SOURCE: "From Facts to Thoughts: Collingwood's Views on the Nature of History," in Philosophy, Vol. XXXV, No. 133, April, 1960, pp. 122-37.

[In the following essay, Rotenstreich provides an analysis of Collingwood's views regarding history as a set of facts and as an object of knowledge.]

1

There is a common distinction between two aspects of history: history as the object dealt with and history as the way of dealing with the object. Within the "objective" aspect of history one may distinguish between the attempt to define the object as man and the attempt to define it as process. Within the "subjective" aspect there is the prevailing tendency to put forward the nature of the conceptual method as one employing individual concepts.

Collingwood's view of the nature of history, in spite of the many-sided development it underwent, can hardly be classified in accordance with these distinctions. He dealt with the two aspects of history mentioned above, although he did not sharply distinguish them. In the first steps he made as a systematic thinker, he attempted to define the nature of history through the nature of the historical object. But since consideration of the nature of history was included from the outset in a Speculum Mentis, which is, and perhaps was meant to be, a kind of "Phenomenology of Mind", he could hardly ignore the problem of knowledge and its relation to the nature of the object. Let us therefore consider how he approached this problem in the first period of his development.

"History is that which actually exists.' "The object of history is fact as such.' The obvious tendency of this approach is to define the nature of history by stating that historical knowledge has necessarily a given object, namely fact. History is not defined as a branch of knowledge dealing with a fact in time, nor as dealing with the facts of human life, etc. It is just attachment to fact that it is considered as the essence of history. Even the fact that historical knowledge deals with the past is not derived from any particular relationship between this knowledge and time in its dimensions. The nature of a fact is a sufficient guide, according to Collingwood, in determining the relation between history and the past: "the historian's business is with fact; and there are not future facts". The aspect of time is certainly secondary on this view. It is an outcome of the nature of facts and not an independent factor.

There is one further characteristic feature of the nature of the historical object qua fact, viz. its individuality. Nothing new is added through this feature, since "matter of fact" and "individuality" might be considered as synonymous. Collingwood does not determine the meaning of "individuality", at this point, e. g. whether or not the historical fact occurs only once. One may be permitted to wonder whether this would be the meaning he attached to individuality, since this meaning carries with it from the outset the aspect of time, which is not the aspect stressed by Collingwood in the first place. Individuality connotes matter of fact, that is to say, the impossibility of a deduction of the fact from a hypothesis or from a systematic setting. Once we assume deducibility, the deduced element ceases to be individual and becomes a variable in a set or in a manifold of replaceable elements. A fact is bound to be individual, since we are bound to accept it as it is, because it is given.

The relationship between individuality and historical knowledge has been extensively discussed in modern philosophy, and Collingwood himself participated in this discussion. The purpose of this discussion was to point to the nature of the historical method and its conceptual apparatus. Collingwood does not consider individuality to be a feature of this apparatus, since he considers it as the nature of the object itself. He assumes that the nature of the object itself guides historical knowledge in employing conceptual ways and means to square with the object.

The cognitive attitude adequate to the object as fact is assertion. Assertion suggests the acceptance of the object as it is, and because it is. An assertion is a categorical statement, the admission that something exists as concrete and given. Historical knowledge is assertive, and in this capacity it is opposed to scientific knowledge, which is hypothetical. In a way Collingwood arrives here at a paradoxical conclusion: historical knowledge, being related at its objective pole to facts and at its subjective pole to assertion, must be a naïve knowledge, a receptive one. This conclusion may be considered as an indication of Collingwood's form of idealism in his early period. Constructions, as manifested in science, are according to Collingwood a lower stage in the development of the forms of mind and reality than assertions of the given concreteness. Once we reach the stage of concreteness there is no legitimate room for constructions. Constructions indicate the gap between the knowing subject and the known object and therefore they are bound to remain abstract. Once we reach a meaningful reality we have but to recognize it as such, that is to say, to assert it. It goes without saying that this systematic presupposition of Collingwood's view blocked the way towards an analytic understanding of the nature of historical knowledge. The very fact that Collingwood eliminates hypothetical statements from history and confines historical statements to assertions indicates that he does not do justice to historical reasoning: every historical inference is hypothetical, being from given data to their causes. As a passage from data to their causes it is hypothetical and there is no room here for mere assertion of causes. It is clear in terms of the history of ideas that Collingwood wanted to step across the boundaries of historical knowledge as outlined by Bradley, but he did not succeed in doing it.

