Voltaire formulates the most significant characteristics of the first Modern metaparadigm in his reflections on Locke and “free will.” The four phases of this metaparadigm will introduce heightened methods of self-analysis, methods for the analysis of human nature and the natural world, and separate this gain of human understanding and doing from the intervention of the Divine. This is a new epoch in human self-development. From its onset, we will see the view of a sovereign human being, whose very being is to be autonomous in his or her choices, indeed finding, as Hobbes will, that this “free will” is the major purpose of the age, an age that will reconstruct society's vision of authority, law, learning and moral action. As Martin Heidegger was to say in a later Modern metaparadigm, referring to great epochs such as that of ancient Greek thought and its ways of conceiving the human person and his community “But what is great can only begin great. Its beginning is in fact the greatest beginning of all.” He also saw such greatness as a potential within the beginnings of this epoch that begins in the mid-seventeenth century.