The impact of prior knowledge on the acquisition of knowledge is certanly not a new finding.

To describe a wanderer on the face of the earth, driven hither and thither by pursuing vengeance as the first recorded murderer, the poet was obliged by all the rules of art to put such sentiments into his mouth as accorded with his unrepented crime and his dreadful agonies of mind and soul.

Experience will cure him of his naïveté.

And ready money had been so much more plentiful of late, owing to poor John Morton's ready-handed honesty!