6010.an essay on philascsacosophical method by r. g. collingwood

8/16/2019 6010.an Essay on Philascsacosophical Method by R. G. Collingwood

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In considering the place of the Essay inCollingwood's work it is instructive to consider thedevelopment of his attitude towards dialectic,


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xxii EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONdegrees of truth and reality, the ontological proof,and one of the central themes of the Essay, thescale of forms. Collingwood began lecturing on Aristotle'sDe Anima in 1912. Although he observedAristotle's use of the scale of forms in De Anima(EPM 102), this manner of presentation andanalysis did not become ingredient in his ownthinking until later. In his first published work,Religion and Philosophy (published in 1916 andwritten over a three-year period from 1912)Collingwood did not take a dialectical approach. Infact, his procedure there betrayed certain tenden-cies which later in the Essay he classified as errors.For example, in the earlier work, where he foundthere to be overlap between religion, theology,and philosophy, he identified the categories andasserted their identity, thereby committing what inthe Essay he dubbed 'the fallacy of identified coin-cidents' (EPM 48). In writing Speculum Mentis (anexplicitly dialectical work) a few years laterCollingwood reconsidered their relationship and

drew an important distinction between implicit andexplicit features of experience. In notes inserted intohis copy of Religion and Philosophy Collingwoodcommented on his rejection of realism:

This book was written in (and before) 1914(begun 1912)andrepresents the high-water mark of my earliest line ofthought--dogmatic belief in New Realism in spite of aninsight into its difficulties which I think none of my teachersshared. . . . The whole thing represents a point of view


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION xxiiiI should entirely repudiate, and its complete failure with thepublic gives me great satisfaction.8

And in his notes on 'The Devil', published in thesame year, he observed that it:

represents the breaking point of my earlier philosophicalbeliefs. It is still realism, sharpened and hardened: Thedoctrine of God is not thought out: the general position isone of transcendence, and the coarseness and clumsiness ofthe work reflects the influences of the environment in which'Prayer' was written. The flagrant superficiality of it, I think,drove me back upon my real convictions, and led to a year ofnegative criticism (1916) and the building-up of a newdialectical idealism in 1917.9

This confirms that Collingwood understood hisown thought at this point to be taking a new turn.But there was still something missing: he had iden-tified his target but not yet fully worked out andarticulated his alternative philosophical approach.In 1917 the 'building up of a new dialectical

idealism' took the form of a full-length unpublishedbook entitled Truth and Contradiction. As only thesecond chapter survived, commentary on the wholebook is impossible.10 However, in this chapterhe analysed the strengths and weaknesses of the

8 Collingwood had bound the proofs of Religion andPhilosophy together with 'The Devil' and wrote these com-ments on the end paper in about 1918.The volume is in thepossession of Teresa Smith. 9 Ibid. 10Although Collingwood stated in his Autobiography(99)that he had destroyed the manuscript of Truth andContradiction, nonetheless Chapter 2survived.


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xxiv EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONcoherence theory of truth and rejected the associatednotion of degrees of truth and reality. In thisendeavour we can see the truth of his later commentthat he was building up a new dialectical idealism:but at this stage had still not yet achieved it; Truthand Contradiction was his first serious attempt, buthe clearly was not happy with it. In the early 1920she wrote a 'Sketch of a Logic of Becoming', 'Noteson Hegel's Logic', a draft of opening chapters of a'Prolegomena to Logic' and Libellus deGeneratione,all devoted to working out a dialectical logic ofbecoming--but he was still not yet satisfied by anyof them. And so Collingwood found himself inpossession of a serviceable philosophical methodwhich (although he employed it in his lectures andin Speculum Mentis) lacked proper philosophicaljustification. It took him another ten years to workout the answer to his own satisfaction throughlengthy and detailed considerations of the nature ofphilosophy and the distinctive character of philo-sophical concepts in a variety of contexts, most espe-cially in philosophy of history and moral philosophy.

Given Collingwood's constant insistence thatphilosophy has to give an account of its own pre-suppositions, he was never going to be ultimatelysatisfied with a method justified solely on pragmaticgrounds. However, he was obviously confident thathe would clear the matter up eventually, and by1923 he was sufficiently confident in the idea of ascale of forms (which was, with the directly relatedlogic of the overlap of classes, the central theme of


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION xxvthe Essay) to use both the phrase and the arrange-ment. The relation between art, religion, science,history, and philosophy is displayed, then, inSpeculum Mentis as constituting a scale of forms ofexperience in which each term in the scale rendersexplicit what for the previous term was onlyimplicit. Although the term does not appear there,Speculum Mentis is arranged dialectically as anoverlapping scale of forms. The forms of experi-ence are articulated phenomenologically, with eachachieving more adequately what its predecessorwas striving (yet failing) to achieve. Collingwood worked out the idea of an overlap-ping scale of forms in conjunction with his lectureson moral philosophy, which he had delivered from1921 and which he rewrote regularly. The coursesof lectures from 1921, 1923 (amended in 1926),1929, 1932, and 1933 clearly show the evolution ofhis thought concerning the scale of forms. Theearliest lectures post-date the dialectical turn butprecede the formulation of scale of forms analysis;by 1923 however Collingwood had made the

decisive shift. In Part II of that year's lectures onmoral philosophy he for the first time offered anaccount of philosophical method in which heexplicitly introduces the idea of a scale of formsand briefly outlines its main features. He attributedthe idea to Aristotle, and cited the analysis inDe Anima of the different forms of the souldiffering in function and capacity as an instance.These lectures were written in September of 1923,


