Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers. - Daniel J. Boorstin

Seekers found clues in the successes, failures, and confusions of predecessors, who became their inspiration, their targets, their resource. From Socrates, Plato learned both caution and the need for bold patterns of meaning of his own. From Plato, Aristotle learned the perils of deserting the world of the senses. Still the later somehow did not make the earlier irrelevant. Seekers, like artists, never wholly displaced those who had tried before. They all enlarged and enriched the menu.

We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.

When photography appeared in the nineteenth century, it offered a new challenge to the mullahs’ theological acrobatics. Muslims wishing to be photographed remembered the Hadiths against pictorial representation. They were glad to be told that since photographs were made by God Himself through the agency of His Sun they were not under the ban of the paintings by presumptuous human artists. Yet in much of the Muslim world, photographs remained under the Prophet’s ban. A Muslim photographer in Delphi, who had spent many years successfully photographing people in groups, in an onrush of conscience finally destroyed all his plates.