SOURCE: "Collingwood on Eternal Problems," in The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 3, April, 1951, pp. 228-41.

[In the following essay, Harris discusses Collingwood's ideas on the possibility of an "ultimate standard" of philosophical truth.]

The notion of eternal truth is as old as philosophy itself, and, surely, of all things, truth can hardly be subject to alteration. The standard by which we judge must be an ultimate standard, for, if it were not, no claim even to relative truth could be justified; and no such standard could be changeable, for, if it were, the claims of the successive competitors for our allegiance would be utterly baseless. The attempt, so often made, to base them on psychological needs is in the highest degree question-begging, for the theory, which determines those needs and the relation to them of the supposed standards, itself lacks authority unless it can be substantiated by reference to some criterion exempt from the psychological conditioning which it claims to have discovered.

Yet the belief is very prevalent today that this ancient idea of an eternal truth is unfounded. Not only are there those who canvass a conventional standard of truth which may be arbitrarily changed to suit our convenience, but there are others less extreme who nevertheless find it hard to believe in an absolute criterion.'It may be well to inquire, ' writes Basil Willey, 'not with Pilate "What is Truth?" but what was felt to be "truth" and "explanation"' (at the period under review). Explanation, he says, cannot be defined absolutely; one can only say that it is a statement which satisfies the demands of a particular time and place. If it is to satisfy, 'its terms should seem ultimate' but that again depends upon certain assumptions the source of which is said to be 'sub-logical'—'not, that is, a "conviction" resulting from an intellectual process, but a quite simple set of the whole being towards a particular way of life'.

Here we have a typical modern attitude to truth; a doctrine which, tested by its own criterion, must be regarded at best as something purely modern and local, in that it can only be temporary and provisional, satisfying the demands only of a particular place and time; and if its source is something 'sub-logical, ' on what grounds can it claim to be taken seriously?

Closely bound up with our notion of truth are the conceptions we entertain of the nature of philosophical problems and the method by which they are to be studied. If there is a body of eternal truth, the problems which beset the philosopher in his search for it will always be relevant to the same objective and there will be a sense in which they may be called eternal also. But, in calling them so we may mean one of two things: a problem may be eternally insoluble and so, like the poor, always with us; or it may be logically related to an eternal truth (its solution), so that even when solved it would still be characteristic of a necessary phase in the process of thought required for the attainment of that truth. In the second meaning, even a mathematical problem, like that of the Pythagoreans about the incommensurability of the diagonal, would be eternal in so far as it must always be faced and surmounted by the student of mathematics at some stage in his progress. But if philosophical problems are relative to eternal or ultimate truths, they will be eternal in both these senses, for the knowledge of ultimate truth implies omniscience, short of which the problem must remain unsolved; yet an ideal solution may be presumed and some progress towards it may be made even by finite minds.

It is, however, notorious that solutions of philosophical problems offered in one generation, or by one type of theory, fail to satisfy universally, and what appeals in one period or intellectual milieu is unacceptable in others. Does this mean that the problem is really different in each case, with the corollary that the truth to which it is relevant is different; or is it only that the proffered solution is false and requires correction or total replacement?

Many modern philosophers scout the ideas of eternal truth and eternal problems, though they do not deny that certain true propositions (notably those of mathematics) are tenseless. They deny the existence of so-called ultimate realities, if only because they are beyond the reach of the senses. Truth, for some, is what is empirically verifiable and such verification does not seem to require omniscience (though, on closer examination it does seem to require omnisentience); nor could it properly be called eternal, for verification by means of sense-perception is a momentary matter and no proposition can be sensuously verified once and for all, but ought strictly to be tested afresh every time it is called in question; nor is there any guarantee, on the principles adopted by philosophers who think in this way, that empirical observation will always give the same result. Similarly, a problem is held either to be soluble by the application of certain accredited methods of investigation—a logistic calculus, or an experimental method, or both—or else to be insoluble altogether; and in neither case should it be called eternal, for in neither case does it remain with us. Either it is filed away and pigeon-holed in the stock of acquired knowledge as solved, or it is rejected as meaningless, for a question that can have no answer is held to be a senseless question.

