ABSTRACT
The advent of philosophical history was not a sudden event. The aim of philosophical history was to substitute intellectual and cultural history for political and military history, the record of the triumphs of the mind for the bloody and vainglorious triumphs of the sword. Before long it became clear that linguistic analysis required study of the history of language. Not the least of the anticipated results was the destruction of those Cartesian innate ideas that threatened to become an impregnable fortress of religious belief in the modern and "enlightened" world. Philosophical history, both as cultural and as conjectural history, had aimed not so much to record as to promote progress. It had always taken "error," usually a code word for religious belief, as its target. Enlightenment would have to be re-thought if it was to be more than a celebration of both injustice and the fatal divorce of culture and nature.
