 In the case of Cassirer, by contrast, although he is certainly a follower and champion of the Enlightenment, he is by no means a thinker of the Enlightenment itself. He is instead a creature of the twentieth century, confronted with forms of science, and also of socio-political organization, technology, warfare, and much else, which could not have been envisaged by either Kant or Hegel. Moreover, the unprecedented horrors of the first half of the twentieth century put Cassirer in a very different moral universe in which no religious or cultural tradition could simply be taken for granted. This is clear in Cassirer’s discussion of religion at the end of Mythical Thought, which, in contrast to both Kant and Hegel, ranks art rather than religion as the highest development of the expressive function of symbolic meaning. We must, in the end, acknowledge that Cassirer’s discussion of myth sheds a bright light on one of the most important problems of his time, namely, the rise of the technologically driven totalitarian state – a problem that continues increasingly to threaten us even today.