h has a backward look at some predecessor.

I quote from Mr. A.B. Walkley a very happy application of this
principle of interpretation:--

"It has always been a matter for speculation why so sagacious
an observer as Diderot should have formulated the wild paradox
that the greatest actor is he who feels his part the least.
Mr. Archer's bibliographical research has solved this riddle.
Diderot's paradox was a protest against a still wilder one. It
seems that a previous eighteenth century writer on the
stage, a certain Saint-Albine, had advanced the fantastic
propositions that none but a magnanimous man can act
magnanimity, that only lovers can do justice to a love scene,
and kindred assertions that read like variations on the
familiar 'Who drives fat oxen must himself be fat'. Diderot
saw the absurdity of this; he saw also the essentially
artificial nature of the French tragedy and comedy of his own
day; and he hastily took up the position which Mr. Archer has
now shown to be untenable."

This instance illustrates another principle that has to be borne in
mind in the interpretation of doctrines from their historical context
of counter-implication. This is the tendency that men have to
put doctrines in too universal a form, and to oppose universal to
universal, that is, to deny with the flat contrary, the very reverse,
when the more humble contradictory is all that the truth admits of. If
a name is wanted for this tendency, it might be called the tendency to
Over-Contradiction. Between "All are" and "None are," the sober
truth often is that "Some are" and "Some are not," and the process of
evolution has often consisted in the substitution of these sober forms
for their more violent predecessors.

[Footnote 1: It is significant of the unsuitableness of
the vague unqualified word Relativity to express a logical
distinction that Dr. Bain calls his law the Law of Relativity
simply, having regard to the relation of difference, _i.e._,
to Counter-Relativity, while Dr. Caird applies the name
Relativity simply to the relation of likeness, _i.e._, to
Co-relativity. It is with a view to taking both forms
of relation into account that I name our law the Law of
Homogeneous Counter-relativity. The Protagorean Law of
Relativity has regard to yet another relation, the relation of
knowledge to the knowing mind: these other logical