<P> The 18th century was a time of enlightenment progression occurring in all intellectual fields . However, the English language was deteriorating into a tangled mess . A group of London booksellers commissioned well - known essayist Samuel Johnson to compile a set of rules governing the English Language . After nine years and the help of six assistants the first edition of A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755 . Johnson's great knowledge of letters, words and literature brought uniqueness to his dictionary . Each word defined in detail, with descriptions of their various uses and numerous literary quotes as illustrations . This was the first dictionary of its kind, containing 40,000 words and nearly 114,000 quotes packed together with Johnson's personal touch . A warm reception greeted Johnson's Dictionary as it was the first dictionary that could be read with pleasure . The definitions full of wit and depth of thought supported by passages from beloved poets and philosophers, which a reader could be content spending an evening poring over its pages . Johnson's choice of structure and format has certainly shaped future English dictionaries and lexicons and the role they play in language development . </P> <P> The Augustan period showed less literature of controversy than the Restoration . There were Puritan authors, however, and one of the names usually associated with the novel is perhaps the most prominent in Puritan writing: Daniel Defoe . After the coronation of Anne, dissenter hopes of reversing the Restoration were at an ebb, and dissenter literature moved from the offensive to the defensive, from revolutionary to conservative . Defoe's infamous volley in the struggle between high and low church came in the form of The Shortest Way with the Dissenters; Or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church . The work is satirical, attacking all of the worries of Establishment figures over the challenges of dissenters . It is, in other words, defensive . Later still, the most majestic work of the era, and the one most quoted and read, was William Law's A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728). The Meditations of Robert Boyle remained popular as well . Both Law and Boyle called for revivalism, and they set the stage for the later development of Methodism and George Whitefield's sermon style . However, their works aimed at the individual, rather than the community . The age of revolutionary divines and militant evangelists in literature was over for a considerable time . </P> <P> Also in contrast to the Restoration, when philosophy in England was fully dominated by John Locke, the 18th century had a vigorous competition among followers of Locke . Bishop Berkeley extended Locke's emphasis on perception to argue that perception entirely solves the Cartesian problem of subjective and objective knowledge by saying "to be is to be perceived ." Only, Berkeley argued, those things that are perceived by a consciousness are real . For Berkeley, the persistence of matter rests in the fact that God perceives those things that humans are not, that a living and continually aware, attentive, and involved God is the only rational explanation for the existence of objective matter . In essence, then, Berkeley's skepticism leads to faith . David Hume, on the other hand, took empiricist skepticism to its extremes, and he was the most radically empiricist philosopher of the period . He attacked surmise and unexamined premises wherever he found them, and his skepticism pointed out metaphysics in areas that other empiricists had assumed were material . Hume doggedly refused to enter into questions of his personal faith in the divine, but his assault on the logic and assumptions of theodicy and cosmogeny was devastating, and he concentrated on the provable and empirical in a way that would lead to utilitarianism and naturalism later . </P> <P> In social and political philosophy, economics underlies much of the debate . Bernard de Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees (1714) became a centre - point of controversy regarding trade, morality, and social ethics . Mandeville argued that wastefulness, lust, pride, and all the other "private" vices were good for the society at large, for each led the individual to employ others, to spend freely, and to free capital to flow through the economy . Mandeville's work is full of paradox and is meant, at least partially, to problematize what he saw as the naive philosophy of human progress and inherent virtue . However, Mandeville's arguments, initially an attack on graft of the War of the Spanish Succession, would be quoted often by economists who wished to strip morality away from questions of trade . </P>

Account of the augustan age in england 1759