But we should, surely, be somewhat too self-confident if we assumed that simply because we could not discover the answer to a question it therefore had none. A problem may well be insoluble for me, even with the help of the most modern techniques, but that gives me no right to the comforting belief that it is absolutely insoluble, and so does not exist. Doctrines which deny the existence of philosophical problems for such reasons smack rather too much of wishful thinking. Moreover, if we have no stable criterion of truth, the 'accepted' methods of investigation may only be provisionally valid and the view which discredits eternal problems may itself pass into disrepute.

But there are others who deny the existence of eternal problems for historical rather than for epistemologica! reasons. Willey, whom I have quoted, is one of these, for he points out that the seventeenth century shift from scholasticism to 'the new science' was a shift of interest from the 'why?'—the final cause—to the 'how?'—the manner of causation. It was a change in the nature of the question. So T. D. Weldon, also, writes that 'to suppose that there is a "problem of causality" or "a problem of the inter-relation of mind and body" which presents itself unaltered to succeeding generations of human beings is mere moonshine. The verbal form of the question may be identical but that is all.'

It should follow from all this that the historical treatment of a philosophical problem is valueless. For if the problem is not the same, except in verbal form, in the various periods when it is discussed, and if a problem of contemporary interest, which is or may be similarly stated, is nevertheless a different question, the answer proposed in the past can give no guidance and can throw no light upon the solution demanded in the present. Yet, oddly enough, the writers who are most emphatic about the impermanence of truths and of problems are usually those who insist most strongly upon historical treatment. Those I have quoted are examples of this curiously contradictory attitude and a similar contradiction can be traced in the philosophy of Collingwood. He is equally emphatic about the non-existence of eternal problems: 'Was it really true, I asked myself, that the problems of philosophy were, even in the loosest sense of that word, eternal? Was it really true that different philosophies were different attempts to answer the same questions? I soon discovered that it was not true; it was merely a vulgar error, consequent on a kind of historical myopia which, deceived by superficial resemblances, failed to defect profound differences.' At the same time he is tirelessly insistent that philosophy is an historical study and maintains that this very discovery of the impermanence of philosophical problems makes the history of philosophy philosophically important.

The question whether or not there are eternal problems in philosophy is, then, after all an epistemological question even when it arises from historical considerations, for if succeeding generations of philosophers are called upon to meet the same problems, or problems which have persisted in some recognisable and identifiable form from the past, the study of the work of their predecessors will be of primary importance in their attempts both to understand and to answer the question with which they are faced. But if there are no such problems the nature and the method of philosophy will be different, it will be concerned with matters of only immediate interest and the philosopher will be like Professor A. J. Ayer's journeyman who works piecemeal at rather special questions in a field of more or less exact science, where once a problem is solved it is finally disposed of.

Collingwood is quite clear that the question is one of method and in his view it is only when the method of philosophy is misconceived that we are deceived into believing in the existence of eternal problems. His first account of the matter is stated in his Autobiography, where he condemns the methods of those whom he calls 'realists.' They imagine, he says, that all philosophers in all ages have raised the same questions and it is simply their answers which have differed, so that it would be sensible and relevant to ask which of two answers to a given question was the right one. To do this one must find out first whether the proposed answer is self-consistent, for should it contradict itself it will have proved to be false. The method of philosophy, in consequence, would consist mainly of the analysis of propositions into other propositions in order to detect whether or not they contradict one another. To this process the history of philosophy would be secondary. If the object is to discover the 'right' answer to an 'eternal' question, it is not of immediate importance to know what answers others have given in the past and our interest in other philosophers will be limited to ascertaining whether their answers are 'right.' To do so it will obviously be necessary to find out what those answers were and that is the work of the historian of philosophy, but it is useful only as a guide leading us by examples of other men's trial and error towards the goal which we seek—the 'right' answer.

