We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective ; in other words their is properly no history, only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, - must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know. What the former age has epitomized into a formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule.
From History, Essays Second Series by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Today, there are several posts on social media about Frederick Douglass - what he would have said/done/felt believed had he been alive today. The sheer variety of opinion is proof of the above quote. Yet, it doesn't absolve those who claim to know the inner life of Douglass from learning his lesson. I attended a short film screening portraying a single episode in Douglass' life. It seemed to me ridiculous - the concept so far removed from his narrative, lived experience, the experience of others, etc. But, the filmmaker used Douglass as his biographer - he lifted Douglass' experience as an illiterate to put a light on the filmmaker's experience. Is that wrong?
There is a tomato hornworm caterpillar in the above image. Parasitic wasps called Braconidae, lay eggs just under the skin of this caterpillar. As the larvae mature, they eat through the caterpillar's skin and weave individual cocoons. Once the wasps emerge, the caterpillar will be so weak it will die. So while the hornworm is a pest, eating tomato, pepper and basil leaves, there exists a natural solution in the form of a beneficial wasp!
When he has satisfied himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by such a person as he, so armed and so motivated, and to ends to which he himself should have worked, the problem is solved ; his thought lives along the whole line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them all with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are now.
This is the only way to understand what motivates others - putting oneself in their position - with the available and contemporary tools - and see if the result would have been different.