In the eighteenth century, a daring and dramatically new intellectual and cultural movement arose in western Europe. Of its many characteristics - audacity, wit, an interest in the practical and the applied - none was more important than its critical, biting edge. This opinionated movement called for "enlightenment" for new thinking about once unquestioned truths and eventually for new actions. Best characterized by the metaphor of light, the Enlightenment has retained the name it acquired early in the eighteenth century.