Now all this, Collingwood maintains, is fundamentally mistaken and is based upon a false logic which commits the error of thinking that truth and falsehood belong to propositions as such—an error not confined to 'realists' but shared with them by 'idealists' and symbolic logicians. Collingwood believes that it is impossible to determine whether or not a proposition is true without knowing what question it is meant to answer and the discovery of that requires historical investigation. We have no right to assume or to jump to the conclusion that a given philosopher's theories are intended as answers to a stock set of eternal questions without valid evidence that these actually were the questions he had in his mind. But we can only acquire the evidence by means of historical research. It follows, therefore, that the work of the historian of philosophy is an integral part of the work of evaluating the theories of the philosopher under consideration. More than this, when we know the question to which a theory is the answer, whether it is the right answer or not depends simply upon whether it 'enables us to get ahead with the process of questioning and answering, ' not (it would seem) on conformity to any absolute standard of eternal truth.

When we turn to Collingwood's second account of the matter in the Essay on Metaphysics, we see why this is so and we learn, further, that the historian's work is not only essential to the philosopher's quest but that it is the whole of it—at least, so far as it is the quest of the metaphysician. For metaphysics, according to Collingwood, is the science of 'absolute presuppositions' and its method is to analyse the thought of, for example, the natural scientist with the object of unearthing these presuppositions and determining whether or not they are absolute. If they prove to be the answers to prior questions, they are only relative and it is legitimate to ask concerning them whether they are right or wrong. But if they are absolute they are themselves prior to all questions and to ask whether or not they are true is a nonsensical question.

The subject-matter of metaphysics, accordingly, is a certain class of historical facts and the preliminary training of the metaphysician should be historical, for the proper method of metaphysics is the historical method—not the out-dated and inefficient method of 'scissors and paste' history, but that of scientific research, by which evidence is sifted, marshalled and systematized and the facts are determined, not merely on hearsay or authority, but by direct scientific investigation.

Consequently, though metaphysics is a systematic study, it is not the study of a closed system. Its task is not system-building. The metaphysician should not and cannot aim at completeness; he is not faced with a repertory of problems which are the problems of metaphysics and of which the answer to one determines the answer to the rest, and he cannot, therefore, adopt a deductive or quasi-mathematical procedure similar to that attempted by Spinoza. It will follow also that there are no 'schools' associated with eminent philosophers whose adherents are constantly at loggerheads about the 'truth' or 'falsehood' of their masters' doctrines. For the masters are not maintaining any doctrine except the historical one that such-and-such absolute presuppositions are made by the scientists and scholars of their time.

When the metaphysician realises that this is really what he is doing and when he studies the metaphysical results obtained by his predecessors in past ages, he will soon become aware that there are no eternal problems; that the questions raised in one generation are not the same, despite superficial likenesses, as those of the next. They change continually and continuously and so far as they are alike their sameness is not that of a 'universal' and their differences those between instances of the universal. The sameness is that of an historical process and the difference that 'between one thing which in the course of that process has turned into something else, and the other thing into which it has turned.'

The contradiction, which I earlier attributed to the historicists, implied in their denial of eternal problems concurrently with their insistence upon the importance of the history of philosophy seems here to have been avoided. Eternal problems are certainly denied, and just as it would be futile, therefore, to try to discover their solutions, so, Collingwood would as certainly have held, it would be futile to seek to trace the history of past attempts to solve them. His emphasis on the importance of the history of philosophy has a different ground. Yet it is one which I hope to show presently only re-establishes the contradiction.

