The achievements of the scientific revolution represented the vanguard of the Enlightenment, that period in European thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when confidence in human reason and experience gradually came to supersede faith in religion and traditional authority. One central feature of Enlightenment thought, which flourished in France, Scotland, England, and Germany, was a commitment to human progress and an optimistic belief in the applicability of scientific knowledge, including social and psychological knowledge, to the improvement of the human condition. The Enlightenment saw the emergence of more liberal, secular, and utilitarian concepts of humanity and the development of more democratic societies, such as the United States. Although not universally embraced, these Enlightenment ideals continue to inform contemporary confidence in the theoretical progress and social utility of the sciences, including social and psychological science.

The rejection of the Aristotelian tradition was good news for the natural sciences. The rejection of Aristotle's geocentric theory and final causal explanations of motion led to advances in astronomy and physics. However, it was not so obviously good news for psychology. One of the casualties of the scientific revolution was Aristotle's biologically grounded functional psychology, which came to be replaced by a variety of mechanistic psychological theories. Ironically, this was not the intent of the pioneers of the new science, such as Galileo, Bacon, and Newton. Although they maintained that final causal explanation has no place in physical science, most recognized that final causal explanation is entirely appropriate in the realm of human and animal behavior. Yet this qualification was generally ignored by the protopsychologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who tried to create a science of psychology based upon the mechanistic forms of efficient causal explanation characteristic of the new science, for which Newton's physics came to serve as a paradigm.

Newton's theory of universal gravitation was hugely influential, not only in physical science, where it continued to reign supreme throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also with respect to the forms of psychological theory that developed during these centuries. These were either attempts to model psychological theory upon Newtonian science, such as associationist psychology, or reactions to them, such as “common sense” psychology, and rationalist and humanist alternatives.