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xxvi EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONas Speculum Mentis was being prepared for thepress. His discussion of the idea in the lectures wasprompted by the approach taken in the book andthis marked the beginning of his working out ofthe logic of a scale of forms. In Speculum Mentis,Collingwood had developed the distinctionbetween implicit and explicit features of experi-ence and philosophy as experience raised to self-consciousness, rendering explicit the principlesimplicitly informing experience, and showing howeach form gives rise to its successor dialectically asa scale of forms. However, although under theinfluence of Croce and Gentile he had movedtowards a dialectical manner of thinking andpresentation, Collingwood had not yet developed afully philosophically adequate account of dialectic.In the conclusion to the section on the scale offorms in the 1923 lectures Collingwood stated that:Our series is to be a series of the forms of action; and actionis the opposite of passivity. Hence at the bottom of the scalewe ought to find pure passivity and at the top, pure activity.Every stage in the scale ought to be more active than the one

below it and more passive than the one above it; and thedialectical process leading from one to the next must be basedon the lower stage's incomplete self-sufficiency, its depend-ence on a principle which it does not itself include or possess.For this means an incomplete freedom and therefore anincompleteactivity.11

11'Action': lectures on moral philosophy, 1923,42. Thisversion of the conclusion, which was an amended version ofthe original, probably dates from 1926. The references to DeAnima are to be found at p. 41.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION xxviiThis indicates that the scale of forms wasexplicitlyidentified by Collingwood as a series of termsin dialectical relationship. A key feature of adialectical relationship is the distinction betweenimplicit and explicit, with later terms makingimplicit what remains only implicit in earlierterms. In Speculum Mentis he wrote that:

I may perhaps be permitted here to refer to a book calledReligion and Philosophy which I published in 1916, and inwhich I tried to give a general account of the nature of thereligious consciousness, tested and illustrated by detailedanalyses of the central doctrines of Christianity. With muchof what that book contains I am still in agreement; but thereare certain principles which I then overlooked or denied, inthe light of which many of its faults can be corrected. Thechief of these principles is the distinction between implicitand explicit. I contended throughout that religion, theology,and philosophy were identical, and this I should now not somuch withdraw as qualify by pointing out that the 'empir-ical' (i.e.real but unexplained) difference between them is thattheology makes explicit what in religion as such is always

implicit, and so with philosophy and theology. This error ledme into a too intellectualistic or abstract attitude towardsreligion, of which many critics rightly accused me. (SM 108n)

Progress on working out the dialectic of implicitand explicit and developing a satisfactory concep-tion of the scale of forms accelerated from 1927-9onwards, in his writing on moral philosophy, pol-itics, and the philosophy of history. This requiredconsideration of the nature and distinctive charac-ter of philosophical concepts. In his essays on 'TheIdea of a Philosophy of Something' (1927) and


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xxviii EDITORS'INTRODUCTION'Outlines of a Philosophy of History' (1928) heargued that there can be a philosophy of somethingif (and only if) that something is a universal andnecessary form of experience;this viewwas repeatedin his pamphlet on The Philosophy of History(1930). In these essays and in his 1929 lectures onmoral philosophy he referred to the conceptsdistinctive of philosophy as transcendentals:

A philosophical concept is universal in the sense that it arisesnecessarily whenever anybody thinks about a subject . . . thesubject itself must be a philosophical, or universal, concept;and that can only mean a concept applicable to everythingthat exists. It is a familiar idea in philosophy that there aresuch concepts; in scholastic terminology they are called tran-scendentals, and you will find, in Spinoza for instance, thatens, res, and unum are given as examples of transcenden-tals . . . The view which I am putting forward, then, is thatthe concepts which compose the body of philosophy aretranscendentals.12

In the 1929 lectures Collingwood wrote that

'philosophy deals with conceptions of a particularkind, namely those that in traditionalphilosophicallanguage are called transcendentals'.13 In thesepapers and lectures, up to and including the1932 lectures, Collingwood was working out thethemes of the Essay through an exploration ofthe differentiaeof philosophical thinking, thedistinctive nature of philosophical concepts versusnon-philosophical or class concepts, and the

12 'The Idea of A Philosophy of Something', in IH 2ndedn., 351--2. I3Lectures on Moral Philosophy, 1929, 6.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION xxiximplications of conceptual overlap for philosophicalanalysis. However, the detailed logic of the overlapof classes had not yet been fully developed and themethodological explorations as a whole had not yetbeen translated into the vocabulary of An Essayon Philosophical Method. In the Essay Collingwoodfinally demonstrated to his own satisfaction how ascale of forms, a dialectical progression, waspossible. This demonstration hinged on thedistinction between empirical or non-philosophicalconcepts as class concepts and philosophicalconcepts which, considered in their relations,displayed identity and difference, fusion of opposi-tion and distinction, and fusion of degree and kind.Thus in a philosophical scale of forms the higherterms make explicit what is merely implicit in thelower. The starting point for Collingwood's reflection onmethod is Socratic. In philosophy we come 'to knowbetter something which in some sense we knewalready' (EPM 11). This principle is reassertedthroughout the book, and he also remarks that

