Experience and thought which is a part of experience is shaped by thought which is itself derived from past history, from certain points of inception. This is both a personal and a cultural matter of selection and interpretation. The truly new is possible but very rare, the apparent variety and applicability of what is already to hand being great. For the new to arise you must first reach back further into the past than the sources of your current thinking to find a deeper starting point but this cannot be done by means of that thinking. The paradox that whatever is truly new is sheltered in the remote past.