Historians know that metaphysical errors can lead to death. R. G. Collingwood wrote: ‘The Patristic diagnosis of the decay of Greco-Roman civilisation ascribes that event to a metaphysical disease . . . It was not barbarian attacks that destroyed the Greco-Roman world . . . The cause was a metaphysical cause. The “pagan” world was failing to keep alive its own fundamental convictions, they (the patristic writers) said, because owing to faults in metaphysical analysis it had become confused as to what these convictions were . . . If metaphysics had been a mere luxury of the intellect, this
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