1. If the metaphysician is to display the presuppositions of the science of a particular period he will find evidence in the work of the metaphysicians of that period, who were engaged on the work of unearthing those very presuppositions. But his attitude towards such evidence will not be simply to take it at its face value. He will have to check it, by himself examining and analysing the propositions of the contemporary science, to discover whether the contemporary metaphysician had successfully revealed its absolute presuppositions—for his analysis may have been faulty.
2. But the historian-metaphysician's interest in doing this is directed primarily towards the absolute presuppositions of science themselves, and only secondarily towards the account given of them by the philosophers of the day; and it is so directed because his real object is to trace the processes of change of the 'constellations' of absolute presuppositions which are at the basis of scientific thought from one period to the next. In doing so, as has been said, he will discover the impermanence of problems and the stupidity of imagining that they can be eternal, but his attention will also be directed to the more fascinating, more difficult and more important question 'Why do they change?' In answer to this question, Collingwood declares, no reason can be given which makes sense except an historical reason. There are stresses and strains in the intellectual systems of every age which render their presuppositions (in Collingwood's terminology) 'consupponible' only under pressure, and as those strains increase so the constellations break down and must be replaced by others. But what is abandoned does not altogether disappear; it persists in suspension (as it were), or as Collingwood says 'incapsulated in a context of present thoughts which, by contradicting it, confine it to a plane different from theirs'

The essential aim of the true metaphysicians' study, therefore, is to discover the strains which give rise to the changes—it is what one might call (borrowing a word from Bernard Bosanquet) the 'morphology' of the absolute presuppositions of knowledge.

This view of the nature of metaphysics is not lightly to be brushed aside, but in the last analysis it will not survive criticism. In the first place, the doctrine of absolute presuppositions as expounded by Collingwood is, I think, unsound. That all philosophy is concerned with the uncovering of latent presuppositions is hardly to be disputed and that some body of these might be described as absolute in the sense that they are ultimate—that unless they are presupposed no science, no inference, no thinking in short, would be possible—this too cannot in the end be denied. It is true also that these presuppositions are not the same in every historical period any more than the conceptions of the natural sciences remain the same as those sciences progress and develop. But the account which Collingwood gives of such absolute presuppositions, of their relations to one another and to the questions which arise from them, is, in my opinion, faulty, though he himself, as I hope to show presently, provides the means of correcting the error.

Collingwood states his case in such a way as to suggest that absolute presuppositions are something quite contingent—something which, on analysis of the propositions of science, we just find to be so-and-so. The stresses and strains to which they are said to be subject are never explained. What is their source? In what sort of tension do they result? It would seem not to be due to logical inconsistency, for Collingwood says that absolute presuppositions cannot be deduced one from another (though they must be 'consupponible'—whatever that may mean) and if this is so it will likewise be impossible to deduce the contradictory of any one of them from any other. The strains remain a mystery and the 'unstable equilibrium' in which they result is a metaphor to which no literal meaning is given. Consequently, when the historian-metaphysician discovers the absolute presuppositions of science in successive periods and traces the series of their changes, he has no means of explaining that series. For it is not sufficient to say that the changes are due to internal strains if it is not known what sort of strains to look for. Yet we are told that no sensible answer can be made to the question 'Why do absolute presuppositions change?' except an historical answer and we now see that historical answer there is none.

The history which is metaphysics should, if we follow this account of it, be a purely descriptive study stating the presuppositions of science in each successive period baldly side by side, and all Collingwood's impassioned protests that history 'is concerned not with "events" but with "processes'" come to naught, for the process has been reduced to a mere series of events. Such a study would be devoid of philosophical interest and would bear little resemblance to the work of the great metaphysicians of the past which Collingwood claims as examples of the method he is advocating.

The contradiction thus remains between the rejection of eternal problems and the insistence upon the historical method. For if the problems are not the same from one period to the next, the historical method can enlighten us very little. It can tell us what they have been in the past; it can give us a chronological list of the presuppositions made in succeeding ages; but if it cannot explain their continuity it can throw no light upon the present in which our immediate interest lies. On the other hand, if the historical method is of real value; if the past remains encapsulated' in the present so that the present cannot be properly understood without it; if the historical process is really continuous and the historian can really explain the changes involved in it, then there must be an identity running throughout its course which will justify our inclination to call the problems of one age the same problems as those of another—there will be some sense in which problems are eternal.

