Greg’s Reviews > Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty > Status Update

Our values – what we think is good and bad, important and trivial, right and wrong, noble and contemptable – all these are conditioned by the place we occupy in the pattern, on the moving stair…To each condition and generation its own perspectives on the past and future, depending upon where it has arrived, what it has left behind, and whither it is moving; its values depend on this same awareness.

The historical approach is inescapable: the very sense of contrast and dissimilarity with which the past affects us provides the only relevant background against which the feature peculiar to our own experience stand out in sufficient relief to be adequately discerned and described.