'every school of philosophical thought has acceptedthis principle' (EPM 161). There was thus nothingdistinctive (and Collingwood did not claim thatthere was anything distinctive) about the mereclaim 'that philosophy brings us to know in adifferent way things which we already knew insome way' (EPM 161). Indeed, Susan Stebbing, inthe article Collingwood subjects to critical scrutinyin Chapter VII, wrote that 'in using the method of


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xxx EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONmetaphysical analysis we are not using a method ofdiscovering reasons; we are using a method ofdiscovering what it is precisely which we alreadyin some sense knew.'14 Collingwood's originalitylies, then, in his systematic elucidation of an accountof philosophical method in which this claim acts asa clue to the nature of philosophical concepts.Philosophical concepts overlap in their instances andout of the basic principle that philosophy rendersexplicit what is otherwise implicit, Collingwood isable to demonstrate the logic of the scale of forms.A further merit of Collingwood's methodologicalapproach, according to Michael Beaney, is that itavoids the so-called 'paradox of analysis', a prob-lem which he identified several years before thephrase was coined. The paradox is that either theanalysandum is the same in meaning as the analysansor it is different. In the first case the analysis istrue but trivial; in the second it is interesting andinformative but false. From this it would seem tofollow that an analysis cannot be both correct andinformative. Collingwood's solution lay in his

conception of the scale of forms of progressivelymore adequate and comprehensive knowledge.15

14 L. S. Stebbing, 'The Method of Analysis inMetaphysics', 93. This is the article discussed in ChapterVII; see also, for example, C. D. Broad's Introduction to hisScientific Thought, London, Kegan Paul,1923. 15 For extended discussion of Collingwood's work in rela-tion to the emerging analytical school see M. Beaney,'Collingwood's Critique of Analytic Philosophy'.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION xxxi Collingwood's achievement lay therefore in hisattempt to think through clearly the requirementsof a scale of forms which did critical justice bothto his employment of it and to the philosophicalwork of his forebears. It was the culmination of anengagement with Hegel, Plato, Bradley, Croce, andGentile on the nature of a dialectical scale and onthe nature of the philosophical concept. To takemerely one instance, Collingwood did not mentionCroce in the Essay, but his presence can nonethe-less be felt because one of his concerns was to takeaccount of Croce's criticism of Hegel's notion ofdialectic.16 For Croce, philosophical conceptswhich are related by opposition exhibit dialecticalrelations; philosophical concepts related only bydistinction, however, cannot enter into dialecticalrelations. Collingwood's view, however, is that thisdistinction (by which Croce rids himself of muchof Hegel's dialectic) ends up by throwing away thepossibility of philosophy itself. In his view, becausephilosophical concepts are related by both opposi-tion and distinction, and because they are both

universal and categorical, they are related dialect-ically and hence arrange themselves as a scale offorms. Collingwood's conception of dialectic isthus a modification of both Croce's and Hegel's. In the Essay Collingwood reached his goal witha formulation of method which allowed him to

16 Collingwood identified his unnamed interlocutors in hisletter to Ryle of 9 May 1935.


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xxxii EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONaccept the idea of a dialectical scale of degreesof knowledge. Through this he was enabled toreappraise the work of philosophers (includingPlato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Locke, Kant, and Hegel)whom he explicitly cited as following this method.In particular after completing the Essay hedirected his method onto Bradley's philosophy,and was able to admit Bradley's doctrine of degreesof truth and reality as valid--at least when under-stood as constituting a scale of forms. This he didin the essay on Bradley published below, and theresults were also made public in his lecture on the'Nature of Metaphysical Study'.17 In Collingwood's writings from the early 1920sonwards we can trace both the use of scale of formsanalysis and its progressive developing theoreticaljustification. These were only properly broughtinto mutual balance in the writing of the Essaywhich was born out of reflection on the scale offorms as previously employed in his philosophicalwork. Hence we can largely agree with LouisMink's claim that the Essay is 'throughout, an

ex post facto justification of the dialectical systemof Speculum Mentis' .l8 The reservation lies inrecognition of the fact that in the Essay Collingwoodwas not trying to produce a philosophical system orto justify the system developed in Speculum Mentis;

17 The second lecture contains a distillation of the argumentdeveloped in Collingwood's essay on Bradley's Appearance andReality and is published in the revised edition of EM. 18 Mink, Mind, History and Dialectic, 73.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION xxxiiihe was seeking to elucidate the logic of philosoph-ical thought through an analysis and explorationofthe nature of philosophical concepts. This returns us to the point in November 1932when Collingwood, following his rewriting of hislectures on moral philosophy in the summer of thatyear, finally embarked on the work which was theculmination of many years of effort, arising bothout of substantive philosophizing and also out ofdetermined but elusive efforts to articulate the logicof philosophical method. But it is also importantto recognize that, although the foregoing consti-tutes a very important and distinctive part of theEssay, there were other important sources as well.After all, Collingwood stated that he was 'weldingtogether' the many thoughts about these questionsthat had been occupying him for many years. One ofthese sources was previous work in aesthetics whichwas distilled into the final chapter concerning'Philosophy as a Branch of Literature'. Collingwoodhad developed his views on aesthetics in SpeculumMentis and Outlines of a Philosophy of Art (1925),

and published papers on 'The Place of Art inEducation' (1926), Aesthetic' (1927), and 'Formand Content in Art' (1929) together with a clusterof substantial reviews in the late 1920s and early1930s. For our present purposes, however, perhaps theother most important source is the series of lectureson the ontological argument written in late 1919.Collingwood first lectured on the ontologicalproof


