On the value of a contextual History of Science

"We shall recognize also that not only a knowledge of the ideas that have been accepted and cultivated by subsequent teachers is necessary for the historical understanding of a science, but also that the rejected and transient thoughts of the inquirers, nay even apparently erroneous notions, may be very important and very instructive. The historical investigation of the development of a science is most needful, lest the principles treasured up in it become a system of half-understood prescripts, or worse, a system of prejudices. Historical investigation ... brings new possibilities before us, by showing that which exists to be in great measure conventional and accidental. From the higher point of view at which different paths of thought converge we may look about us with freer vision and discover routes before unknown."

Ernst Mach, Science of Mechanics