The idea is to let the viewer be immersed in the process and gain some enlightenment from that.

WSJ: Repertory Film: External Influences

Requiring more than a thousand moving parts, Vaucanson's duck was not only a mechanical marvel, but also begged some very Enlightenment-era intellectual questions: Was there anything more to life than mechanics and plumbing?

FORBES

Recent events and ideas inspired some criollos: independence and republicanism in the United States, the French Enlightenment, British liberalism.

ECONOMIST: Millennium issue: Freeing Spanish America