All existing things have a past. Nothing which happens escapes completely from the grip of the past; some events scarcely escape at all from its grip. Much of what exists is a persistence or reproduction of what existed earlier. Entities, events or systems, physiological, psychological, social and cultural, have careers in which at each point the state of the system stands in some determinate relationship to the state of the system at earlier points.
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Edward Shils (1971) studied this question.