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xxxiv EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONin 1920 and again in 1921 and 1922. The lectureswere extensive (36,000 words) and consisted (aswashis wont) of a theoretical and an historical part.Chapter VI, 'Philosophy as Categorical Thinking',can be seen as a distillation of these lectures.19Collingwood also discussed the ontological proofin Religion and Philosophy and Speculum Mentis,and a few years later returned to it in An Essay onMetaphysics. As an indication of Collingwood'sapproach to the ontological argument, considerthese passages from the lectures:

[T]aken by itself, in abstraction from any context or rathercontent of positive theological and philosophical concep-tions, the ontological proof [is] purely formal and empty.The trouble with it, taken thus in abstraction, is not (as somecritics have said) that it proves the existence of an Absolutebut not of God still less of the Christian God. The trouble is,rather, that it does not prove anything positive at all. It is themere skeleton or framework of proof, without any deter-mination towards proving this rather than that. It shows thatreality exists as we conceive it: but it does not in itself deter-

mine how we shall conceive reality: that is to say it is a pureform which does not dictate its own content. In its specialreligious bearing, it is of value in insisting that religion isconception, i.e. is not mere imagination, but claims truth: butit does not tell us whether one particular religion is truer thananother. Similarly in its philosophical bearing it does notadvance any special theory of the nature of reality. Now thispurely formal character of the ontological proof must bereconciled with one very conspicuous fact: namely that all its

19 See, e.g., EPM 124-7. Inspection of pages 1, 22, 28, 35,41-2, 49 of the Lectures on the Ontological Proof of theExistence of God will confirm this.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION xxxvsupporters have emphatically asserted that it could onlyapply to one conception, not to any and every conception. Itis the first thing that strikes one on studying the literature,that Anselm, Descartes and his followers, Hegel, and the restall insist that there is only one idea which is affected by theproof, an idea which they variously define as id quo majuscogitari nequit, ens realissimum, the one substance, theAbsolute Conception, or God. All their critics, on the otherhand, from Gaunilo to Kant, get at cross-purposes with themby trying to apply it to other ideas--ideas either of thingsperfect in their kind, not absolutely perfect, or else ofordinary objects of experience.20

In a related passagewhichmovestowardsthe argu-ment in the Essay he restates the same point byarguing that:

Anselm's ontological argument, taken in abstraction from anyspecific metaphysical or religious doctrine, is empty of alldeterminate content: it does indeed prove the existence of areality of some kind, but it is only religion, or metaphysicsin so far as metaphysics means the logical development of

religion, that it proves the existence of the God of Christianbelief. Except to a mind steeped in Christianity, or at any ratein a theistic system of thought, the ontological argument hasno definitelytheistic bearing at all: the reality whose existenceit proves may be an Absolute but it is not God.21

In relationto the positionmaintained in the Essay,Collingwood's summary of the significance of theargument is important.He suggeststhat 'the onto-logical proof is really no less than the convictionthat thinking is worth while; a conviction withoutwhich thought would never have arrived at any

20 Lectures on the Ontological Proof, 22. 2 I Ibid. 44.


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xxxvi EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONresults at all'.22 In other words, we have to believethat our thought is valid, that is, that valid reason-ing exists. We cannot think unless we presupposethat we are thinking truly about a real object andthis real object--whatever else it might be--includes our own thought. Further, thought is cri-teriological, that is, it judges acts of thinkingaccording to standards which in turn are self-reflexively applied to itself. Philosophy is the studyof thinking, and thinking is always implicitlycriteriological, that is, governed by criteria by whichthe success or failure of each piece of thinking isjudged. Philosophy is self-referential; it is aninstance of its subject matter and therefore in itsown performance exemplifies the principles andcriteria of the performance it takes as its startingpoint, and appeals in judgement to the same cri-teria. As he expressed it in The Principles of Art, 'inorder to study the nature of thinking it is necessaryto ascertain both what persons who think are actu-ally doing and also whether what they are doing isa success or a failure':23 the philosopher is therefore

obliged to judge his or her own performance as athinker. Philosophy, then, is criteriological in tworespects: it judges the success or failure of theperformance it philosophizes about and at the sametime judges its own success or failure as a piece ofphilosophical thinking, using in the latter instance

22Lectures on the Ontological Proof, 21. 23PA 171n; see also EM 107 and 109.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION xxxviicriteria applying both to itself and to its object.This takes the form of a simple argument: philo-sophical thought concerns standards; because it isthinking about thinking it is self-reflexive; there-fore it necessarily concerns its own standards andhas to exemplify and live up to them. This appearsto be the point of the ontological argument asCollingwood uses it in the Essay; it was also one ofGilbert Ryle's key points of disagreement.

