The fierce debate about the reality of spirits and the “Invisible World” which flared up in the 1690’s helped define the early Enlightenment. All sides in this debate—from Spinoza and Balthasar Bekker to John Beaumont and Cotton Mather—refashioned familiar metaphors of light and darkness and connected them with the world beyond Europe in surprising new ways. This article shows how this key controversy of the early Enlightenment was built upon references to darkness, light, and the benighted pagan peoples of the world. As new street lighting and improved domestic lighting nocturnalized daily life in the Netherlands, London, and Paris, the old denizens of the night - ghosts, spirits, and witches—were increasingly relegated to the extra-European world and used to articulate new categories of human difference based on civility, reason, and skin color. These new categories of human difference—new ways of seeing and ordering the world—were essential to the formation of early modern whiteness and the Enlightenment.

关于烈酒的现实和1690年代爆发的“无形世界”的激烈辩论帮助定义了早期的启蒙运动。从斯宾诺莎（Spinoza）和巴尔塔萨尔·贝克尔（Balthasar Bekker）到约翰·博蒙特（John Beaumont）和科顿·马瑟（Cotton Mather），这场辩论的所有方面都重新塑造了光明与黑暗的熟悉隐喻，并以令人惊讶的新方式将它们与欧洲以外的世界联系起来。本文说明了早期启蒙运动的主要争议是如何建立在对黑暗，光明和世界上已习以为常的异教徒的引用之上的。随着新的街道照明和室内照明的改善，在荷兰，伦敦和巴黎的夜生活开始日新月异，夜间的老居民-鬼魂，鬼魂和巫婆-已越来越多地沦落到欧洲以外的世界，并被用来表述新的类别。基于文明，原因和肤色的人为差异。