This consideration of history as related to facts on the one hand, and to the assertive act on the other leads Collingwood to a paradoxical historical conclusion. Philosophy of History in its manifestation in Vico was explicitly anti-Cartesian. Descartes has been blamed for being abstract; hence philosophical prominence has been given to history as a concrete creation. But Collingwood, although deeply rooted in the Viconian tradition, considers the main achievement of Descartes to be precisely in the discovery of history.'Descartes, in his cogito ergo sum, laid down that historical fact was the absolute meaning of knowledge.' Only because Collingwood gives history a generic meaning as a knowledge of ultimate irreducible facts can he identify historicity with the objective of Descartes.'Cogito ergo sum" in his view expresses a fact; hence the nature of the statement of Descartes is a historical one. Here Collingwood's tendency becomes clearly apparent: history deals with facts; hence where one finds an attitude of hypotheses non fìngo there one finds history. Indirectly Collingwood meets here the criticism of the Cartesian tradition as expressed in Vico. As a matter of fact Descartes—this is Collingwood's view—does not assume a self-sustained abstract knowledge.'Descartes meant what he said, and what he said was that the concrete historical fact, the fact of my actual present awareness, was the root of science. … Science presupposes history and can never go behind history: that is the discovery of which Descartes' formula is the deepest and the most fruitful expression.' Vico, on this view, did not realize the concrete, historical-factual basis of the Cartesian abstraction.

The structure of the Cartesian system is an example of the nature of the dependence of science upon history and a further means to clarify the nature of history. If history employs assertions and is categorical, science employs suppositions and is hypothetical. Collingwood tried to show that each supposition presupposes at least one assertion, the assertion that there is supposition here. In other words science as a texture of suppositions presupposes history as a body of assertions. We may sum up the logic of Collingwood's conception of the relation between science and history in these two points: (1) there is no possibility of an infinite regression of suppositions. The end of the chain of suppositions implies an assertion of fact. (2) Thus a chain of suppositions ultimately leads to fact, which is the domain of history. Science henceforth implicitly presupposes history, while the realm of history proper is the explicit manifestation of the implicit presupposition. In this period of his development, Collingwood tried to overcome the duality of science and history through a dialectical device: he made the two realms stages in the manifestation of Mind, giving each of them its relative justification. This dialectical justification of the various stages of development of Mind was possible on the basis of the underlying assumption, that is to say that the difference between the stages is one of modality of assertions and not one of material content or ontological realm.'The abstract cannot rest upon the more abstract, but only on the concrete", and history is the first acknowledgement of concreteness.

The elimination of any construction in history leads Collingwood at this stage to assume an inner relation between the historical attitude and philosophical realism.'Fact as something independent of my own or your knowledge of it".'The historical form of dogmatism is that represented by modern realism … which results from discovering the concept of fact". This is one of the most remarkable traits in Collingwood's entire development: history is thought to be connected with epistemological realism, since history rests on the very assertion of given facts. It is precisely here that the fundamental change occurred in the later stage of his thought: history will then be connected with an anti-realistic attitude, as against the realism expounded by the "minute philosophers". But this change was made possible only by a change in Collingwood's entire philosophical attitude. Collingwood in the period of Speculum Mentis employs a clear cut dichotomy: hypothesis on the one hand and assertion on the other. Assertion was considered as characteristic of a higher cognitive level than hypothesis. The entire system, including the relation of history to philosophy, is based on this primary assumption. This dichotomy in turn was based on the consideration of concreteness as the ideal goal of knowledge, parallel to the consideration of concreteness as the ultimate stage of the manifestation of Mind. One may say that here the Hegelian attitude becomes apparent, as the knowing subject becomes submerged in the object; the view of epistomology itself is a sign of the alienation between subject and object, an alienation which must be overcome. Once concreteness is the ideal there is no room for cognitive activity, on the part of the subject. The appropriate attitude towards concreteness is the ideal there is no room for a cognitive activity. As against this dichotomy in the early stage another dichotomy is put forward in the mature stage of Collingwood's system, that of questioning against assertion. With this new dichotomy a new understanding of history emerges.

