ABSTRACT
Ernst cassirer has maintained in The Philosophy of the Enlightenment that the common opinion that the eighteenth century was an “unhistorical” century, is not and cannot be historically justified.’ For, he continues fit was the eighteenth century which raised the central philosophical problem in this field of knowledge. It inquires concerning the “conditions of the possibility” of history, just as it inquires concerning the conditions of the possibility of natural science.’ The chapter shows that the very remarks of the critics and satirists indicate a real concern with the matter of writing history. From early in the seventeenth century the unworthiness and deficiencies of English history had been commented on, by Bacon, Hayward, and Raleigh, and the standards by which such criticisms were made had remained pretty well the same from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.