The contradiction is the result of the unsatisfactory account we have been given of absolute presuppositions and to this we must first turn our attention. If absolute presuppositions are to give rise to questions they must have some implications and if they are to be 'consupponible' the implications of one must, at least in part, be identical with those of another (to say that they must be mutually consistent means no more nor less than this). Consequently, absolute presuppositions must be in some way mutually implicated. Collingwood denies this because, he says, they would then be relative and not absolute, but, as we shall presently see, the disjunction is based upon a fallacy. Once it is realised that to be consupponible is to have compatible implications it becomes clear that the source of internal strains in any constellation of absolute presuppositions will be some logical incompatibility and we should have to examine the implications of the presuppositions in order to discover this. So we should be led to the investigation of a matter which Collingwood always passes over in silence. He tells us that the logical efficacy of a supposition is that it causes questions to arise, but just how questions arise and what makes suppositions give rise to them he never inquires. What is the relation between absolute presuppositions and the science that they underlie and are said to render possible? Questions such as these demand nothing less than a logic of science and, in the light of that the study of the morphology of absolute presuppositions would become a philosophical history of thought on the lines of Hegel's history of philosophy, demonstrating that it is throughout a dialectical process—whether or not the principle of the dialectic were Hegelian. A good deal of what Collingwood has written seems to support such a conception both of metaphysics and of history, but if this conception is to be taken seriously his repudiation of eternal problems in philosophy cannot stand.

The questions involved in the study of absolute presuppositions are, therefore, not all of them historical and, though what I have called the morphology of absolute presuppositions is certainly in one aspect an historical study, it follows a method which, if universal in history (as Collingwood seems at times to be implying), would make history a philosophical study rather than vice versa.

It is astonishing that Collingwood, in the Essay on Metaphysics, should so far have obfuscated what seven years earlier he had so lucidly explained. For in his Essay on Philosophical Method he gives a profound and convincing account of the relation of philosophy to its history and provides by implication an admirable answer to the question of eternal problems. In the earlier work Collingwood points out that the distinguishing feature of philosophical thinking, which marks it off from the natural sciences, is the principle which he calls 'the overlap of classes.' In science, a universal concept or genus is specified into mutually exclusive classes or species, whereas in philosophy the universal, though it may be specified, is such that the species overlap. "The overlap, ' he writes, 'is not exceptional, it is normal; and it is not negligible in extent, it may reach formidable dimensions.' By numerous and convincing examples he shows that this is the case and the principle proves to be fundamental, explaining all the features of philosophical method subsequently discussed. Neglect of the principle leads to what he calls the fallacy of false disjunction and its alternative applications, the fallacy of precarious margins and the fallacy of identified coincidents. Those who fail to recognise the overlap of classes imagine that the instances of a philosophical universal can be rigidly divided into separate groups corresponding to the division of the universal into species, whereas any instance, owing to the overlap, may belong to two (or more) such groups at once. The proposition that it belongs either to one or to another of two species is, therefore, a false disjunction. If, on the other hand, observing the overlap, we seek to identify two species altogether, we fail to make a necessary distinction and falsely identify what are only coincident. The attempt to steer a middle course, to ignore the area of overlap as one of ambiguity and to confine our attention to that part of the subjectmatter in which the overlap is not apparent, would be to ignore those instances which are philosophically most important and so to commit the error of attending only to precariously marginal examples.