This clinging to the given facts is the first point to be stressed in terms of the limitations of history as a form of Mind. The very possibility that history may lead to a dogmatic attitude indicates the weakness of history. Dogmatism is rooted in the assertion of something as ultimate though really it is provisional only. Historical knowledge assumes that what is asserted as a fact is a real fact; it does not recognize its own immanent limitations. It considers its own facts to be recognized as given and hence as the real facts. But these facts cannot be real since they are set in a partial context only. Facts included in an all-embracing context, Collingwood therefore argued, are facts known by philosophy and not by history. The aim of history is to know the facts but it does not reach this goal since the context of history is always incomplete. If we do not know the complete context, we do not even know the single fact, according to the Hegelian maxim that the truth is the whole.'If history exists, its object is an infinite whole which is unknowable and renders all its parts unknowable" … "we must claim access to the fact as it really was. This fact … is inaccessible. History as a form of knowledge cannot exist.' Historical knowledge thus condemns the knowing subject to a passive position of sheer assertion. In the last resort there is no meaningful room within the historical domain, as the domain of an assertion of facts, for the status of the knowing subject. If, however, the subject is eliminated there is no justification of the claim of historical knowledge to be a knowledge of the concrete. There is only one legitimate meaning of the notion of concreteness, that of totality. But totality is outside the scope of historical knowledge. Totality as the all embracing context is a philosophical concept and not an historical one. Thus history is only on the threshold of philosophy, since it intends to reach concreteness but does not reach it. Philosophy requires the victory of history over science since it presupposes the establishment of the striving towards concreteness. But philosophy ultimately overcomes history, just as an objective arrived at overcomes the sheer strife for and the formulation of it. History ends with its own breakdown, but this is a positive, that is to say, a dialectical breakdown, since out of the debris of history philosophy emerges.

In an earlier book, Collingwood had formulated the relation between history and philosophy as one of identity which became later on a "Leitmotif of Collingwood's system: "history a parte objecti—the reality which historical research seeks to know—is nothing else than the totality of existence; and this is also the object of philosophy. History a parte subjecti—the activity of the historian—is investigation of all that has happened and is happening; and this is philosophy too. History and Philosophy are therefore the same thing". This emphasis on the identity of the two realms certainly does not reappear in Speculum Mentis. But we may perhaps see the difference in the attitudes between Religion and Philosophy (1916) and Speculum Mentis (1923) as a difference in point of view only and not as a fundamental one: the claim of history is to be philosophy. But this claim does not succeed because of the immanent limitation of history as the knowledge of given facts. Religion and Philosophy stresses the identity of history and philosophy in terms of the program, while Speculum Mentis stresses the difference between the two realms in terms of the realization of the common program. In both works the intermediary between history and philosophy is the striving towards concreteness, which in turn implies totality. The connection of history with the aspect of totality and concreteness did not leave room for the dimension of time. On the contrary: since concrete totality is self-contained, the problem had to be raised whether or not time is included in the all-embracing totality. According to Collingwood history does not deal with data in time, but with data as such. Hence the problem of the relation between data and time has not been raised. But the time aspect appears in Speculum Mentis indirectly, though it does not fit organically into the entire conception as outlined in this book. The time aspect appears in connection with the problem of novelty in history on the one hand and of permanence on the other.'It is process in which method or regularity does not exclude novelty; for every phase while it grows out of the preceding phase, sums it up in the immediacy of its own being and thereby sums up implicitly the whole of the previous history. Every such summation is a new act, and history consists of this perpetual summation of itself.' Here at once the aspect of process comes to the fore, although this aspect had not been stressed when the nature of history had been considered in terms of its status in the chain of manifestations of Mind. It goes without saying that there is no sense in considering the aspect of novelty and summation unless we presuppose the background of time. But the relation of history to time remains a riddle in Collingwood's system in all its phases and is one of the paradoxes of his entire conception. Collingwood aims to consider history sub specie acternitatis and thus expel time from history. Collingwood was so eager to stress the identity of history with philosophy that he tried to abstract history from its real milieu and to deal with history without dealing with time. This is like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.

