SOURCE: Review of Faith and Reason: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, in The Journal of Religion, Vol. 49, No. 3, July, 1969, pp. 280-94.

[In the following essay, Hartt provides an analysis of Collingwood's religious thought.]

I

Mr. Rubinoff's subtitle is excessively modest. In the Editor's Introduction [to Faith and Reason: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion by R. G. Collingwood], and in the introductions to each of the major divisions of the Collingwood material he presents in this volume, he mounts an interesting and important argument about the consistency of Collingwood's philosophy, early and late. He says: "According to my interpretation … Collingwood's thought should be regarded as a gradually developing scale of forms which admits of differences as well as similarities. And such differences as may appear either as a series of irreconcilable inconsistencies or as evidence of significant changes of outlook will emerge, when so regarded, as systematic differences which perform a dialectical function in the system as a whole.' Thus he takes the field against such interpreters of Collingwood as T. M. Knox and Alan Donagan who argue that Collingwood's thought suffers from grave inconsistencies (see particularly Donagan, The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood [Oxford, 1962]). To make his thesis stick against such meticulous and formidable critics, Mr. Rubinoff will surely need to apply his thesis to Collingwood's later philosophy, since Faith and Reason does not carry Collingwood into the extraordinarily creative period of the 1930's. More than that, Rubinoff will have to show that the "gradually developing scale of forms" is the actual internal structure of Collingwood's overall philosophy rather than a hermeneutical device externally applied to his thought in order to render it consistent as well as dialectical.

I should say now that I do not intend in this essay to enter the lists either for or against Mr. Rubinoff s thesis; or otherwise deport myself as though I had the credentials to speak authoritatively on the appropriate questions concerning the development of Collingwood's philosophy. Rather, I wish to focus attention upon some elements of Collingwood's philosophy that have shown remarkable staying power, both in philosophy and in theology, though particularly, for my purposes, in theology. Rubinoff's selection of material from the "early Collingwood," and his clear and even-handed interpretation of this material, have considerable merit for this purpose.

II

Collingwood has been spared the formation of a cult dedicated to the apotheosis of its hero. Even so sympathetic a friend and interpreter as T. M. Knox insists that Collingwood did not achieve the stature of such luminaries of the first magnitude as Alexander and Whitehead, though he had the promise. And Alan Donagan, who has mounted the most telling argument so far about Collingwood's consistency, is quite ready to sustain the best in Collingwood against the poorer. So also Louis Mink, who has recently provided a striking and cogent interpretation of Collingwood's philosophy of mind. These are hardly to be regarded as so many efforts, along with Rubinoff s, to refurbish an image damaged by major attack or obscured by the mists of time. It is, rather, the case that Collingwood was a remarkably seminal thinker—to use an appraisive term applied many years ago to G. H. Mead by John Dewey. Especially on such themes as Mind, Art, History, Religion, and Civilization, Collingwood said much of enduring importance. I think it may be difficult to prove that his thinking on these things can be rounded off into System, though we wish Rubinoff well as he sets himself to that task. At the very least, Collingwood traces connections among these central elements in the life of spirit. I am at the moment quite prepared to leave it to the philosophers to determine just how systematic that connective tissue is. Collingwood's theological influence flows pre-eminently from his doctrines of history. But that is not the whole story, as I shall now endeavor to indicate.

III

Collingwood was probably not the prime author of historical relativism as a theological viewpoint. I suppose that Troeltsch deserves that honor, such as it is. There is more than a tincture of relativism in Collingwood's theory of history, no doubt, and of the skepticism logically enmeshed in it. But he had his own line of resistance to the skeptical entailment; and this has not yet reached the theological relativists, perhaps because Collingwood's position is deeply involved with an uncommonly sophisticated philosophical doctrine of mind; and theologians do not usually sit in on that game, though they may cozy up to apparent winners. Yet Collingwood's philosophy of history continues to be important for theological purposes. One thinks of H. Richard Niebuhr's Meaning of Revelation (New York, 1942). There Niebuhr drew a distinction between inner and outer history that corresponds roughly to Collingwood's distinction between real history on the one hand and chronicle and "scissors-and-paste" history on the other. Too, Collingwood made much of the function of the historian as an interpreter of facts. He did not stop to propound a hermeneutical theory, under that label, at any rate. But he made much of the conviction that "facts" and "meanings" are not given to or found by the historian in isolation from each other. It would be hard offhand to think of a notion dearer the heart of contemporary theology than this: Meaning rather than fact is after all what real history is all about.