Reception of the Essay

Most of the reviews of An Essay on PhilosophicalMethod were positive, as was the reception byCollingwood's friends. In reviewing it for theOxford Magazine, T M. Knox described it as'a philosophical classic'; the review in Mind byF. C. S. Schiller was typically quirky but appreciat-ive; that in Philosophy by L. J. Russell was broadlysympathetic--and the editor of Philosophy,Sydney Hooper, sent Collingwood a letter express-

ing his appreciation of the book. CharlesHartshorne reviewed it favourably in TheInternational Journal of Ethics and it was alsoreviewed in many other places.24 Collingwoodalso received letters from Samuel Alexander,H. W. B. Joseph, and H. H. Joachim, all expressingappreciation, and the book also sparked

24 For details see C. Dreisbach, R. G. Collingwood: ABibliographical Checklist.


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xxxviii EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONcorrespondence with his old mentor J. A. Smith.Despite this acclaim, the essay had its critics andRyle was not the only one; and it is interesting tonote that Ryle was not the only one to raise concernsabout the use of the ontological argument in theEssay. Father M. C. D'Arcy also did so, although hiscomments tended in the opposite direction. WhereasRyle bemoaned what he saw as logical backslidingwith Collingwood claiming too much for theconstructive powers of philosophy, D'Arcy wasmore worried that perhaps it established too little.He noted Collingwood's 'remarkable statement that"with Hegel's rejection of subjective idealism, theOntological Proof took its place once more amongthe accepted principles of modern philosophy, andit has never again been seriously criticized", and wenton to comment that 'I like this remark especially assome time ago I was told by two Cambridge philo-sophers that the greatest achievement of their schoolconsisted in the final refutation of this veryargument! I wonder, too, whether St Anselm wouldhave been satisfied with the kind of object

Mr Collingwood wishes to prove.'25 Oddly enough,Collingwood's modified defence of the ontologicalargument did not worry most reviewers: it did notfigure in any way in the reviews in Mind, Philosophyor The International Journal of Ethics.26

25M. C. D'Arcy, review of EPM. Collingwood had previ-ously written a favourable review of D'Arcy's book TheNature of Belief. 26By F. C. S. Schiller, L. J. Russell, and C. Hartshornerespectively.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION xxxix Some reviewers, whether friendly or hostile, tookissue with Collingwood's use of language. So, forexample, D'Arcy regarded the Essay as an inter-esting and important book whilst C. J. Ducasse, forone, took the opposite view and considered it to befundamentally mistaken and misconceived;27 butboth agreed that Collingwood's language wasimprecise, sometimes vague, and insufficientlyanalytical. This criticism was later echoed byA. J. Ayer in his Philosophy in the TwentiethCentury where he remarked that 'An Essay onPhilosophical Method is a contribution to belles-lettres rather than philosophy. The style isuniformly elegant, the matter mostly obscure.'28 General reviews aside, the two most substantial,critical and detailed contemporary responses to theEssay were the pieces by Ryle29 in 1935 andDucasse in 1936. Ryle's article is considered belowin the context of the correspondence. Ducasse

27 'Mr. Collingwood on philosophical method'. In 1931Collingwood had given a favourable but critical review of

Ducasse's The Philosophy of Art. It is ironic, in the light ofDucasse's criticisms of his use of language, that Collingwoodshould praise Ducasse for adhering to his determination toavoid 'the vagueness and logical looseness which have beenthe bane of philosophy'. 28 Ayer, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, 193. It isinteresting to note that R. W. Chapman at the ClarendonPress remarked in a brief note to W. D. Ross that 'I am nojudge of its probable soundness or merit as philosophy, butit looks as if it might satisfy the condition of good literature.'Letter to Ross, 10 March 1933, Clarendon Press archives. 29 G. Ryle, 'Mr. Collingwood and the Ontological Argument'.


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xl EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONwrote a substantial critical essay on Collingwood'sviews of philosophical method. He correctly iden-tified that Collingwood was attempting to elucidatea method for philosophy grounded in the nature ofphilosophical concepts. For Collingwood, whereasin scientific concepts the species of a genus aremutually exclusive, in philosophy they overlap, andthe species of a philosophical genus constitute ascale of forms combining differences of degree withdifferences in kind. Ducasse's main line of attackwas to address head-on what it means to be a speciesof a genus. He argued that for Collingwood toestablish his claim that philosophical concepts aredistinguished from scientific concepts by virtue ofthe fact that species of the genus overlap in philo-sophy, he would have to show that the relevantspecies are coordinate species of the genus: 'for theoverlapping of species of a genus that are notcoordinate is a ubiquitous fact, in no way distinctiveof philosophical concepts'.30 Again, 'coordinatenessof overlapping species of a genus is the onlything that would have been distinctive, or that was

in any need of demonstration, and without itMr Collingwood's examples are only a waste oftime.'31 He suggested that although Collingwooddid not explicitly state that they are coordinatespecies, he tacitly claimed this to be so.32 However,

30 C. J. Ducasse, 'Mr. Collingwood on philosophicalmethod', 98. 3 IIbid. 99. 32 EPM, 35. Elsewhere, however, Collingwood seemsto expressly deny that they are coordinate species, see,


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION xlihe then accused Collingwood of never evenattempting to show that the species that he mentionsare coordinate and then tried to impale him on thehorns of a logical dilemma by stating firmly 'thatthey are not coordinate automatically follows fromthe fact that they overlap. But if Mr Collingwooddid not claim them to be coordinate, their overlap-ping, as already pointed out, could not then beclaimed to be something distinctive of philosoph-ical concepts.'33 In other words, Ducasse willinglygrants conceptual overlap, but denies its significanceunless Collingwood were clearly arguing that over-lap were overlap of coordinate species--and this hemaintained he had not and could not do. Hisargument is reminiscent of that employed by Ryle.34 For Collingwood, the central claim is that philo-sophical concepts escape the rules of classificationexhibited by empirical or class concepts. Inresponse, then, he would presumably have refusedto accept the horns of the dilemma on whichDucasse sought to impale him. For Ducasse,Collingwood evades the issue by refusing (in his

imprecision) to see the dilemma; for Collingwood,

e.g., 'Method and Metaphysics', below, note 4. The point,presumably, is that Collingwood denies what Ducasseaffirms, that is, that the standard logic of classes is applica-ble to philosophical concepts. Given this, one can see that thetwo philosophers were bound to talk straight past each other.

