ABSTRACT
At this stage in the analysis, it becomes in principle possible to show how specific thinkers and traditions of thought have en ... countered problems of this kind, how they have dealt with them and what further problems have arisen in consequence of their responses; and in doing so, modes of thought may be met with which approximate to what we mean when we use such terms as 'historical'. At the cost of some looseness, we may employ such terms in exploring these intellectual developments, and to do so has the great advantage of being positive instead of evaluatory. Instead of trying to determine whether a man's thought was or was not 'historical' according to some preconceived criterion, we can trace the ways in which-rather than the extent to whichhis thought had become involved in questions and answers of the kind to which such a term may possibly be illuminatingly applied; and we can concern ourselves with the substance rather than the epithet, with what his thought was rather than with what it may not have been.
