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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: simple reason that we have no facts. The facts are lost.
Of course, if you assume a proposition as certainly true, it is easy
enough to prove that proposition to be true, at least to your own
satisfaction. If you assert with the old proverb, that you may make
a silk purse out of a sow's ear, you will be stupider than I dare
suppose anyone here to be, if you cannot invent for yourselves all
the intermediate stages of the transformation, however startling.
And, indeed, if modern philosophers had stuck more closely to this
old proverb, and its defining verb "make," and tried to show how
some person or persons--let them be who they may--men, angels, or
gods--made the sow's ear into the silk purse, and the savage into
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