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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: Aristotle. The important position which these two great thinkers
occupy in the progress of historical criticism can hardly be over-
estimated. I do not mean merely as regards their treatment of the
Greek Bible, and Plato's endeavours to purge sacred history of its
immorality by the application of ethical canons at the time when
Aristotle was beginning to undermine the basis of miracles by his
scientific conception of law, but with reference to these two wider
questions of the rise of civil institutions and the philosophy of
history.
And first, as regards the current theories of the primitive
condition of society, there was a wide divergence of opinion in
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