2

The conception of history as outlined in Speculum Mentis underwent various fundamental changes. Between the earlier conception and the later there is an intermediate one which is expounded in a paper of 1925. In this paper Collingwood emphasized not so much the /actuality of history as the individuality of historical events; yet this might be considered as a change in terminology only. But this change has certainly some basis in Collingwood's explicit criticism of history, since he tries now to show that history is in the end an unachievable task: "the alleged facts upon which it builds its inductions are actually never secure enough to bear the weight that is put on them". Collingwood criticized history in Speculum Mentis as being pretentious, as attempting to reach totality which is beyond its power. There was no question as to facts, and therefore Descartes' "cogito" as an isolated fact or a statement of a fact was not put in doubt. To be sure, no fact could be understood unless placed in the context of totality, and this context was thought to be set by philosophy and not by history. The question could be raised in the context of Speculum Mentis whether a fact can be considered as being a fact when isolated from its context, or whether we may still assume the existence of the fact and stress the importance of the context only for the understanding of its full meaning. The realistic trend involved in history would refer to the independent existence of the given fact while a full understanding of the fact would necessarily overstep the scope of the fact as such. Unless I am mistaken, the paper of 1925 marks the emergence of his understanding of the relation between the two aspects of history. Facts are no longer considered as confined to themselves apart from their being understood: " … inductive study is itself based on ascertained facts, but these facts in their turn can never at any given moment finally be ascertained, for instance the discovery of this Roman villa may bring into question doctrines hitherto generally accepted as to the provenance and date of some kinds of pottery". Here Collingwood explicitly accepts the standard of "the truth as the whole" as the inner standard of history too. Yet this standard eventually shows the finitude of historical knowledge. Collingwood does not distinguish any more between the fact as such which is ascertained in its giveness and the meaning of the fact which places the fact in a context. Here he assumes only one legitimate context—that of totality. To be sure, the historical fact, even when placed in the total context, does not lose its individuality; it might be for this reason that Collingwood stressed in this stage of his doctrine the trait of individuality in the nature of the historical object more than the trait of factuality.

The cognitive act which characterized history in Speculum Mentis was assertion. In the paper of 1925 Collingwood writes of the act of perception. Perception as Collingwood understands it now is an activity on the part of the knowing subject. He stresses the aspect of activity in perception by putting to the fore the judgment implied in perception: "in all perceptions we are making a judgment, trying to answer the question what it is that we perceive, and all history is simply a more intense and sustained attempt to answer the same question". Collingwood criticizes the dichotomy of sensation and thought, and tries to show that sensation itself involves an act of thought. If sensation implies thought then perception also implies thought in its shaped form as judgment. The aspect of judgment is brought to the fore in perception through a very important notion, which is to occupy a central position in Collingwood's later system. Even perception, he argues, is an act of answering a question. The x is not sensed as such. Perception interprets the x and determines its nature and meaning and this determination is certainly an activity.'History is perception raised to its highest power, just as art is imagination raised to its highest power.' Thus from two points of view the former conception of history undergoes a far-reaching criticism. From the point of view of the object, factuality ceases to be understood in a naïve way as something merely given. From the point of view of the subject historical knowledge is no longer just assertion; it is perception and as such a manifestation of a cognitive activity. These two angles of criticism are interrelated: since the fact is not given it is in a way created, through the act of perception. The object of history is not defined as independent of the knowledge of it: "The historian's data consist of what he is able to perceive".