But if philosophical species overlap, the classes of presupposition distinguished in the Essay on Metaphysics should likewise display this propensity. And this is just what we find when we examine their character more closely. An absolute presupposition is logically prior to every question and every proposition of the science in which it is presupposed. It is not the answer to any question raised in that science and so it cannot be scientifically 'justified.' A relative presupposition, on the other hand, is the answer to a prior question and it is therefore possible to justify it as the right answer or to reject it as wrong. But when they are raised to what Collingwood calls 'the philosophical phase, ' it becomes apparent that absolute presuppositions are no more than the basal hypotheses of the sciences, and the philosopher's task is not only to discover what they are, but, as Plato maintained, to cancel or remove them by revealing their merely hypothetical character in the light of a more comprehensive and fundamental conception which is not a mere hypothesis but is capable of maintaining and justifying itself. The presuppositions which are absolute for science prove to be relative when viewed philosophically. Using Kantian instead of Platonic language we may say that they are empirically absolute but transcendentally relative. Empirically (or scientifically) it does not make sense to question their validity, but transcendentally they can be deduced, an account can be given of them in a theory the subjectmatter of which is not hypothetical but is categorical, a philosophical theory making no assumptions and following a method whereby we can at once establish our starting-point by reasoning and check the principles of the reasoning by experience, a method not strictly deduction nor strictly induction but having something in common with both.

Collingwood's contention in the later essay that metaphysics is the science of absolute presuppositions may, therefore, be correct, but his description of its aim and method certainly is not; for it does not confine itself to determining what those presuppositions are. The scientist himself is able, often enough, to do as much as that (and Collingwood holds that the more scientific he is the more clearly will he be aware of what he presupposes). The metaphysician's object is to go further and to criticise those presuppositions—a task which, in his later work, Collingwood declares to be impossible. Yet the very process of discovery is already the beginning of criticism. What Collingwood calls 'metaphysical analysis, ' the process of discovering what question is presupposed as prior to a given proposition and again what that question presupposes, is a method of criticism. It is a process of developing the implications of a proposition and displaying its connections with others in some systematic body of knowledge the structure of which becomes apparent as we proceed. Collingwood is, therefore, right to insist on its continuity with scientific analysis. But this process cannot go on in vacuo. Only on the basis of a total experience, in the light of which the given proposition from which we begin has meaning and significance, and only by reference to that, can we develop its implications and so discover what it presupposes. And what comes to light as we do so is the systematic structure of that experience itself. Yet, as the system grows, so experience develops and is modified. What was before confused and obscure becomes, by the operation of thought upon it, definite and articulated (and let us not forget that thought is no mere 'armchair' occupation but may, on occasion, require considerable practical activity by way of observation and experiment); so that what was before 'known' only vaguely and 'in dim forecast' becomes known precisely and in its explicit relations to the rest of experience. The process by which initial confusions are clarified and consequent contradictions removed may properly be called criticism; and it is just this process, by which the systematic structure of experience is elucidated, that reveals what in our thinking is derived from what presuppositions. It is, moreover, this process that, in an unselfconscious manner, is going on throughout the development of science; but when we come to reflect upon it, when it becomes selfconscious or (as Collingwood says) raised to its philosophical phase, it becomes the philosophical method—the critical method elaborated (though not originated) by Kant.

The metaphysician, therefore, discovers the absolute presuppositions of science (its 'a priori principles') by reflection upon the nature of the experience which the science investigates. The form of his argument (as in Kant's first Critiqué) is 'If our experience is to be such as it is and if such-and-such propositions are to be made in science, then such-and-such presuppositions (e. g., that all perceptible things have extensive magnitude, or that all change is supported by a permanent substratum) are necessarily implied.' But the principles he discloses, though a priori for the scientist (absolutely presupposed by him), are so only because of the admitted nature of experience. Experience, as we have it, is prior to the absolute presuppositions and is presupposed in them. If our experience were other than it is the a priori elements in science would be different. Accordingly, the presuppositions which are absolute for science are for philosophy relative to experience. They are the defining characteristics of experience or, as Hegel expressed it, provisional 'definitions of the Absolute.'

