Excerpt from The Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance

Different causes of various kinds and degrees of cogency may exist for prefixing to a new work, that bugbear of the modem reader - an Introduction. Thus there may be reasons of undeniable expediency for dealing in a separate and initiatory chapter with the general outline or purport of the book. Among such reasons may be one or more whose special operation gives them a peculiar claim to consideration. The book may e.g. treat of a subject long misapprehended and maltreated by writers who have generally dealt with it in time past; or, like a stranger who can claim kinship among the circle into which he craves admission, the book may be so allied with an older work on the same or kindred subject that it is capable of receiving from it no small amount of reflected illustration in the way of references or extracts. Now both of these reasons combine as justifying an introduction to the present work. 1st. It is related to a work which the author published so far back as 1881 under the title of Evenings With The Skeptics. It may indeed claim to be in some sort a continuation of that work - carrying down the history of the chief representative Skeptics to the period of the Renaissance and a century or more beyond.

By this, however, is not intended that such a continuity in the subjects of the two works need be emphasized or exaggerated, so that the essential independence, self-sufficingness, and conclusiveness of these two volumes should be deemed for a moment open to question.

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This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance (Classic Reprint) (John Owen)