11 quotes
Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.
Speculum Mentis (1924)
Science is finding things out; and in that sense history is science.
The Idea of History (1946)
The ideal and the real are not mutually exclusive. A thing may be ideal and also real.
Some Perplexities about time: with an attempted solution (1925)
In actual history, events overlap ; you cannot, except by a confessed fiction, state the point at which the event called the Middle Ages ends and the event called the Modern Period begins.
The value of history ... is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.
The Idea of History (1946)
The chief business of seventeenth-century philosophy was to reckon with seventeenth-century science... the chief business of twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.
R. G. Collingwood (1937)
Time, as succession of past, present and future, really has its being totum simul for the thought of a spectator, and this justifies its ‘spatialized’ presentation as a line of which we can see the whole at once.
Some Perplexities about time: with an attempted solution (1925)
All history is art, because to tell a story is art, whereas to tell a true story is history: thus history is art, but a specification of art, art qualified by a condition (truth) which deprives it of a part of its character but not of all.
R. G. Collingwood (1925)
The general conception here maintained is not new; it is one already familiar from the works of Coleridge, Croce and many others; it is the view that art is at bottom neither more nor less than imagination.
The essence of this conception is .. the idea of a community as governing itself by fostering the free expression of all political opinions that take shape within it, and finding some means of reducing this multiplicity of opinions to a unity.
R. G. Collingwood (2005)
If it is asked why Socrates permits certain forms of art to be retained in the ideal state instead of consistently banishing all alike, the answer is surely obvious: these are, in the opinion of Socrates, the forms which art will take in the hands of men who understand its true nature.
R. G. Collingwood (1925)