There are other sorts of theological affinities with Collingwood's philosophy. For example some theologians represent religion as a constitutive element of human life; and they can discover faith even where it is philosophically denied. So also the early Collingwood:

Faith is the religious habit of mind. That is to say, it is the attitude which we take up toward things as a whole. There is a certain analogy to it in the attitude which we take up toward a relative or limited whole like our country. We come to know what our country is, what it means to us, by living in it, and acting and thinking as parts of it; we love it in knowing it, and certainly could not know it without loving it. Our devotion to it, our willingness to sacrifice our personal welfare and even our lives to its honor, are elements in our attitude toward it as a whole, and therefore religious elements; but in so far as it is not the whole but only a whole, that is, at bottom only a finite thing, it is at best only an earthly god and our worship of it is not pure worship but in part idolatrous.

This was written in 1928, in an essay called "Faith and Reason.' Thus it clearly anticipates the contemporary theological discovery of (a) the omni-presence of the "religious element" in human life and (b) the polytheistic-idolatrous propensities of man,—things we thought had been discovered by Tillich and the Niebuhrs.

In this same essay Collingwood makes a claim that clearly anticipates a cardinal thesis in Schubert Ogden's philosophical theology. Collingwood writes:

Practical faith consists in the certainty that life is worth living, that the world into which we have been unwillingly thrust is a world that contains scope for action and will give us a fair chance showing what we are made of; a world in which, if we turn out complete failures, we shall have only ourselves to blame. Practical faith means "accepting the universe," or, what is the same thing, knowing that we are free.

Here we have in nuce Ogden's rebuke to the philosophical nay-sayers, in The Reality of God and Other Essays (New York, 1966) (particularly, "The Strange Witness of Unbelief). But we have also a clear anticipation of something Tillich was trying to uncover in the tortuous analysis of despair in The Courage To Be (New Haven, Conn., 1952).

Despite these theologians the very recent theological period was dominated by men who wanted no truck with universal religion or with the "religious dimension.' Barth was of course the chief spokesman in the attempt to show that (but never very clearly how) Revelation puts religion out of business—at least for the Christian. This was a powerful inducement for theologians to ignore religious phenomena and to get on with the odd business of creating a "religionless Christianity.' It is not terribly surprising that religious phenomena are still around. Indeed in the American scene the swinging theologians have had to become apprentice sociologists in order to track down the wonderful diversity of the religious elements in American life; in order thereafter to celebrate properly the spiritual beauties of secularized culture.

I have not yet mentioned what may well be the most important and the most interesting theological affinities with elements of Collingwood's thought. These are: (1) The relation of faith to Absolute Presuppositions. (2) The role of religion in the vicissitudes of Civilization. (3) The fate of Revelation in a systematic or comprehensive philosophy of spirit. I propose to discuss these in the order indicated.

IV

To begin, (1) hardly any element of Collingwood's philosophy has attracted as much interest or drawn as much fire as his doctrine of absolute presuppositions. His formulation of this doctrine (in An Essay on Metaphysics) is straightforward, relatively simple, and totally lacking any deliberate hint of mystification. The question-and-answer method of rational enquiry (developed in An Essay on Philosophical Method, [London, 1933] but already adumbrated in The Philosophy of History [1930]) makes it clear that behind every determinate question there is something already supposed—not, of course, the "answer" but something that puts the question into business. From this alone it appears to follow: (a) Behind the method itself lurks an assumption with which the method itself cannot cope, that is, that the world will stand still for rational probes into its meaning. Or, (b) any particular enquiry is grounded in some-thing not itself the object of that enquiry, for example, "What is the cause of x" presupposes that we know what cause means (or, if that is different, how it ought to be used). But if we set out to find out what cause is, we should, it seems, be up against either a primordial intuition of the way the world wags, and there's an end on it, or an arbitrary stipulation, an axiom, if you prefer.

There would seem, then, little profit in trying to make something big out of (b). It is no doubt true; but it is not very instructive.