The criticism of the shortcomings of historical thought as outlined in the system of Speculum Mentis was based on the assumption that historical thought does not establish the total context. One of the expressions of the partiality of the historical context was the fact that the historian himself was left outside the context of his thought. The gulf between object and subject was an indication of the inherent weakness of history in its unrealizable pretension to be concrete. This criticism is restated in the article on "The Nature and Aims of a Philosophy of History", but the context of the criticism is now different. The relation between history and philosophy is no longer that of a formulation of a program and the fulfilment of it. History is "object-centred" thinking, it "asks questions only about its own object, not about the way in which it comes to know that object". The fact that the historian is not included in the setting of his thought is an outcome of the very trend of historical thought. This trend may be stated in the following way: historical thought is a perceptive thought but not a reflective one.'… he [i. e. the historian] is always the spectator of a life in which he does not participate: he sees the world of fact as it were across a gulf which, as an historian, he cannot bridge.' Here again this shift in Collingwood's understanding of history becomes clear: history is finite not only because its subject-matter is partial and, as partial, can never be definite. It is finite because the subject or the knower remains on a plane different from that of his object. The finitude of history lies in the very duality of subject and object. To put it in other words: within the system of Speculum Mentis factuality was regarded as an advantage of history as against the hypothetical nature of science, which is based on a chain of suppositions. The problem of the alienation between subject and object was hinted at but was only a secondary feature rooted in the incompleteness of history. In terms of assertion on the part of the knower there was no room to point to the gulf between the knower and his object. Once the active nature of the subject has been brought to the fore the whole perspective changed: in perception considered as judgment, or act of thought, the knower is separated from his object. Against the totality of facts, objectively considered, a new totality is hinted at, comprising both subject and object. In both works the main concept in Collingwood's understanding of history is that of totality. In Speculum Mentis history had a realistic feature. Totality was realistic at least in its claim: a totality of facts placed in an all-embracing context of facts. In the paper of 1925 the new aspect of history comes to the fore: history as an activity of thought. Totality here is understood as containing both the subject and his object. The relation between history and philosophy in Speculum Mentis is one of a program and its fulfilment, while the relation between history and philosophy in the paper of 1925 is one between naïve thought which is object centred, and reflective thought. Reflective thought is understood in terms of Hegel's conception of self-consciousness as an identity of subject and object.

The change in the meaning of totality might perhaps be tied up with the change in the whole systematic approach. Speculum Mentis is a kind of Phenomenology of Mind, a study in the progressive manifestations of Mind. History is one of the forms of Mind: it is Mind as it manifests itself in factuality. The later phases of Collingwood's philosophy were at least more modest—or to put it in other words—not phenomenological, but epistemological. History is no longer understood as a manifestation of Mind, but as a form of knowledge. Philosophy of history is mainly a theory of historical knowledge and not a theory of the status of history in the progressive manifestations of Mind. Therefore the problem of totality arises within the scope of historical consciousness and not within the scope of historical facts. From this point of view the article of 1925 is at least an anticipation of the new approach as it was to be formulated in the mature system.

3

In the course of time Collingwood's view of the nature of history changed still more. There is in the first place an assumption which might be considered trivial when detached from the earlier view, or from the far-reaching conclusion derived from it in the mature view: history is "knowledge of the world of human affairs". The neutral object-of history as fact becomes now a specific object, within the human realm.

