Separately, in the arts and letters, two ideas originating in France would have particular impact. The first was Impressionism, a school of painting that initially focused on work done, not in studios, but outdoors (en plein air). Impressionist paintings demonstrated that human beings do not see objects, but instead see light, itself. The second school was Symbolism, marked by a belief that language is expressly symbolic in its nature, and that poetry and writing should follow connections that the sheer sound and texture of the words create.
At the same time, social, political, religious, and economic forces were at work that would become the basis to argue for a radically different kind of art and thinking. In religion, biblical scholars argued that that the biblical writers were not conveying God's literal word, but were strongly influenced by their times, societies, and audiences. Historians and archaeologists further challenged the factual basis of the Bible and differentiated an evidence-based perspective of the past with the worldview of the ancients, including the biblical authors, who uncritically accepted oral and mythological traditions.
Chief among the physical influences on the development of modernism was steam-powered industrialization, which produced buildings that combined art and engineering, and in new industrial materials such as cast iron to produce bridges and skyscrapers—or the Eiffel Tower, which broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be—resulting in a radically different urban environment.
The possibilities created by scientific examination of subjects, together with the miseries of industrial urban life, brought changes that would shake a European civilization, which had previously regarded itself as having a continuous and progressive line of development from the Renaissance. With the telegraph offering instantaneous communication at a distance, the experience of time itself was altered.
The breadth of the changes can be sensed in how many modern disciplines are described as being "classical" in their pre-twentieth-century form, including physics, economics, and arts such as ballet, theater, or architecture.