• The Enlightenment was, as its exponents all insisted, like every philosophical movement

also a critical one. In this sense it was the true beginning of modernity, as an open-ended,
continuing progression, subject to constant scrutiny and re-evaluation.
• It had, as we shall see, a very clear sense of the direction in which mankind was heading and
why; but it never placed any limits on its future development. The objective was to arrive at
Condorcet’s “state of civilization,” but when that had been attained there was to be no cease,
no end to history.
• Unlike either the Renaissance or the Reformation, the Enlightenment had begun not as an
attempt to rescue some hallowed past, but as an assault on the past in the name of the future.
• It was a period which sought to overturn every intellectual assump- tion, every dogma, every
“prejudice” (a favorite term) that had previously exercised any hold over the minds of men
• sought to expose intellectual confusion, and the deceptions perpetrated by religion and the
uncritical adherence to custom
• Enlightenment would allow the individual to walk by himself. It would liberate him (and
increasingly her) from the constraints which had been placed upon him. But to achieve this
end he had to question what his pastor, his doctor, the books he had read, even his ruler had
to say. To do that, he had to think for himself.
•