Meanwhile the historiography which immediately followed pushed the double aporia of antiquity and of the Middle Ages to the extreme; and it was owing to this radical unprejudiced procedure that it acquired its definite physiognomy and the right of being considered a particular historiographical period. The symbolical vesture, woven of memories of the Græco-Roman world, with which the modern spirit had first clothed itself, is now torn and thrown away. The thought that the ancients had not been the oldest and wisest among the peoples, but the youngest and the least expert, and that the true ancients, that is to say, the most expert and mature in mind, are co be found in the men of the modern world, had little by little made its way and become universally accepted. Reason in its nudity, henceforth saluted by its proper name, succeeds the example and the authority of the Græco-Romans, which represented reason opposed to barbaric culture and customs. Humanitarianism, the cult of humanity, also idolized by the name of 'nature,' that is to say, ingenuous general human nature, succeeds to humanism, with its one-sided admirations for certain peoples and for certain forms of life. Histories written in Latin become scarce or are confined to the learned, and those written in national languages are multiplied; criticism is exercised not only upon medieval falsifications and fables, upon the writings of credulous and ignorant monks in monasteries, but upon the pages of ancient historians, and the first doubts appear as to the truth of the historical Roman tradition. A feeling of sympathy, however, toward the ancients still persists, whereas repugnance and abhorrence for the Middle Ages continue to increase. All feel and say that they have emerged, not only from darkness, but from the twilight before dawn, that the sun of reason is high on the horizon, illuminating the intellect and irradiating it with most vivid light. 'Light,' 'illumination,' and the like are words pronounced on every occasion and with ever increasing conviction and energy; hence the title 'age of light,' of 'enlightenment' or of 'illumination,' given to the period extending from Descartes to Kant. Another term began to circulate, at first used rarely and in a restricted sense--'progress.' It gradually becomes more insistent and familiar, and finally succeeds in supplying a criterion for the judgment of facts, for the conduct of life, for the construction of history, becomes the subject of special investigations, and of a new kind of history, the history of the _progresses_ of the human spirit.