33 Ducasse., op. cit., 99. 34 In a footnote Ducasse explicitly states his agreement withRyle's criticisms of the categorical nature of philosophicalpropositions.


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xlii EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONDucasse (and those like Ryle who share his view)miss the point by falsely assuming that all conceptsare empirical classes. As he expressed it in the Essay:

[W]hen a concept has a dual significance, philosophical andnon-philosophical, in its non-philosophical phase it qualifiesa limited part of reality, whereas in its philosophical it leaks orescapes out of these limits and invades the neighbouringregions, tending at last to colour our thought of reality as awhole. As a non-philosophical concept it observes the rulesof classification, its instances forming a class separate fromother classes; as a philosophical concept it breaks these rules,and the class of its instances overlaps those of its co-ordinatespecies. (EPM 35)

Philosophy, then, ought to recognize these distin-guishing features of philosophical concepts (or of thephilosophical phase of concepts). Collingwood waswell aware that certain approaches to philosophy,which he had earlier dubbed 'scientific philosophy'35and now referred to as analytical philosophy, agreedin maintaining that all concepts (philosophical

concepts included) are class concepts where thephrase 'class concept' refers to the concepts typicalof empirical science. This reduction is of courseexactly what Collingwood was trying to escape:

Where the generic concept is non-philosophical, as here, theaffirmation of one specific form involves the indiscriminatedenial of all the rest, for their structure is that of a group ofco-ordinate classes where each excludes each and thereforeany one excludes all the rest, none more than another. But

35 See SM, 49-50.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION xliiiwhere the generic concept is philosophical, specified in ascale of forms of which the judgement is intended to affirmthe highest (which it always is, because every one necessarilyconceives the highest specific form known to him as the trueform of the generic concept, and so affirms that), its denialof all the inferior forms is summarized in one denial, namelythat of the proximate form; since each summarizes the wholescale up to that point, and the denial of that involves thedenial of all that it summarizes. (EPM 107-8)

This is a claim about the distinctiveness of philo-sophy, philosophical reasoning, and philosophicalconcepts, expressing the view that they do notobey the laws of formal classificatory logic. Itwould therefore follow that simply invoking thoselaws against Collingwood could not havepersuaded him, as it is their very status andcharacter that is the point at issue. But Ducassethought that by the looseness of his language atcritical points in his argument Collingwood madematters easy for himself. Collingwood was himselfwell aware that such a charge might be brought

against his manner of philosophizing by membersof the analytical school who adopted a technical,scientific view of the nature of language. InSpeculum Mentis Collingwood had remarked that'to suppose that one word, in whatever context itappears, ought to mean one thing and no more,argues not an exceptionally high standard oflogical accuracy but an exceptional ignorance as tothe nature of language' (SM 11). This remarkprompted Stebbing in reviewing the book to make


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xliv EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONthe riposte that 'presumably, to expect that suchimportant words as true, identical, real should havea clear and unambiguous meaning, is to be a "verbalpedant" who uses "jargon" that is neither Englishnor "plain". The critic is thus given to understandat the outset that he must not expect precision ofstatement whether or not there be clearness ofthought.' Collingwood's argument in the finalchapter of the Essay that philosophy should bewritten in literary rather than technical scientificlanguage was therefore no new departure: butCollingwood was no nearer persuading Ducasse ofits merits than he had earlier persuaded Stebbing.Indeed the claim provoked a comparable outburstfrom Ducasse:

Many others of Mr Collingwood's contentions testify no lesseloquently than those already considered how unfailinglyfatal in philosophical investigations is a method which, in nomatter what eulogistic terms described, essentially consistsof a systematic refusal to be precise whenever precisionwould require of the reader some effort of attention, and

would thus interfere with his literary enjoyment of whathe reads.36

Ducasse, it is fair to say, was not convinced by theEssay. Presumably Collingwood was aware of hisarticle, but there is no evidence that he consideredits criticisms either in unpublished manuscripts,private correspondence, or in print. Ducasse later

36 L. S. Stebbing, review of Speculum Mentis, 566.Ducasse, op. cit., 104.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION xlvreviewed An Essay on Metaphysics, which he muchpreferred to the earlier work; indeed, he seemed toprefer it in direct proportion to the extent to which,in his view, it ignored or controverted the prin-ciples and precepts of its predecessor.37

The Essay and after

Having looked at some of the reviews and criticalresponses to the An Essay on Philosophical Methodwe can now examine Collingwood's own use of hisfresh-minted method and its relation to his laterthought. After publication Collingwood employedthe notion of the scale of forms and its associatedconcepts extensively. For instance, it is to be foundin the manuscripts such as 'Notes Towards aMetaphysic', and in lectures such as 'Methodand Metaphysics'. It is employed historically inboth The Idea of Nature (largely written in 1934and revised in 1937) and The Idea of History(mostly written early in 1936). It is present in The

Principles of Art and forms the backbone ofThe New Leviathan. In the Essay Collingwood does not distinguishor systematically explore all of the possibleapplications of the scale of forms. For example, inhis work we find consciousness, forms of experi-ence, concepts, and historical development allvariously arranged as scales of forms. But there is

37Ducasse, review of EM.