But is (a) any richer? This depends on what one means by coping with absolute presuppositions. For Collingwood this most explicitly does not mean that there is some way of figuring out whether an absolute presupposition, or a set of them, is true or false; for there is not. The explanation for this seems to be very simple: absolute presuppositions are not propositions. The force of this unqualified truth-disclaimer is derived very largely, if not entirely, from his identification of propositions with assertions. This hardly means that absolute presuppositions simply defy statement or expression. It means, so far, that they cannot be argued for or argued against. So with absolute presupposition we are not confronted with something so deeply buried in the psyche that once it is brought up to the light of day, it promptly disintegrates; or, to put it paradoxically, so soon as it becomes recognizable it loses its identity. It might lose its function. But is Collingwood ready, yet, to identify the meaning of an absolute presupposition with its function?

Collingwood's doctrine does invite trivialization. It might, for instance, be taken to be a peculiarly earnest propounding of a commonplace situation: If I set out to prove x (whatever x is), I must assume that the instrument employed for that purpose is itself valid (or appropriate: in any case one would not say true). Or suppose I say, "If you don't believe the barn is red, look for yourself.' I am not thereby calling in question either the method of ostensive signs or the reliability of visual perception. Both can be called in question; but neither is in fact called in question by asking, "Isn't the barn red, after all?" Each is actually assumed to be valid. But on Collingwood's terms, they would be relative rather than absolute presuppositions.

So let us try again. Let us say that coming to terms with absolute presuppositions is really a matter of coming to understand them. That sounds something like a hermeneutical enterprise; and the more so when it is re-enforced with the conviction that the metaphysician-historian (for the drive of An Essay on Metaphysics is to abolish the distinction between them) cannot smoke out his own (or his culture's?) absolute presuppositions without depriving them of their absoluteness. But set this conviction aside for the moment. What is it to understand an absolute presupposition? It is certainly not a matter of testing or evaluating; so perhaps it is a matter of seeing how such a thing functions, or did function. What is so rewarding about that? Worse yet, how does that differ at all from the history of ideas? Aristotelian science used certain conceptions of cause. If you understand Aristotelian science you eo ipso understand that absolute presupposition, cause. That is, any system of explanations (scientific, theological, or whatnot) operates with assumptions not explained by the system; but these assumptions are surely exhibited in the system; and anybody who wants to know about those assumptions need only follow out that system. He may still wonder "Well, why those assumptions?", but that now means only, "Well, why that system?" And I suppose the only serious answer to that question is, "It seemed to work.' And that assumes that the minds or the culture for whom it worked (or seemed to: a subsequent historical judgment?) were satisfied with its answers to the questions they wanted to ask.

Surely another sort of interpretation of absolute presuppositions is conceivable. Perhaps they are pre-dispositions (or even precommitments) that live in a half-lit shadowy backworld of the mind. But mind so far as it is rational distrusts shadows: it is dedicated to the illumination and perhaps the expurgation of whatever lurks there. Therefore someone must be delegated to go in after these dim but potent predispositions. And that is the metaphysician. The metaphysician becomes the dredger for absolute presuppositions.

But again something nags at us. Whose absolute presuppositions can the philosophical dredger-man bring up into clear daylight? Not, says Collingwood, his own; or, more properly, I suppose, our own. This does not mean that one cannot be made aware of the absolute presuppositions upon which one's epoch or culture is grounded. I see very little comfort in Collingwood for that kind of irrational ism. But once they are elucidated, what is more natural, indeed what is all but inevitable, but that we should proceed at once into the appraisal of these presuppositions? Something impels us to ask, "Are they true?" And as we have seen, Collingwood believes that question to be nonsense. One can ask, "Is it true?" only of a proposition; and absolute presuppositions are not propositions. But neither are they attitudes or dispositions; for if they were, the historian's task would be hopeless indeed.

Here Professor Louis Mink has come forward with a very helpful suggestion. Collingwood's absolute presuppositions are best understood as being concepts and constellations of concepts.'Like Kant, Collingwood regards a constellation of absolute presuppositions as a system of concepts which provides the formal structure of experience—which determines, that is to say, what we count as an item of experience at all.' I should think we would need at once to add: concepts framed or imbedded in some kind or another of linguistic structure, for example, as the subject of a definitional (or axiomatic) sentence: "By cause we mean.…' Definitional and axiomatic sentences are not assertions. But they are not easily construable, either, as subrational or prerational determinations of the mind to bend the world one way rather than another or to have it one way rather than another. For in fact various conceptual systems (and probably imaginai ones too) can be constructed upon any given set of definitions.

