Abstract
Collingwood’s description of science is especially interesting. For him science represents an enormous step forward over art and religion. In science, for the first time, thought becomes aware of its nature as an act of assertion. That is, for the first time, the thinker distinguishes between thought and the language which expresses it. Whereas in religion, the language in which an assertion is expressed is identified with truth itself, in science thought frees itself from regarding language as truth, recognizing thought, not language, as truth. In so doing, science makes language a servant of thought and no longer its master. This emancipation leads to distinction between literal and metaphorical use of language. Collingwood holds that all language is symbolic, in other words, metaphorical; language never is its own meaning, but always points to some “meaning” beyond itself, in the mind of its user. He says that when a user is not aware of the metaphorical character of all language, he identifies language with its meaning, and this Collingwood, in a seeming paradox, calls a metaphorical (or poetic) use of language. But when the user becomes aware of the metaphorical character of all language, then he is in a position to triumph over language. He may then attempt to use it “literally” to designate or stipulate whatever he wishes it to mean.
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References
Speculum Mentis, p. 157.
Speculum Mentis, p. 161.
Speculum Mentis, p. 162.
Speculum Mentis, pp. 162-163.
Speculum Mentis, p. 163. Presumably, Collingwood has in mind the term ‘ίδιος,’ which means “particular”, “individual”, “non-general”. Its noun-form ‘ιδιώτης,’ meaning an individual person or a private person as distinct from the group, is the root of the modern European term “idiot”.
Speculum Mentis, p. 165.
Speculum Mentis, p. 165.
Speculum Mentis, p. 167.
Speculum Mentis, p. 168.
Speculum Mentis, p. 169.
Speculum Mentis, p. 169.
Speculum Mentis, p. 178.
Speculum Mentis, p. 179.
Speculum Mentis, p. 180.
Collingwood’s ignorance of the critique of science by scientists (as distinct from philosophers of science) may stem from the fact that this movement began to flower only very late in his life. The most recent figures whom he discusses in The Idea of Nature date perforce from the early 1930’s, when the book was largely written. The social consequences of science were to be brought to the fore above all by the chemist John Bernai (1901-) in The Social Function of Science (London, 1939). In The Idea of Nature, Collingwood focusses on cosmology, and among twentieth century cosmologists, he singles out Samuel Alexander (1859–1938) and Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) for special praise. He reserves particular scorn for Bergson’s cosmology, ibid., pp. 136-141.
See Jacob Moleschott, Der Kreislauf des Lebens: Psychologische Antworten auf Liebigs Chemische Briefe (Mainz, 1852) for a remarkable plea by a scientist for the supremacy of science, and within science for the primacy of physiology.
This is one of the ideas for which Collingwood has frequently been cited as an authority. See e.g. A. Boyce Gibson, “The Two Strands in Natural Theology”, in: Process and Divinity: the Hartshorne Festschrift (La Salle, I11., 1964), p. 481, note 7. Gibson cites An Essay on Metaphysics, p. 254. Gibson has in mind Collingwood’s view that “[with the coming of Christianity] it became a matter of faith that the world of nature should be regarded no longer as the realm of impression, but as the realm of precision”. Quoted from An Essay on Metaphysics, p. 253. Cf. Speculum Mentis, p. 160. For a more detailed, if less well known statement of this position, see Michael B. Foster, “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science”, Mind, 43 (1934), 446-468. Collingwood does not appear to have taken notice of any of the work of Michael Foster (1903–1959), who took a first in Literae Humaniores in 1925, the second of the two years when Collingwood sat on the board of five examiners.
E.g., Bertrand Russell (1872-), Rudolf Carnap (1891-), and Russell’s follower, A. J. Ayer (1910-). Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (London, 1936) expresses this ideal in a form which many now find too crude and militant. Collingwood discusses Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic as a document in “the suicide of positivistic metaphysics” inAn Essay on Metaphysics (1940), pp. 163-168, mentioning Russell, ibid., p. 168.
Readers of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes will be familiar with this difficulty. It virtually commits the reader to misunderstand much of the book on a first reading. It is doubly regrettable, therefore, that both the Phänomenologie and Speculum Mentis were written in some haste and were not adequately revised.
Letter to Croce of May 27, 1921 quoted in Donagan, The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, p. 314. See also Collingwood, An Autobiography, p. 56, note 1: About answering critics: I have never made, and shall never make, any public answer to any public criticism passed upon my work. I value my time too highly. A further statement of Collingwood’s reluctance to engage in polemic is found in the Preface to An Autobiography: If any of these [men whom I admire and love] should resent what I have written, I wish him to know that my rule in writing books is never to name a man except honoris causa, and that naming any one personally known to me is my way of thanking him for what I owe to his friendship, or his teaching, or his example, or all three. An Autobiography, Preface. Given Collingwood’s declared intention of not engaging in polemic, it is interesting to speculate whether this reluctance was a cause or a result of his tendency to resort to invective whenever he embarks upon criticism. Perhaps if he had written more critiques, he would have learned to produce more temperate ones. But then again, he may have found it necessary to refrain from them because he found himself to be incapable of moderation in the criticism of whatever he found objectionable. For an example of his resort to invective see supra, Ch. VI, notes 47 and 48.
In view of Collingwood’s relative ignorance of the procedures of natural science, it is ironic that one of his best-known books should be The Idea of Nature (1945). No doubt The Idea of Nature owes part of its popularity to the fact that it deals with a branch of science seldom treated historically in small compass, namely cosmology. Nevertheless, it is not one of Collingwood’s more original books, and he brought only Chapter I to its desired completion. The fact that it has eclipsed Speculum Mentis is especially unfortunate, since for all its flaws, the latter has more profound things to say about the nature of science.
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© 1967 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Johnston, W.M. (1967). Science as the Third Form of Experience. In: The Formative Years of R. G. Collingwood. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9481-5_11
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