"It is hardly doubtful that, after hundreds or thousands of years have passed, the simple, detailed, and perhaps contradictory, narratives of contemporary witnesses will outlive those more elaborate and artistic efforts of the historian which are so largely inspired and coloured by the convictions of another—viz., his own—age. For as Goethe has remarked: "History must from time to time be rewritten, not because many new facts have been discovered, but because new aspects come into view, because the participant in the progress of an age is led to standpoints from which the past can be regarded and judged in a novel manner.""
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A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century
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