  A grasp of both the unity and the development of Nishida’s thought is also crucial to understanding it. As should be obvious, Nishida’s thought underwent extensive changes over the course of four decades. Less evident is that the varying themes are united by a deepening of the same basic insights. The Preface to the third volume of his Philosophical Essays published in 1939 gives us his own view of the unity of his progression: “It is said that that I repeatedly discuss the same problems, and [indeed] from An Inquiry into the Good on, my objective has been to see things and think things from the most direct and fundamental standpoint—to grasp all things from the standpoint of whence they come and whither they go” (NKZ IX, 3). A Preface written three years earlier to the reprint of An Inquiry into the Good identifies some of the crucial connections in the changing thematic: the standpoint of pure experience articulated in that maiden work developed into that of absolute will, and later into the notion of place or topos, concretized further as a dialectical universal, which in turn gets expressed as action-intuition. “That which I called...the world of pure experience I have now come to think of as the world of historical reality. The world of enactive intuition—the world of poiesis—is none other than the world of pure experience” (Nishida 1990, xxxiii).