What is the background of this new understanding of the nature of history? It seems as if Collingwood himself gives us a clue to the hidden motives which led him towards this change. In the first place, the deeper understanding of the nature of fact accomplishes the first change: "facts is a name for what history is about: facta, gesta, things done … deeds". Here Collingwood uses still the first meaning of the term "facts" which indicates their giveness. But "facts has also a secondary sense, …'things made'. A making is a deed, a thing made is the result of a deed. To know about deeds is to know about their results.' "The historical method involves studying both deeds and their results in this case, both mental activities and their results, for example concepts". There is here a kind of regress carried out from facts qua results to the process creating them. Historical method is interested both in the results and in their background. In dealing with historical facts qua results, Collingwood performs a reduction from facts to motives. History does not deal with facts, as events; it deals with events as actions, and the term action is intended to connote both the aspect of motive and that of results. Since the historical concern has been clearly placed in the human realm, the historical fact which was in the first place the ultimate datum, ceases to be ultimate. It necessarily points to its background within the human realm, to motives, thoughts and purposes expressing themselves in acts. This new view which we may call, for sake of convenience, the anthropological view of history. There emerges now the new conception which explicitly does not identify events with historical objects: "I mean more than he [se. S. Alexander] does by the word 'historicity'. For him to say that the world is 'a world of events' is to say 'the world and everything in it is historical.' For me, the two things are not at all the same.'

This shift to the human realm carries with it a new understanding of the individuality of the historical object. There is no longer an attribution of individuality to a neutral object; individuality has now a human meaning. It means a human being whose deeds are understood in terms of historical method. History in its shift from events to thoughts studies individuals. Individuality ceases to be a mark of the given object on the one hand or else a conceptual device on the other, and is held to reside in the very nature of the specific object of the research. Yet this confinement of individuality to the human sphere is the source of a new problem in Collingwood's system. Since the historical individual expresses himself in thoughts which in turn lead to results, individuality cannot be "monadic".'Because individuality is the vehicle of a thought which because it was actually theirs, is potentially everyone's.' Here we have to point out that this new change undermines the clear connection of history with individuality, which was so much stressed in the former view. The individual nature of the historical object is a fact in itself. But there is no essential connection between the object of history qua thought or purpose and the individual who personally was the bearer of the thought. The connection between the real object of history qua actions rooted in thoughts, and the human individuals in whom these actions actually did occur is accidental. Indeed, Collingwood comes back here to the Hegelian conception of the "cunning of Reason", and views individuals as embodiments and agents of the Reason of history. Individuals cease to be considered as ultimate self-sufficient entities.

A further significant change occured in the shift from knowledge based on the sole ascertaining of facts to a knowledge based on questioning. In Collingwood's approach to history there is an increasing share of activity "a parte subjecti"; from an assertion which indicates the sole acceptance of the fact he moved to perception which contains the activity of judgment; from this he moves further to the "Baconian understanding of history", viz. challenging the given circumstances by putting questions to them. The difference of this from assertion is stressed in the following passage: "The questioning activity, as I called it, was not an activity of achieving a compresence with, or apprehension of something; it was not preliminary to the act of knowing, it was one half, the other half being answering the question of an act which in its totality was knowing".

4

The Baconian approach to history points to the purposive nature of history, while the purposive nature of the historical action makes the questioning activity possible, that is to say, altogether meaningful. Thus there is in Collingwood's mature system a double contraction of the realm of thought. History proper, in Collingwood's view, becomes history of thought. Thought is not understood as just content or meaning. Thought receives from the outset a connotation which is intended to make it suitable for the historical context: thought is purpose, either purpose as the driving force of an action or purpose as the end the action is aiming at. Thought is understood as intentionality towards the future and as moving towards it. The purpose of historical understanding is to discover from the results the action which created that result.'Political theory is the history of political thought: not 'political theory', but the thought which occupies the mind of a man engaged in political work: the formation of a policy, the planning of means to execute it, the attempts to carry it into effect, the discovery that others are hostile to it". This example taken from the field of political history is certainly a clue to Collingwood's entire system of historical knowledge: Collingwood could place history in the realm of purposive activities since in the late phase of his development he did not take into account the objective circumstances in which the purposive activity takes place, for instance, the geographical data essential for purposive planning of an action, or the stamina and endurance of a people or a society which is called upon to act, etc. Collingwood—and this is the main criticism of his view with reference to his contraction of history to purposive activities—placed the activity, as it were, in a vacuum; he understood it as having meaning only when related from the outset to meaningful activity. The only meaningful activity which he took into account was that of sponsoring an action with a purpose in view. But in history there are meanings assigned to given facts through what may roughly be called in Toynbee's terminology responses to circumstances: an earthquake, although by no means a purposive activity created within the human realm, certainly has a historical meaning through its impact on the human realm, that is to say through the meaning connected with this disaster after the event and not in anticipation of it. This is another indication of the anthropological view of history as set out by Collingwood: man is a being who projects the future, a being to whom the future is not given but is rather created through his own deeds. Hence history as an understanding of human affairs has to discover this essential feature of human existence. But Collingwood detached human activity from its given environment and took into account only the meanings created by a purposive action and those anticipating the forthcoming results.

