The Enlightenment was mankind's emergence from a period lacking the sense of determination and courage necessary for independent thought to thrive without authoritative knowledge, provoking a most remarkable change in every form of the construction and expression of ideas. All aspects of human life demanded rationalization. Moral philosophy, history, sociology, law, politics, literary criticism, medicine, natural science, religion, drama; intellectual vitality in every possible field of learning was constantly doubted, examined, investigated and debated. All inquiries and discoveries were to be made in the spirit of ‘dare to know’. Architecture, for one, a product of all sorts of factors – social, economic, scientific, technical, ethnological – was inevitably affected by this dynamic period of intellectual events. This is misleading, however, in so far as it seems to stress the revolutionary aspects and impacts of this period at the expense of the actual condition of the age of the Enlightenment. Emphasizing the independent significance of the period, the incidental element of the movement is capable of being confused with the essential. While the disavowal of established dogmas characterized the substance of the Enlightenment, it was nevertheless an age greatly dependent on historic knowledge and the past, careful not to make any violent breaks with previous traditions. It was centuries of gradual transformation rather than of change; of discovery rather than reformation; and of exegesis rather than negation of the previous centuries.