Today, when historians look at the Enlightenment, they look at it through the eyes of great thinkers. "The philosophical spirit itself took refuge in the writings of some great men" (D'Alembert,7). They contributed to creating knowledge as it is understood today. However, the question remains: what category do these men fall into? There are many different names and definitions of what these men can be called and who qualifies to fall into this group. It is said that many of the men classified in the category were not true mind-expanding, thought-challenging philosophical thinkers. In the essay “The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature” by Robert Darnton, the status of these philosophes that were produced during the High Enlightenment is discussed. He argues that “the vision at the pinnacle of eighteenth-century intellectual history has been described so often and so well that it might be useful to go in a new direction, to try to get to the bottom of the Enlightenment and attempt to penetrate its underworld. .. from below” (Darnton,57). He decides to examine the status of Enlightenment thinkers during this period to see the social position they had and the influence on the world around them, not by general philosophers. Not by the works that have been produced or by the social responses to them; by the writers themselves. Darnton criticizes other historians for looking at the Enlightenment "only through the eyes of this elite and proposes that, instead, we examine it from the perspective of those who failed to break through to this closed elite of 'literary aristocrats'" (Chi they were the philosophers, 44). Darnton discusses, in his essay, the position of men of letters during the... middle of paper... impoverished. Grub Street members now needed the shift in thinking that was occurring in the early Enlightenment. “It would seem necessary, therefore, to seek the connection between the Enlightenment and the Revolution, to examine the structure of the cultural world under the Old Regime, to descend from the heights of metaphysics and enter Grub Street” (Darnton, 65). These old Enlightenment ideas were spreading to the lower classes because of what was happening to the Men of Letters. These members needed a change. “[As] they grew fat in Voltaire's church, the revolutionary spirit passed to the lean, hungry men of Grub Street, to the cultural pariahs who, through poverty and humiliation” (Darnton, 66). This is what happened in France during the High Enlightenment which led to the Revolution for further changes.