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IN ITS

HISTORICAL SETTING

BY

ANNE ELIZABETH BURLINGAME
Assistant Professor of History, Hunter College

INTRODUCTION BY

JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON

NEW YORK

B. W. HUEBSCH, INC.

1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY B. W. HUEBSCH, INC.

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PREFACE

The little book here presented is the outgrowth of a design to trace through the writings of certain formative thinkers the development of a critical attitude toward classical authors in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. At first interested in the more formal side of her topic, the writer became increasingly impressed with the contrasting attitudes of spirit manifested by attackers and defenders of ancient authority. This differing quality of spirit became at length the absorbing theme of her study, gave to her conclusions their final form.

and

The writer wishes to express her abiding gratitude to Professor James Harvey Robinson, through whose inspiration and encouragement the work has alone been made possible. She feels deep obligation also to Professor William A. Dunning of Columbia University, whose kindly interest and scholarly criticism of her manuscript were of invaluable assistance. Her thanks are likewise due to President George Samler Davis of Hunter College, whose high devotion to cultural ideals has opened the way for her undertaking.

ANNE ELIZABETH BURLINGAME.

October, 1920.

INTRODUCTION

This little volume is the story of an escape the escape of the mind from an ancient prejudice. It seems to me both a fascinating and illuminating tale. It is not a series of literary reminiscences but an account of a fundamental emancipation with which the reader may profitably acquaint himself as a striking illustration of the manner in which the human mind grows, through the Old giving place to the New. This is a vital process to which we find it painful to reconcile ourselves at times. But Samuel Butler reminds us that "All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in a process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed and unchanged surroundings; living, in fact, is nothing else than this process of accommodation." This is a hard saying, for by nature we are for the most part and most of the time seeking our ease in comfortable routine; and accommodation requires thought and thought is likely to be laborious if it is good, for to accept new things we must wrench ourselves away from what we have hitherto approved and from what our fellows still approve. The history of man is the story of his reluctant and as yet highly imperfect accommodation to new knowledge

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