It follows that as science advances and as knowledge grows, the nature of our experience is modified. The manner in which we interpret it at one stage, at a later stage will not serve, and absolute presuppositions change. These changes, exhibited in the course of scientific progress, are the changes incident upon and inherent in the development of knowledge. The series of changes, like the development, is continuous—it is an historical process—and the continuity running through it is as important as the differences which display themselves seriatim within it.

Collingwood, therefore, is right to maintain that metaphysics is an historical study, but the important point is the nature of the historical process, which turns out to be a critical (or, as I called it before, a dialectical) process, and the historical method adopted accordingly may not be simply descriptive but must also be dialectical. The scientific historian, sifting and weighing his evidence, may still content himself, when he has drawn his conclusions, with a description of facts and events. But, for the metaphysician, description, however necessary, is not enough (and we may question whether it is enough even for the historian). The dynamic of the process of historical change must be investigated and analysed, and this dynamic is the dialectical principle running through the process. History and metaphysics, as branches of knowledge, overlap.

Seven years after the Essay on Philosophical Method Collingwood had so far forgotten what he had written as to distinguish rigidly between history and metaphysics, apparently forgetting that these are specifications of the philosophical concept, Knowledge, and then, discovering that they overlap, he identified them entirely, committing the fallacy of false disjunction issuing in the false identification of coincidents, to which he had himself earlier drawn attention. He failed to see that though both the specific forms may be exemplified in the same instances, yet they remain two. The Aristotelian formula … applies here as elsewhere in philosophy. … Consequently, he is led into further confusion from which his own earlier warnings might have saved him. Let us therefore return to his exposition in the earlier work.

The specification of the philosophical universal into overlapping classes is further explained by showing that it always takes the form of an ascending scale. The overlapping classes cannot be mere differences in kind, for that is the characteristic of non-philosophical species; nor can they be mere differences in degree, for even such differences are mutually exclusive. But if these two sorts of difference are combined (if they overlap), we have a generic concept specified into a scale of forms such that each embodies a variable element in a specific degree, the distinctions between the species occurring at critical points on the scale of gradations. But it further transpires that the variable element and the generic essence are the same thing—the principle of overlap applies here as elsewhere—and the scale is one throughout which the generic essence is successively displayed by the specific forms in continuously increasing fulness. Moreover, the specific forms prove to be both opposites and distincts, so that the scale consists of a gradation of forms, each embodying the generic essence more fully than the last, each distinct from every other and each the opposite of its predecessor in the scale; just as goodness and badness are at once distinct and opposite moral conditions and gradations in a scale of moral worth.

Now a scale of forms of this kind is a development, and if it occurs in time it is an historical process. When, therefore, we compare the philosophical theories of different generations, as Collingwood does in the Autobiography, and we find that, while they have a certain sameness, they differ both as to the questions raised and the answers offered, and when we discover, as Collingwood does, that these differences and this sameness are those of an historical process, should we not realise that the theories are phases in a scale of forms which is the specification of a philosophical universal? This, indeed, is exactly what Collingwood himself maintains in Chapter IX of the Essay on Philosophical Method where the history of philosophy is given as an example of such a scale. What, then, are we to make of his assertion in the Autobiography that the sameness of and difference between two philosophical theories are not 'the sameness of a "universal" … and the difference between two instances of that universal' but are 'the sameness of an historical process and … the difference between one thing which in the course of that process has turned into something else, and the other thing into which it has turned'? Again the principle of the overlap of classes has been forgotten along with the teaching that the philosophical universal specifies itself into a scale of forms.