Now one of the plainest and least avoidable of all historical generalizations is that absolute presuppositions change. But whether changes in dominant world views and in systems of explanation are the effects of shifts in absolute presuppositions is far from being that clear. I mean it is neither that clear in Collingwood nor in history itself. It is true for both that every so often it becomes apparent, to properly perceptive and clearheaded minds, that what was lately unquestionable is now open to question and may actually be rejected, either because it is hopelessly obscure or is otiose; or—and I don't see how we can a priori leave this out of consideration—it just seems wrong.

Here we might suppose Collingwood is right, and say that even in an age of pervasive doubt, or in a mind which begins by making doubt a methodological principle (as Descartes is supposed to have done), there has been a shift of absolute presuppositions. The new questions betoken the rise of a new age; and what makes the new questions possible, logically, is no more doubted, and is no more dubitable, than what the now discredited philosophic piety took to be both self-evident and indispensable. But is that shift, that giving-up of one set of absolute presuppositions and the discovery that another set has taken over—is that a rational process? Is it the result of a rational probe that has finally got to the bottom of a mind-set, and not merely seen through a set of axioms; and finds it dubious? Or does it just happen? Does Spirit zig and zag according to a logic of its own, the chief features of which can be made out retrodictively but none of which is available for prophecy?

It is tempting to linger longer over Collingwood's absolute presuppositions as a philosophical-historical problem. But theology is waiting in the wing. What, that is, could be more appealing (except to the hardiest of Revelationists) than to absorb absolute presuppositions into an account of faith? On several counts this seems plausible.

One. Absolute presuppositions are either accepted or rejected—as absolute. As Collingwood says, it is impossible to mount arguments in their behalf.'We must accept them and hold firmly to them; we must insist on presupposing them in all our thinking without asking why they should be thus accepted.' Surely it is possible to interpret religious faith in a way very like this, that is, as a phenomenon that has some aspects of decision in it but is not, so to speak, decisively a matter of decision. Faced with threats or with seductive alternatives, the man of faith may then decide to stand fast. But what he clings to, that upon which he stands, was not created or posited by his will, and it will not vanish simply at his wilful spurning.

Two. Faith, too, seems to be something deeper and solider than beliefs, if beliefs are propositions (or assertions). For many theologians of the present age it is self-evident, or at least is indubitably the case, that faith is deeper and existentially far richer than mere belief, so far as belief, is construed propositionally. Indeed, if one had to choose between revelation and faith, it would seem that the religiously sensitive person, to say nothing of one on the alert for falsifications of existence, would ride with faith. For all sorts of other people are always asking about beliefs, "Are they true?"; or, "How would you go at convincing us that they are true?" Whereas it would seem that all a reasonable person could ask about faith is, "Do you or do you not have it?" Beyond this one might venture tentatively to give an autobiographical account both of how one came to have such a thing and of how the world looks when one has it. But it would be a serious mistake if this were understood as a concession that after all faith is about (or refers to) something in such a way that the adequacy or propriety of treating it that way could be debated clearly and fruitfully.

Three. Thus upon the foundation of faith one might weave a life-style; or perhaps even construct a massive society; or—in retrospect—form a cultural epoch. That is, in the first instance, a Christian life; and in the second, the church; and, in the third, Christendom.

Whether or not Collingwood would have approved of such theological exploitations of his theory of absolute presuppositions, I think there is something wrong with this view of faith and that is its virtual isolation from belief taken in a strong sense—the sense of intending a world that is extralinguistic and, for that matter, extra-experiential.'I believe in God" is no doubt a vote of confidence in the way the world is being run. It may also express a disposition to accept gracefully whatever descends upon one from the world beyond our dispositions. But a person who wanted to express so generous and withal so vague a sentiment surely would not need to use for this purpose a linguistic vehicle certain to draw the fire of the enemies of "God" rather than enemies of the sentiment. One can deplore sentiments but one cannot refute them. But if someone tells me that God is the source of my well being and is efficaciously concerned with my ills, I should feel entitled to ask, "Is that so?" rather than merely "Why do you say such odd things?", or, "Well, certainly not many people feel that way any more.'

