The Idea of History

by R.G. Collingwood

(i) (a) Universal history and particular history. The antithesis is too rigid. If universal history means a history of everything that has happened, it is impossible. If particular history means a particular study which does not involve a definite conception of the nature and significance of history as a whole, that too is impossible.

(i) (b) Historical thought and philosophical thought. Again the antithesis is too rigid.

(ii) (a) All history certainly shows progress, i.e. it is the development of something; but to call this progress a plan of nature as Kant does is to use mythological language.

(ii) (b) The goal of this progress is not, as Kant thought, in the future. History terminates not in the future but in the present.

(iii) That which is coming into existence is certainly human rationality, but this does not mean the disappearance of human irrationality. Once more, the antithesis is too rigid.

(iv) Passion and ignorance have certainly done their work, and an important work, in past history, but they have never been mere passion and mere ignorance; they have been rather a blind and blundering will for good and a dim and deluded wisdom.

The Philosophy of History is an illogical excrescence on the corpus of Hegel’s works.

F. H. Bradley, and his first published work was specifically concerned with the problems of history. This was The Presuppositions of Critical History, written in 1874.

And it was Bradley’s consciousness of this, no doubt, that led him after composing this essay to devote himself to the searching examination of Mill’s Logic whose results he published in his Principles of Logic nine years later.

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The effect of Bradley’s work on subsequent English philosophy was to induce it, in general, to accept this error as an axiomatic truth, and to adopt the second horn of the resulting dilemma. In Oxford, the result was Cook Wilson and Oxford realism; in Cambridge, it was Bertrand Russell and Cambridge realism.

serious attempt to cope with the philosophy of history was made by Robert Flint in a number of volumes between 1874 and 1893,

Bosanquet, who was closely associated with Bradley himself, treated history with open contempt as a false form of thought,

In the later nineteenth century the idea of progress became almost an article of faith. This conception was a piece of sheer metaphysics derived from evolutionary naturalism and foisted upon history by the temper of the age.

In order to realize the lengths to which this dogma of progress was pushed, it is necessary to go slumming among the most unsavoury relics of third-rate historical work.

The first thing he does is to cut up the field of historical study into a specifiable number of distinct sections, each called a society. Each society is wholly self-contained. It is for Toynbee a very important question whether Western Christendom is a continuation of Hellenic society or a different society related to it by way of affiliation. The right answer, according to him, is the second.

These are distinctions about how we categorize what we are studying, not intrinsic properties of populations over time.

We are not allowed to say that Hellenic civilization has turned into Western Christendom by a process of development involving the accentuation of some of its elements, the fading away of others, and the emergence of certain new elements within itself and the borrowing of others from external sources. The philosophical principle involved in saying that would be the principle that a civilization may develop into new forms while yet remaining itself, whereas Toynbee’s principle is that if a civilization changes it ceases to be itself and a new civilization comes into being.

This is not a constraint on historical events, but a constraint on how we speak about our abstract historical entities.

His whole scheme is really a scheme of pigeon-holes elaborately arranged and labelled, into which ready-made historical facts can be put. Such schemes are not in themselves vicious; but they always entail certain dangers: notably the danger of forgetting that the facts thus pigeon-holed have to be separated from their context by an act of dissection.

The criticism which must be passed on Toynbee’s principles is thus twofold.

First, he regards history itself, the historical process, as cut up by sharp lines into mutually exclusive parts, and denies the continuity of the process in virtue of which every part overlaps and interpenetrates others. His distinction between societies or civilizations is really a distinction between focal points in the process: he has misunderstood it as a distinction between chunks or lumps of fact into which the process is divided.

Secondly, he misconceives the relation between the historical process and the historian who knows it. He regards the historian as the intelligent spectator of history, in the same way in which the scientist is the intelligent spectator of nature: he fails to see that the historian is an integral element in the process of history itself, reviving in himself the experiences of which he achieves historical knowledge. Just as the various parts of the process are...

In the detail of his work, Toynbee shows a very fine historical sense and only rarely allows his actual historical judgements to be falsified by the errors in his principles.

The only question that matters about a philosophy is whether it is right or wrong.

Since they are all wrong, some shades of distinction about how they each are wrong would be more interesting.

Croce puts this by saying that art in general, in the wide sense, represents or narrates the possible; history represents or narrates that which has really happened. That which has happened is, of course, not impossible; if it were, it would not have happened; the real thus falls inside the sphere of the possible, not outside it, and thus history as narration of the real falls inside art as the narration of the possible.

the distinction between truth and falsehood

The trouble is that when dealing with incomplete information, truth and falsehood cannot be known in a binary fashion. Estimates of probability are the best that we can hope for.

Man, who desires to know everything, desires to know himself.

Without some knowledge of himself, his knowledge of other things is imperfect: for to know something without knowing that one knows it is only a half-knowing, and to know that one knows is to know oneself.

