The Historical Context of the Industrial Revolution (original) (raw)

We humans, as the highest form of life on the blue planet, have a history of about 3.8 billion years. That makes the recovery of the whole memory a formidable, if not frightening, exercise in the archeology of knowledge. Until we are somewhere close to it, we might never be sure who we are, where have we come from, and where are we going, the perennial questions humankind has struggled with since the earliest times. But since there is no end to what we can know, what matters in the end is not how much we know of our past but how we understand, or the method, intellectual tools or concepts, or the perspective by which we interpret what we know. The significance of this endeavour, of correctly interpreting the past, is evident in that it enables us to correctly envision the path that leads from the present to the future.

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