So far, then, as faith carries forward some element of belief it is not to be identified with Collingwood's absolute presupposition. For what we are urged to hang on to, through thick and thin, is more than an attitude and it is more than a constellation of concepts devoid of assertorial intent or power. The faith to which the religious man clings is a way of construing the whole of experience and the world. Here I think Collingwood, especially in the early period, is right, but only in a very general sort of way. Thereafter differences appear. The Christian believes that his life-orientation is the right one because it conforms, at least in its intent, to what God demands and makes possible of achievement. Thus in what he believes, or accepts on faith, if you prefer, he is exposed to something that judges his life-orientation and his church and his civilization and his cultural epoch. Thus "I believe in God" means that a total reformation, an absolute revolution, is somewhere out there in store for me and for my world. In the meantime the faithful man is therefore faced with a double demand: he must make the most of the "system" that is his inheritance; but he must also be ready to see it die.

v

Thus we arrive at the second salient of this essay: (2) the role of religion in the vicissitudes of civilization.

Collingwood, both as a philosopher and as a loyal Englishman, was gravely concerned over the state of Western civilization. In the last ten years of his life Germany mounted yet another barbaric assault upon Christendom. At the beginning of that period, as well as later, he had attacked philosophical trivializers and gamesmen with as much vigor, but hardly with as much coolness, as Berkeley had gone after the "minute philosophers" in his time. Leaving the question of Collingwood's health aside, we can see retrospectively an excellent reason for the difference in tonality: Berkeley had not to face the totalitarian fanatic looking down the gun barrel at him. We may doubt that the British philosophers Collingwood attacked can be largely blamed for the incredible shortness of vision displayed by political leadership in Britain in the period 1933-40; or for the inertness of the British people as the Nazi gangsters (apparently Collingwood's favorite epithet for them, and it will do) safely inflated bluff after bluff into the ghastly nightmare of an empire of millennial boasts dripping with real blood. But we cannot doubt Collingwood's searing prescience, nor the soundness of the passions which animate that most remarkable of all his writings, The New Leviathan. We may, however, wonder whether his earlier concern for the integrity of religion, and for the primordial character of faith, had been diluted, or perhaps even transformed, by the magnitude of the threat to the human scheme he had come to believe to have transcendent value; and which he calls Christendom.

Earlier he had given a clear indication of the role of religion vis-a-vis absolute presuppositions. In An Essay on Metaphysics he wrote:

The result of simply presupposing our presuppositions, clinging to them by a sheer act of faith, whether or not we know what they are, whether or not we work out their consequences, is the creation of a religion; and the institutions of a religion have this as their object, to consolidate in believers and perpetuate in their posterity the absolute presuppositions which lie at the root of their thought (p. 197).

…The guardianship of the European 'scientific frame of mind' is vested in the religious institutions of European civilization.… For if science is 'experience' interpreted in the light of our general convictions as to the nature of the world, religion is what expresses these convictions in themselves and for their own sake, and hands them on from generation to generation (p. 198).

Thus we are prepared for the conservative-defensive role of religion when Civilization is attacked by barbarians, such as the Saracens, the Turks, the Albigensi and, at last, in Collingwood's waning years, the Germans. Collingwood's account of the Albigensian business is particularly interesting. In this revival of Manichaenism he finds a flat denial of the properly dialectical view of the relation of mind and body. Collingwood does not, of course, approve of the brutality with which the Cathari sects were crushed—although there was violence enough on both sides of the struggle. But he does believe that the metaphysical-moral monotheism of Christian Europe indeed had to be defended against the "eristic" account of body versus mind.

But even if we were persuaded by Collingwood's claims for the religious foundation of the civilization he calls Christendom, we should have to ask what place he is prepared to assign to the prophetic-critical functions of religion in the Western world. I mean specifically the religious-ethical criticism of the social order intended to lay bare infidelity to the Covenant (however construed), rather than to rally citizens to the defense of the order against noxious heresies from within and barbaric assault from without. The prophet may indeed offer a theological interpretation of the barbaric threat: divine punishment for unshriven sin. Even so he is likely to offer a way out or a way through to health—to what Collingwood calls "Peace and Plenty" (New Leviathan, chap, xl) and that is a radical amendment of life, corporate and individual.'Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.' So Amos, and thereafter the prophetic component in Western religion.

