W XVIII wieku kategoria sumienia stała się jedną z podstawowych wartości kulturowych Europy. Przez to istotnym zaczęła być relacja pomiędzy polityką a wartościami moralnymi. Jednak wcześniejsza, nowożytna europejska teoria polityczna stała w opozycji do idei sprawowania rządów opierając się na sumieniu, dlatego przedoświeceniowe kategorie prawdy i moralności nie stanowiły znaczących wartości politycznych. W polskiej myśli politycznej II połowy XVIII wieku dominowało przeświadczenie, że nie można oddzielić polityki od moralności. Ale niechęć do wtrącania się władcy do spraw sumienia, wsparta na wartościach szlacheckiej wolności oraz równości, powodowała, że polscy autorzy tekstów z zakresu teorii politycznej nie czynili króla odpowiedzialnym za prawdę i moralność.
EN
In the 18th century the category of conscience became one of the rudimentary cultural values in Europe. For this reason, the relationship between politics and moral values became vital. However the earlier, modern European political theory was in opposition to the idea of governing on the basis of conscience, which is why the categories of truth and morality from the pre-Enlightenment period did not constitute any significant political values. In the Polish political thought of the second half of the 18th century, there was the conviction that the politics cannot be separated from morality. Nonetheless the unwillingness of the king to interfere with the issues of the conscience, based on the values of the noble freedom and equality resulted in the fact that the Polish authors of the texts within the scope of the political theory had not made the king responsible for the truth and morality.
The process of mythologization of avifauna has been analyzed in order to study the relation between man and nature, and more precisely, between the Renaissance humanism and natural sciences. One issue is puzzling in this field – why did educated and well-read humanists mythologize nature, including the avifauna? Why did authors, for whom in principle criticism was an elementary indicator for perceiving reality, got rid of it so easily? 16th century authors with humanist education did not reconstruct nature but art, and they searched for its ideal in ancient works filled with mythologization of the nature. Humanist erudition required describing mythical animals and equally mythical symbolic of those animals. In this way one could prove that he knew ancient texts well. Reconstruction of such nature as it really existed was an attitude that was unworthy of a humanist artist. Hence the store of knowledge and ignorance that existed in those times was translated into a particular, often mythologized, text written by a Renaissance author.