance of atheism. In the year 1717 _Freemasonry_ came into existence in England. _Adam Smith_ originated the idea of a liberal political economy which frees the individual from all bond, even in the economic field. The views prevailing in England then exert great influence in France. _Rousseau_ and _Voltaire_ appear.