Historical research, however, does not deal with thoughts within the realm of one's own life. Thought creates results, and unless it does so it is inaccessible to the historian. The first condition for a historical object qua thought to be known is, that thought has to express itself in the realm of facts. Collingwood here remains faithful to his original understanding of the nature of the historical object qua fact, but goes beyond the realm of mere facts by rooting them in the realm of thought. This is the first condition which makes historical knowledge possible "a parte objecti". But there is another condition "a parte subjecti": "the historian must be able to think over again for himself the thought whose expression he is trying to interpret". One wonders what kind of condition is brought to the fore in this formulation. The first condition is certainly an epistemological condition: unless it has results there is no way of knowing the thought itself. The second condition, that "a parte subjecti", sounds like a psychological condition: one has to be a mathematician, at least a potential one, in order to understand mathematics, or one has to be able to reconstruct the plan of a political action in order to understand a historical political action. But actually this condition has been provided for in the very fact that historical knowledge deals with thought, and thought is not confined to the individual existence, since it has a universal meaning. Furthermore the fact that history deals with thoughts makes it a priori understandable for a historian. The condition formulated as to the ability of the historian to rethink the investigated thought sounds like a condition stated for a philologist to be able to read the script of the text he is dealing with.

There is a clear epistemological advantage implied in this shift towards thought. There is no room for a sheer ascertaining of thoughts, as if they were meaningless facts. Since we move in the realm of meaning, the ascertaining of the fact of thought is "eo ipso" an understanding of it.'To discover that thought is already to understand it. After the historian has ascertained the facts there is no further process of inquiring into their causes. When he knows what happened, he already knows why it happened.' The ontological nature of the historical realm "qua " thought leads to some clear epistemological consequences: towards thoughts there is only one possible attitude: that of a thoughtful activity.'A parte subjecti" this activity means understanding of the motives, since thought "a parte objecti" means motives and purposes expressed in deeds. To know a thought means to understand it.

This line in Collingwood's thought was expressed in an earlier article: "what happens, happens for a good reason, and it is the business of history to trace the reason and to state it. And that means to justify the event". This line in Collingwood's thought can be understood in the light of his later development: since every historical act is an outcome of a purposive action, every act is understandable and as understandable it is justifiable. Justification does not mean approval of the act but detection of its motives. Collingwood rejects explicitly the moral approval of every act, once we understand it in its motive.' … this truth is grossly distorted if it is twisted into the service of the vulgar optimism which takes it for the whole truth.' The half truth hinted at in this statement refers to the feature of the understanding as an intellectual act and not as moral approval. It seems that to regard the nature of historical knowledge as the understanding of a thought does not lead to the Leibnizian optimism which Collingwood rejects, but rather to a tolerance, the nature of which he formulated in connection with Ruskin's view: " … tolerance: the activity to live one's own life and yet to admire and to love people who live by the systems which one rejects".