But if we accept the earlier statement of Collingwood's theory, we find good reason for saying that the problems with which philosophers deal are in every age the same, as well as for saying (as he does in his later works) that they are not. Philosophies differ, it is true, in degree and in kind; they are also opposed to one another, so as to give rise to argument and dispute, but they are nevertheless the specifications of one and the same philosophical universal and so their differences and oppositions are only the normal characteristics of the phases in a scale of forms. What is still more significant is the fact that such a scale is always an ascending scale. The phases embody progressively more and more fully the generic essence, and such a progression implies a completion, a summit to the ascent, an acme—that which throughout the gamut of gradations, informs the particulars and makes them its particulars and yet does so in varying degrees, so that none of them except the last fully typifies the universal. When these phases or gradations, then, are the successive notions of a philosophical problem and its solution, each of them indeed will differ from the last, will even in a sense be in opposition to it, yet each will be a fuller and a truer account of that eternal problem and that eternal truth which all are attempting to express with varying degrees of success. The eternal problems are relative to the philosophical universals which in the history of philosophy are specified in a scale of forms, and accordingly the method of philosophy is at once historical and dialectical. It must trace the scale of forms throughout its length in order to achieve its goal (a goal of which the best achievements of the human intellect fall far short), but the method it adopts must nevertheless always be critical and even, to a certain extent, eristic.

The metaphysician, accordingly, must be a systembuilder; but his system being a philosophical system will display itself as a scale of forms. And it will be one that, among its various methods of self-manifestation, expresses itself in an historical process the course of which the metaphysician must study. He will, therefore, also be an historian tracing the series of differing and opposing doctrines in which the universal he is seeking to characterise has, in the past, revealed its specifications.

Thus the implication of contradiction in the doctrine of the Essay on Metaphysics is avoided in the Philosophical Method and the contradiction itself can be resolved by the application of the principles there expounded. And, for all that he says in the later work, these principles must surely be regarded as fundamental to Collingwood's whole position, for he is emphatic in his assertion that there is a continuity of development in historical changes, and when he maintains that metaphysics is an historical study he insists at the same time that its essential interest lies in the manner of and the reasons for the changes in absolute presuppositions from one period to the next. He insists, also, that the understanding of the past is indispensable to the proper understanding of the present, whether we are dealing with absolute presuppositions or with other historical matters. And to admit all this is to admit, after all, that there is a sense—not loose or indefinite, but precise—in which the problems of philosophy are eternal; not the sense in which any historical fact can be called eternal because it has happened once and for all, but that in which it is true to say (with Kant) that only the permanent can change. The new form which a problem takes is only a new form, but the problem is still the same. Its form is new because new material relevant to it has come to hand, because new evidence has been discovered and new interpretations have been made. All this has certainly modified it, but it has not sheerly changed; it has developed and grown, which it could not have done if it had been replaced by an utterly different question. We cannot, therefore, refuse to call philosophical problems eternal, at least in this sense, for if the resemblances between those of one generation and those of another were purely superficial and deceptive, we should have to believe that these resemblances had deceived the philosophers themselves who raised the questions and must consequently have falsified their attempted solutions. They must have mistaken one problem for another entirely different and so have been ignorant of the questions they were trying to answer. For, clearly, the philosophers of the past believed themselves to be discussing the same problems as had been tackled by their predecessors and they built upon foundations which their predecessors had laid. The denial of eternal problems, in this sense, then, would make nonsense of the whole history of philosophy and would render contemporary thought completely unintelligible.

To support this conclusion we may call Collingwood himself as witness, for, writing of the history of philosophical thought, he says: 'It is a genuine history in so far as the events contained in it lead each to the next: so far, that is, as each philosopher has learnt his philosophy through studying the work of his predecessors. For in that case each is trying to do what his predecessors did—to philosophize; but to do it better by doing it differently; assimilating whatever seems true, rejecting whatever seems false, and thus producing a new philosophy which is at the same time an improved version of the old. His successor in turn stands in this same relation to himself, and thus the entire history of thought is the history of a single sustained attempt to solve a single permanent problem, each phase advancing the problem by the extent of all the work done on it in the interval, and summing up the fruits of this work in the shape of a unique presentation of the problem.'