ABSTRACT
Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of alll men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating the Historical Point of View….When a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man's own colleagues) and what the general course of critisism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the ‘present state of the question’. To regard the ancient writer as a said could possibly source of knowledge —to anticipate that what he behaviour —this would be rejected as unutterably simpleminded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human rece all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages thee is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristc truths of another.