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xlvi EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONa question: does scale of forms analysis requiremodification if applied to these different objects?The Essay is largely silent on this, perhaps becauseit makes the implicit assumption that there are noessential differences worth remarking. Although itcould be argued that use of the method in differ-ent contexts requires modification,38 it should benoted that neither in the Essay nor later didCollingwood indicate that he saw any need forfundamental modification to the argument of theEssay. In the Essay itself he has no qualms withemploying the scale of forms historically;39 hemight be wrong to be so sanguine, but equally,perhaps we should accept that the work is an essaynot a treatise, and that Collingwood limited hisconcerns accordingly. The Principles of Art (1938) was explicit in itsreferences to the Essay and quietly unobtrusive inits employment of the scale of forms and theconcept of overlap. One important passage isdiscussed below; another is where Collingwoodrefers to the overlap between art and craft and

urges his readers to avoid the fallacy of precarious

38 In his introduction to the revised edition of EM, RexMartin points out that a historical use of the scale of formsrequires modification as its particular forms might not beco-present. In a historical process, for example, it may be thata later phase has no point of temporal coincidence with an ear-lier phase and hence the two cannot overlap in the way inwhich they can and do in a purely conceptual scale of forms(EM xxxviii--xlv). 3 9 e.g., see EPM 190--3.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION xlviimargins (PA 22n). This is an important point andone often missed by hostile critics who frequentlytake Collingwood to be claiming that what is craftis ipso facto not art and vice versa. In 'What Civilization Means', written in 1939-40,the method is employed in an important andexplicit rebuttal of historical relativism. In thisessay Collingwood analysed the ideals of civilizedconduct and demonstrated that their interrelationsare those of forms in a scale of forms. There cannotbe, therefore, a single unilinear scale in whichcivilizations differ only in degree: civilizationsdiffer both in degree and in kind.40 It is worth noting that, generally, Collingwooddid not dwell on the issue of method, preferringinstead to let the dialectic emerge from the flow ofthe argument itself. This also follows his generalapproach to system building: he was systematic, butdid not seek to produce a complete system unifiedin structure and terminology. There remains acuriosity, however, in the fact that the scale of formswas not obviously employed (and was certainly not

mentioned) in An Essay on Metaphysics, where,given its immediate predecessors and successorswhich used or recommended the method, togetherwith its status as a companion volume to the Essayon Method, one would expect it to have been. Weexamine this curiosity below.

40 For an analysis of this piece (reprinted in the secondedition of NL), in relation to the Essay, see J. Connelly,Metaphysics, Method and Politics, ch. 6.


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xlviii EDITORS' INTRODUCTION Collingwood's last published book during his life-time was TheNew Leviathan. This drew extensivelyon themes emerging directly out of the lectures onmoral philosophy, especially his most recent series'Goodness, Rightness, Utility', written at the turn ofthe year 1939-40; it incorporates the analysis to befound in manuscripts such as 'What CivilizationMeans' (1939-40) and draws on the account of mindand consciousness developed in The Principles ofArt. It is explicitly arranged as a scale of forms.However, it does make an apparent (but unsignalled)modification to the doctrine by introducing 'the lawof primitive survivals'. This states that 'when A ismodified into B there survives in any example of B,side by side with the function B which is the modi-fied form of A, an element of A in its primitive orunmodified state' (NL 9.51).41

Philosophical Method and Cosmology

Before embarking on an account of the previously

unpublished manuscripts reprinted below, it is

41 David Boucher, The Social and Political Thought ofR. G. Collingwood, 96, argues that the presence of an unmod-ified residue means there can be no complete overlap of formson a scale. It could be argued in reply that the law of primi-tive survivals is found in historical, but not in purely concep-tual scales of forms; however, this would be to concede theunity of scale of forms analysis. A different reply would be toargue that the law is implicit in the Essay anyway. For exam-ple, Collingwood states that the higher of two adjacent forms'fails to include the lower in its entirety because there is a


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION xlixinstructive to look at the cosmological notes thatCollingwood made immediately after composingthe Essay. According to Knox, after completing theEssay, Collingwood remarked that having 'pro-pounded a theory of philosophical method, he wasnow proceeding to apply it to a problem which hadnever been solved, namely, to the philosophy ofnature'.42 To this end he began a series of notebookson cosmology--'Notes Towards a Metaphysic'.There were five notebooks in all, covering some522 pages (about 130,000 words). Much of thiswork contributed to his lectures on 'Nature andMind' (and subsequently to The Idea of Nature).One substantial outcome was the sketch of a cos-mology which formed the originalconclusion (1934)to the lectures which comprise the bulk of The Ideaof Nature.43 In the opening remarks of the note-books, begun in September 1933, Collingwood

negative aspect in the lower which is rejected by the higher:the lower, in addition to asserting its own content, denies thatthe generic essence contains anything more, and this denial

constitutes its falsehood' (EPM 90). It is a moot point.