Self-knowledge is desirable and important to man, not only for its own sake, but as a condition without which no other knowledge can be critically justified and securely based.

Others, notably the representatives of psychology, would say that the science of these thinkers was not sufficiently scientific: psychology was still in its infancy. But if we ask these same men to produce here and now the practical results for which those early students hoped, they excuse themselves by saying that psychology is still in its infancy.

In 1936, psychology was, if not still in its infancy, in no more than its early adolesence.

It is true that the same Cartesian spirit which did so much for physics was already laying the foundations of critical method in history before the seventeenth century was out;[61] but the modern conception of history as a study at once critical and constructive, whose field is the human past in its entirety, and whose method is the reconstruction of that past from documents written and unwritten, critically analysed and interpreted, was not established until the nineteenth, and is even yet not fully worked out in all its implications.

The thesis which I shall maintain is that the science of human nature was a false attempt — falsified by the analogy of natural science — to understand the mind itself, and that, whereas the right way of investigating nature is by the methods called scientific, the right way of investigating mind is by the methods of history.

Eighty-seven years later I expect the coming argument to be obsolete.

According to this old-established conception, the specific forms of natural things constitute a changeless repertory of fixed types,

The fallacy of Platonism.

Now in human affairs, as historical research had clearly demonstrated by the eighteenth century, there is no such fixed repertory of specific forms.

Hear, hear.

Nothing could be a completer error concerning the history of thought than to suppose that the historian as such merely ascertains ‘what so-and-so thought’, leaving it to someone else to decide ‘whether it was true All thinking is critical thinking; the thought which re-enacts past thoughts, therefore, criticizes them in re-enacting them.

The belief that man is the only animal that thinks at all is no doubt a superstition; but the belief that man thinks more, and more continuously and effectively, than any other animal, and is the only animal whose conduct is to any great extent determined by thought instead of by mere impulse and appetite, is probably well enough founded to justify the historian’s rule of thumb.

Not the least of the errors contained in the science of human nature is its claim to establish a framework to which all future history must conform, to close the gates of the future and bind posterity within limits due not to the nature of things (limits of that kind are real, and are easily accepted) but to the supposed laws of the mind itself.

Hume was therefore right to maintain that there is no such thing as ‘spiritual substance’, nothing that a mind is, distinct from and underlying what it does.

But as regards his mental life it is true; and the way in which this profit is realized is by historical knowledge.

More properly it is by culture.

The idea that man, apart from his self-conscious historical life, is different from the rest of creation in being a rational animal is a mere superstition. It is only by fits and starts, in a flickering and dubious manner, that human beings are rational at all. In quality, as well as in amount, their rationality is a matter of degree: some are oftener rational than others, some rational in a more intense way. But a flickering and dubious rationality can certainly not be denied to animals other than men.

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The textbooks of logic in use today still bear the marks of this revolt in the distinction they draw between two kinds of inference, ‘deductive’ and ‘inductive’. It was not until late in the nineteenth century that historical thought reached a stage of development comparable with that reached by natural science about the beginning of the seventeenth; but this event has not yet begun to interest those philosophers who write textbooks of logic.

Now, anyone who had read Vico, or even a second-hand version of some of his ideas, must have known that the important question about any statement contained in a source is not whether it is true or false, but what it means. And to ask what it means is to step right outside the world of scissors-and-paste history into a world where history is not written by copying out the testimony of the best sources, but by coming to your own conclusions.

The scientific historian no doubt spends a great deal of time reading the same books that the scissors-and-paste historian used to read — Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, and so forth — but he reads them in an entirely different spirit; in fact, a Baconian spirit. The scissors-and-paste historian reads them in a simply receptive spirit, to find out what they said. The scientific historian reads them with a question in his mind, having taken the initiative by deciding for himself what he wants to find out from them.

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Confronted with a readymade statement about the subject he is studying, the scientific historian never asks himself: ‘Is this statement true or false?’ In other words, ‘Shall I incorporate it in my history of that subject or not?’ The question he asks himself is: ‘What does this statement mean?’ And this is not equivalent to the question, ‘What did the person who made it mean by it?’, although that is doubtless a question that the historian must ask, and must be able to answer. It is equivalent, rather, to the question, ‘What light is thrown on the subject in which I am interested by the fact that this person made this statement, meaning by it what he did mean?’

This might be expressed by saying that the scientific historian does not treat statements as statements but as evidence: not as true or false accounts of the facts of which they profess to be accounts, but as other facts which, if he knows the right questions to ask about them, may throw light on those facts.

If we raise the question of what can there be historical knowledge, the answer is that which can be re-enacted in the historian’s mind.

This seems a little bizarre to me.

If it were possible to say of any man that he acted with no idea whatever what would come of it, but did the first thing that came into his head and merely waited to see the consequences, it would follow that such a man was no politician, and that his action was merely the intrusion into political life of a blind and irrational force.

Sound familiar?

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but wrong ways of thinking are just as much historical facts as right ones,