ABSTRACT
The history of ideas may seem to many to be a series of notable discoveries or inventions, each standing in a unique temporal (and, therefore, technical and social) setting, and each appearing as a product of its time. That’s how things may seem in retrospect. There may appear to be a gradual improvement or refinement in the features of any innovation which some may call evolutionary, as if there were something inevitable or supreme about the process. The work of any singular person may appear to others to fit neatly into that pattern, as if that person’s ideas were part of a necessarily ongoing stream, the source and course of which can be found and traced by examining what, at any time, are antecedent and current elements of the stream. To any such person, however, I suspect that the source and course of his own ideas have an entirely different appearance. Some ideas stem from fortuitous sets of circumstances, some from deliberate rejection of prevalent dogma, some from a gradually emerging sense of the integral character of apparently disparate circumstances and ideas. Some survive as distinctive and novel elements of a school of thought, some drift like flotsam on the tide of what seems to be the mainstream of ideas, some are submerged or cast aside by the stream. All of these fates have befallen some ideas I have entertained.
