In the eighteenth century a concept of modernity was formulated which had as its origin the Renaissance. In this century and also in the Brazilian historiography, the ‘new ages’ concerned, essentially, to the Atlantic discoveries, that gave a pragmatic and announcing sense of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. As association or rupture with the Renaissant humanism, the discussion about the philosophical origins of the Discoveries occcurred on the reading that took place in the modern contemporaneous history.