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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: principle which lays down that just as the study of physiology
should precede the study of pathology, just as the laws of disease
are best discovered by the phenomena presented in health, so the
method of arriving at all great social and political truths is by
the investigation of those cases where development has been normal,
rational and undisturbed.
The critical canon that the more a people has been interfered with,
the more difficult it becomes to generalise the laws of its
progress and to analyse the separate forces of its civilisation, is
one the validity of which is now generally recognised by those who
pretend to a scientific treatment of all history: and while we
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