I claim for students of history that their study – if properly conducted – can strip the mind of illusions, leading them from heady abstraction back to men and women in their infinite diversity – warning them, by reference to actuality, against this or that ideology which oversimplifies the past under a single formula or promises the millenium the day after tomorrow.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "I claim for students of history that their study – if properly conducted – can strip the mind of illusions, leading them from heady abstraction back to men and women in their infinite diversity – warning them, by reference to actuality, against this or that ideology which oversimplifies the past under a single formula or promises the millenium the day after tomorrow." in the context of "David C. Douglas, 'The Seamless Robe: An Historian's Apology', in Time and the Hour: Some Collected Papers of David C. Douglas (1977), p. 23" to mean that wisdom is timeless.