Ought we to interpret this religious tradition as being essentially a vivid re-presentation of the absolute presuppositions of the people of God? Or ought we to broaden our understanding of the prophetic performance to include fresh apprehensions of the will of the living God? The rhetoric of the prophet may lead us to confuse proper regard for the foundation of the covenant (again, however construed) with what the people of God (whoever they are) must do now to justify its position in the commonwealth of man. The prophetic element in Western religion is most fertile when it has made and reinforced this distinction. This does not mean that the prophet must appeal to fresh or novel revelations in order to justify his criticisms of the social order. It does mean that the God of his faith is unremittingly attentive to the predicament and the performance of the elect, whoever they are.'He that watches over Israel slumbers not nor sleeps.' In this there is great comfort. And there is uncommon threat, too. For it is to this perfectly focused transcendent God to whom mankind answers for every moral flaw, and upon whom the "hope of glory" absolutely depends.

vi

Thus we arrive at the third question: (3) what is the fate of revelation in a comprehensive philosophy of spirit? Obviously the question is manageable only if two antecedent conditions are satisfactorily settled, (a) We must be clear about revelation, (b) We must come to terms with the principal features of the philosophy of spirit.

a) Revelation has not had an easy ride on the seas of philosophy for a long time. For revelation is religion's greatest offense wherever (to switch metaphors) philosophy has been installed as the grand vizier of the cognitive empire. The heart of the offense is the claim that x is knowledge at once of God (the ultimately and decisively real) and of man's true destiny; and this x is not a mode or instance of knowing of which either the content or the principle is subsumable under a general account of the cognitive enterprise. The concept of revelation can of course be used in a weaker, humbler and more generous sense, that is, as a religious label for the (not so very wonderful but yet wonderfully useful) habit reality has of making itself available for man's cognitive appetite (à la Spinoza in The Theological-Political Tractate).

Where revelation is understood in the much stronger sense suggested above we can easily analyze the offense into its important parts. One of these is the offense to a comprehensive audit of all cognitive accounts; for it seems self-evident to the modern mind that the auditing system must be a native feature of the natural reason; and revelation challenges that. And then there is the realistic fear that revelation, if it came off, would give its beneficiaries (and their supernaturally appointed heirs and assigns) an enormous advantage over everybody else. One would not need to presuppose the truth of the doctrine of original sin to predict that this advantage would lead sooner or later to grand mischief against the body politic; for the mere presumption of such an advantage has in fact repeatedly done so. So it would have been immensely reassuring to the rest of mankind (or, more likely to its philosophical advocates) had God plainly warned the beneficiaries of his special dispensations against their misuse; or if he had at the same time, if not by the same stroke, appointed general advocates or monitors to protect the interests of the generality of mankind. Philosophers have commonly assumed that office. But in the modern world they have rarely claimed that their reasons for doing so stood on all fours with the special dispensations of Providence. They have, instead, characteristically appealed to the sanctions and warrants of reason as such. This has been their standard contribution to that classic impasse called reason versus revelation.

b) A philosophy of spirit might provide a way around this sterile confrontation. That has been the hope and thereafter the program of a company of philosophical theologians since the early years of the nineteenth century. However plain and grievous the disagreements between Hegel and Schleiermacher, there was a common cause bigger than both of them; and that is the philosophy of spirit. For the philosophy of spirit is a rationally systematic (in that sense scientific) effort to account for human culture as the diverse and yet unitive achievements of mind. Accordingly, philosophy of spirit begins with a phenomenology of mind in order to let its structures and powers become evident. Thereafter it ought to be possible to place (which is not at all the same as explaining) each of the realms of spirit in relation to each other: Science, art, religion, politics, and philosophy itself. It is not necessary to add to this the realm of history, since if the initial or fundamental phenomenology of mind is done adequately the processful or creative-dynamic character of spirit is fully evident from the outset.

Is it a mistake—roughly as important as egregious—to try to subsume such an undertaking under metaphysics, whether or not it is metaphysical idealism, and thereafter limit serious discussion of the matter to such questions as monistic or pluralistic. What about the external world? What about the transcendence of God? How can a thinker dare to be systematic when life everywhere bristles with paradox, absurdity, etc? This move is a patent mistake, no matter how much the later philosophy of Hegel may have fortified it (if it did), because the announced target of the philosophy of spirit is not being and its modes. The subject and the object alike is spirit, the creative potency of man, realized in the objective forms of history. So if one persists in asking, "But what about nature?", the philosopher of spirit can and must reply, "That is what science studies.' Or, "But what about God as he really is?", can and must evoke the reply, "That is what the forms of the religious life comprehend.'

