We cannot...

We cannot, of course, completely avoid viewing past moralists and past philosophers in terms of present distinctions. To set out to write the history of moral philosophy at all involves us in selecting from the past what falls under the heading of moral philosophy as we now conceive it.

But it is important that we should, as far as it is possible, allow the history of philosophy to break down our present-day preconceptions, so that our too narrow views of what can and cannot be thought, said, and done are discarded in face of the record of what has been thought, said, and done. We have to steer between the danger of a dead antiquarianism,