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In the meantime, though, intellectual history remained the dominant historiographical trend. The German scholar Ernst Cassirer is one of the most prominent intellectual historians. His writing on The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932) asserted the time as "a part and a special phase of that whole intellectual development through which modern philosophic thought gained its characteristic self-confidence and self-consciousness". Borrowing from Kant, Cassirer states that Enlightenment is the process by which the spirit "achieves clarity and depth in its understanding of its own nature and destiny, and of its own fundamental character and mission".[180] This clarity and understanding were gained in a shift away from knowledge through revelation and towards the use of reason. Cassirer's project is to trace the history of the enlightenment where the driving engine of change are the new forms of intellectual use of reason.

This driving force of change, for Cassirer, was a shift modeled from Galileo towards a distinctively modern and scientific empirical approach towards philosophic inquiry. He was one of the firsts to lay down the groundwork for the ideas for Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant. Cassirer traces the enlightenment to its finality with the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant as a modern version of philosophic idealism with epistemology as synonymous with philosophy.

Cassirer's influence was huge for later intellectual historians such as Johnson Kent Wright's analysis of Cassirer's work 'A bright Clear Mirror' in the book What's left of Enlightenment by Reill & Baker. His works were also later critiqued by Peter Gay who considers the context in which it Cassirer wrote, Germany in 1932, on the precipice of the Nazi seizure of power and one of the greatest assaults on the ideals of the Enlightenment. Gay also argued that "Cassirer's work remains a trenchant defense against enemies of the Enlightenment in the twenty-first century."

[Robert Darnton] in his work, "In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas" comments both on Gay and Cassirer's interpretations of the Enlightenment. While Gay's 'social history of ideas' still requires a methodology to it that can accurately capture the Enlightenment. Darton asserts, "it will probably fall back on ad hoc combinations of Cassirer and Mornet until it develops a discipline of its own. If those two masters can- not yet be brought together in a new definition of the Enlightenment, they cannot be left alone. And seen through the work of their successors, their achievement looms larger than ever."

In short, the Enlightenment was a series of philosophical, scientific and otherwise intellectual developments that took place mostly in the 18th century – the birthplace of intellectual modernity.