section_path: Historiography/Definition
section_name: Definition
paragraph_text: Definition
  
  The term "Enlightenment" emerged in English in the latter part of the 19th century, with particular reference to French philosophy, as the equivalent of the French term Lumières (used first by Jean-Baptiste Dubos in 1733 and already well established by 1751). From Kant's 1784 essay "Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?" ("Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment? "), the German term became Aufklärun g (aufklären =to illuminate; sich aufklären =to clear up). However, scholars have never agreed on a definition of the Enlightenment or on its chronological or geographical extent. Terms like les Lumières (French), illuminism o (Italian), ilustración (Spanish) and Aufklärung (German) referred to partly overlapping movements. Not until the late 19th century did English scholars agree they were talking about "the Enlightenment."
  
  Enlightenment historiography began in the period itself, from what Enlightenment figures said about their work. A dominant element was the intellectual angle they took. Jean le Rond d'Alembert 's Preliminary Discourse of l'Encyclopédie provides a history of the Enlightenment which comprises a chronological list of developments in the realm of knowledge—of which the Encyclopédie forms the pinnacle. In 1783, Mendelssohn referred to Enlightenment as a process by which man was educated in the use of reason. Kant called Enlightenment "man's release from his self-incurred tutelage," tutelage being "man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another." "For Kant, Enlightenment was mankind's final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance." The German scholar Ernst Cassirer called the Enlightenment "a part and a special phase of that whole intellectual development through which modern philosophic thought gained its characteristic self-confidence and self-consciousness." According to historian Roy Porter, the liberation of the human mind from a dogmatic state of ignorance, is the epitome of what the Age of Enlightenment was trying to capture.
  
  Bertrand Russell saw the Enlightenment as a phase in a progressive development which began in antiquity and that reason and challenges to the established order were constant ideals throughout that time. Russell said that the Enlightenment was ultimately born out of the Protestant reaction against the Catholic Counter-Reformation and that philosophical views such as affinity for democracy against monarchy originated among 16th-century Protestants to justify their desire to break away from the Catholic Church. Although many of these philosophical ideals were picked up by Catholics, Russell argues that by the 18th century the Enlightenment was the principal manifestation of the schism that began with Martin Luther.
  
  Jonathan Israel rejects the attempts of postmodern and Marxian historians to understand the revolutionary ideas of the period purely as by-products of social and economic transformations. He instead focuses on the history of ideas in the period from 1650 to the end of the 18th century and claims that it was the ideas themselves that caused the change that eventually led to the revolutions of the latter half of the 18th century and the early 19th century. Israel argues that until the 1650s Western civilization "was based on a largely shared core of faith, tradition, and authority."