ABSTRACT
This chapter charts the rise of scepticism about perception as a universal in written and filmic histories, and tests whether there was a knock-on effect to wonder. It notes that while the role of history in discerning universals persists, those universals may come to be understood differently over time, and the pace at which that understanding takes place may also vary across universals and across time. The chapter discusses the radical historicisation of metaphysics by Rorty, Collingwood, Wittgenstein and Braudel, who argued in different ways that our general sense making moves in the manner of a river or a wave. In 1896, the writer Maxim Gorky documented his first experience of watching some Lumiere films, with one of them very likely being The Arrival of a Train at Le Ciotat Station.