We have considered above what Collingwood understood as the second condition of historical consciousness, i. e. the mind of the historian. This condition has been regarded as trivial, since it puts forward the psychological disposition of the historian and not the objective essence of historical consciousness as such. Collingwood would certainly reject this interpretation because of the main subjectivistic trend of his new system. History shifts in his view from the domain of the under-standing of the specific nature of the object to the emphasis of the meeting between object and subject. This is a subjectivistic interpretation of the saying: "Die Weltgeschichte is das Weltgericht". ("The history of the world is the world's bar of judgment.') This saying, in Hegel's context pointed to the trial within the actual historical process, where the superseding events determine the success and the value of the previous events. Collingwood put into this saying a new content: "die Weltgeschichte is das Weltgericht: and it is true, but in a sense not always recognized. It is the historian himself who stands at the bar of judgment, and there reveals his own mind in its strength and weakness, its virtues and its vices". How could Collingwood attribute to the old saying this subjectivist connotation? The starting point of Collingwood's new understanding of history lies in the assumption that all history is the history of thought. Thus history is, of necessity, from the outset a meaningful realm. This is a kind of an axiomatic assumption of his entire view. If so, then it is the task of the historian to detect the meaning of the realm he is investigating. If he fails in that his failure is an indication of his own weakness, and not of the absence of meaning in the events as such. As a matter of principle the historical events as such are understandable since they are events in the realm of thought. The failure to understand them is henceforth a psychological or spiritual weakness on part of the man who tries to understand them. This is a mitigated version of the former trend: although historical events are not justified they are understandable. Again the spiritual nature of history comes to the fore: within the system of Speculum Mentis the spiritual nature of history was inherent in the status of history as one of the forms of Mind, although Mind manifested itself in neutral prima facie non-spiritual, phenomena of facts. Within the later system, the spiritual nature of history appears in the very content of the historical object. However, there remains the question of how Collingwood could attribute this fundamental status to the strength or to the weakness of the mind of the historian. If historical events are meaningful in themselves, since they are placed within the domain of thought, how is it that the historian can fail to understand them? "The historical process is itself a process of thought, and it exists only in so far as the minds which are parts of it know themselves for parts of it.' The mind of the historian is a part of the process and how is it that it stands at the bar of judgment and not the mind which exhibits itself in the events investigated? One may put this critical observation in the following way: either the mind of the historian has an independent standing and thus there is no self-evident identity between history as res gestae and their narration, or else it is a part of the historical realm and hence there cannot be a problem of principle connected with the mind of the historian, which is fundamentally a part of the objective realm.

5

There is a lack of symmetry in Collingwood's theory of history, because the status of the mind of the historian is by no means as essential as the status of the object of his mind as thought. But Collingwood, for systematic reasons, wanted to emphasize the parallel status of the historical object and the historical subject and even made this parallelism the main point in his criticism of the German school's approach to history on the one hand, and that of the contemporary French philosophical school on the other: …'whereas the German movement tries to find the historical process objectively existing outside the thinker's mind, and fails to find it there just because it is not outside, the French movement tries to find it subjectively inside the thinker's mind, and fails to find it because, being thus enclosed within the subjectivity of the thinker, it ceases to be a process of knowledge and becomes a process of immediate experience: it becomes a merely psychological process, a process of sensations, feelings, sentiments. The root of the error in both cases is the same. The subjective and the objective are regarded as two different things, heterogeneous in their essence, however intimately related … it is wrong in the case of history, where the process of historical thought is homogeneous with the process of history itself, both being processes of thought". The error of both schools lies in their onesidedness; only Croce, as Collingwood observes, grasped the synthetic nature of history. But Collingwood is actually closer to the German school than he himself was aware of: although he tries to establish the synthesis between thought as object and the mind of the historian, the mind of the historian has a secondary status only since the meaningful event is bound to be understood, precisely because it is meaningful. The mind of the historian may have value as an example of the height human understanding is able to reach, but according to the principles of Collingwood's own view it cannot have an ontological status. Although Collingwood strove in his later conception of history towards a well-balanced synthesis of object and subject he still retains a conception which attributes a preponderance to the historical object.