Now I am inclined to think that Rubinoff is right in his thesis, that is, that Collingwood's program was consistent—persistent, rather—from the early writings on philosophy of religion, through Speculum Mentis, and on to the end. At the end, in The New Leviathan, he is still hard at work on the program; harder than ever, actually, because he could see that spirit itself had come under challenges both brutal and ultra-sophisticated. Thus in 1927 he wrote: "It is by faith that we grasp reality, whether we call that reality by the name of God or by any other name, as immediately and certainly present to us.' We have already seen that this knowledge is a kind of intuitive apprehension of the world as a whole. Experience, that is, is a unitary affair, from the outset. It remains to be shown that the world is really a reflection of the mind itself, but not at all in the sense of an ego-projection (à la Fichte). Rather, the world is a spiritual process, essentially dialectical, certainly all-inclusive. Thus in The Principles of Art (London, 1938) Collingwood propounds an indispensable element of the program: consciousness as multi-leveled. Since he had already discerned the dialectical structure of spirit he had then to decide whether the forms and levels of spirit are to be construed after the model of a hierarchy or, to the contrary, whether the forms had each its indestructible integrity, within the unity of spirit itself. I think it is clear he opted for the latter. Accordingly, faith and reason are dialectically related to each other, but not art and science. Or, and more tellingly for our purpose, God and man are dialectically related, but not religion and civilization. This means that man as person is not aufgehoben into the Absolute. But it also means that "God" is not the odd name of a being existing somehow and somewhere beyond the realm of spirit. In 1916 Collingwood wrote:

Thus God is at once immanent and transcendent; and man can be regarded as, on the one hand, a part of the universal divine spirit, and on the other, as a person separate from God and capable of opposition to him. God is immanent because all human knowledge and goodness are the very indwelling of his spirit in the mind of man; transcendent because, whether or not man attains to these things, God has attained to them; his being does not depend upon the success of human endeavor.

But lest we fall forthwith into the error of freeing this mysterious self-existence of God from the dialectical life of spirit we must note that

just as a being really limited in time could not know of its own limitation … so a being really finite could not know itself as finite. The self-knowledge of man as finite is already his assertion of himself as infinite.

God standing aloof from the drama of human sin and redemption, a mere stage manager, is no true symbol of the absolute mind in its concreteness. But this is exactly where the truth of our religious imagery shines most brilliantly. It is God who accepts the burden of error, takes upon himself the moral responsibility for the fall, and so redeems not his creature but himself.

Thus Collingwood's famous reduction of metaphysics to history (An Essay on Metaphysics) and the denial of access via history to simple facts of the past (The Idea of History) are in principle entirely consistent with the encompassing philosophy of spirit, and in fact are strict requirements of it.

It should therefore be apparent that revelation cannot survive the embrace of such a philosophical program. This is not because religion is swallowed up by an absolute philosophy. It is, rather, because such a belief as revelation expresses is itself taken up into the historical process of spirit; and any possibility of its having a trans-experiential intentionality is systematically eliminated. But, again, this is not because somebody knows that much about the constitution and behavior of reality beyond the mind (or spirit). If Collingwood is right the situation is much simpler and more decisive than that: we have no way in fact of appropriating and interpreting such knowledge that would not in principle destroy the integrity of spirit in its human realizations and aspirations. Thus from revelation we cannot build down and out into the actualities of human life in the round. Whereas from a proper account of spirit we can give the religious dimension (faith plus the supreme dedication to the defense of civilization) an honest priority of immediacy, vividness, and richness relative to the specializations of the cultural-historical forms of life.

VII

The work of Rubinoff, Mink, and Donagan is bringing Collingwood back into the scene as a philosopher of considerable magnitude. It is clear that his work as a philosophical theologian can be ignored only by thinkers who continue piously to believe that Barth (or somebody or other) demolished any and every philosophical theology as a thing of any relevance for the interpretation of the Christian faith. The third volume of Tillich's Systematic Theology is quite enough, by itself, to show us that that negative attitude suffers from premature closure—or, in less neutral terms, from dogmatism. It may be the case that revelation does not need and cannot profit from a philosophy of spirit. That needs to be demonstrated rather than merely asserted. I should think that Barth's Church Dogmatics, Vol. III ("Creation"), could only with severe difficulties be absorbed into such a demonstration.