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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 72

[introduction]

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It is a familiar saying that "it has taken all the past to make the present," but this profound truth owes what currency it has rather to its paradoxical expression than to any general appreciation of its significance. The roots of things hidden in the past escape attention, and oftentimes what is deemed the original invention of to-day is in its main essentials as old as Aristotle. Of nothing is this truer than of systems of thought. Human thought, like human nature, is a growth, and doctrines which appear to the less observant to be the creation of this decade or the last are but the lineal descendants of the philosophies of hoary antiquity. I premise this because I hope to make what I have to say forcibly illustrate it. My first purpose is to trace