ABSTRACT
Ernst Cassirer finds support for his views by showing historians to be the natural culmination of a cultural change. His theory of history emerges after surveys and appraisals of other historians' views of history, wherein Cassirer describes changing views about the aim of history. Consequently, when Cassirer deals with the cultural materials of an age, he is not concerned with them as the materials of an outcome. Because knowledge in the cultural disciplines is ordinarily compared to the generality and the deductively systematized pattern of the physical sciences, the acquisition of knowledge in the cultural disciplines can be explained without assuming a priori mental activity. J. H. Randall and J. Dewey say that philosophical thinking arises when there is a need to reorganize and reinterpret human experience during times of cultural change, when old patterns no longer give guidance. Cassirer may be regarded as both engaged in hermeneutic cultural anthropology and in the work of a historian.