42 T M. Knox, Prefatory Note to The Idea of Nature, v. 43 The conclusions to the lectures on nature and mind arereprinted in The Principles of History. The 1935 conclusionis similar to the conclusion published in The Idea of Naturein that it simply marks the transition from the idea of natureto the idea of history. The 1934conclusion, by contrast, is asuccinctly stated philosophical cosmology tracing the emer-gence and evolution of matter, life, mind, and God. Fordetails of these manuscripts, see D. Boucher, 'The Principlesof History and the Cosmology Conclusion to The Ideaof Nature', and 'The Significance of R. G. Collingwood's

Principles of History'.


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1 EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONmade the relationship between his current enter-prise and his newly published views on philosoph-ical method clear, in terms which were later echoedin 'Method and Metaphysics':

The main principle of my method is the Scale of Forms--in this problem we have a genus (I suppose its name isReality) divided into a scale of species Matter, Life, Mind.According to the method, these should be kinds of realityand also degrees of reality, the highest the most real: eachshould be distinct from the next and also opposed to thenext--and Matter-Mind are just as truly 'nexts' as Matter-Life & Life-Mind, Life here forming the 'twilight-term'between them, and the whole triad being only a roughpreliminary triangulation for a much more detailedsurvey--each should sum up the whole scale to that pointand from its own point of view be identical with the genus,so that, from the point of view of a lower term (e.g. Matter)that term is the genus (Reality) and the higher terms (Life,Mind) are simply nothing--the names of errors. Whereasfrom the point of view of a higher term (e.g. Mind)although that term is the genus (Mind = Reality) the same

term includes the lower terms (Matter, Life) and, instead ofdenying these, asserts them as implicates of itself. It doesdeny them in one sense, but only in the sense that it deniestheir denials, viz. their claim to be the only or highest termin the scale. Now what about the nisus? i.e. what is the nature of theforce which drives us from a lower term to the next higher,or if you like converts that into this? On this subject I havesaid nothing in the Essay. It is what Spinoza would call animmanent causality: something in the first term whichconverts it into the second.44

44 'Notes Towards a Metaphysic', 1.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION liThis statement goes beyond the Essay in itsassertion that reality constitutes a scale of forms:this is the unifying theme of Collingwood's theo-retical cosmology. But is Collingwood assertingthat reality in reconstitutes a scale of forms or thatreality, qua philosophical concept, necessarilyarticulates itself as a scale of forms? The Essayitself confined itself to the analysis of concepts andremained agnostic on these wider issues.

'The Metaphysics of F. H. Bradley'

Over Christmas 1933 Collingwood wrote anextended essay on Bradley with the title 'TheMetaphysics of F. H. Bradley: An Essay onAppearance and Reality'. The core argument of thisessay also became a central part of the second ofhis lectures on 'The Nature of MetaphysicalStudy', delivered in early 1934. Perhaps the essaywas itself delivered as a lecture in its own right;certainly Collingwood's discussion of Bradley made

an appreciable impact on Donald MacKinnon, whoremarked that he 'had the advantage of hearingthree courses of lectures by that remarkablephilosopher (and indeed his Inaugural lecture asProfessor, not to mention two remarkable lectureson Bradley's Appearance and Reality)' .45 The essay provides an account of Bradley'scentral metaphysical doctrines, their origin in his

45 D. M. MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology, 29.


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lii EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONrejection of the phenomenalism of Mansel andMill, and proceeds to make the claim that Bradleywas enunciating some of the central doctrines ofmodern realism and was not the idealist he wastypically taken to be. From the point of view ofmethod the essay is notable because of its reinter-pretation and reappropriation of the doctrine ofthe degrees of truth and reality, something onlynow possible for Collingwood because he hadcleared up the issue of philosophical method.Whereas he had previously rejected the doctrine ofdegrees of truth and reality, he was now able toembrace them, suitably reinterpreted along thelines of his conception of the scale of forms. InTruth and Contradiction (1917) Collingwoodsubmitted the theory of truth as coherence tosearching criticism, although he admitted that itwas probably the best theory available. His mainobjection to the associated doctrine of degrees oftruth and reality was that truth could not bearranged on a linear scale, a point repeated inSpeculum Mentis, where he states that 'the terms

of a dialectical series are not related to one anotherin terms of degree, but by the assertion in eachterm of something which in the previous term waswrongly denied' (SM 208). This statementanticipates the doctrine developed at length inthe Essay. Following the conceptual labours ofthe Essay, however, he was now free to use thenotions of degrees of knowledge, truth or realityunencumbered by lingering doubts concerning


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION liiitheir validity, principally because he had reconcep-tualized what is meant by the term 'degrees' inphilosophy. He made this clear in The Principles ofArt, where in discussing the imagination, heremarked that 'Kant . . . approached the problemalong a new line. Instead of trying to conceive realsensa and imaginary sensa as two coordinate speciesof the same genus, the conception which, in spite ofthe empiricists' attempt to revive it, had beenonce for all refuted by the Cartesians, he conceivedthe difference between them as a difference ofdegree' (PA 187). The point is clarified in a footnote:

Here and elsewhere I use this word in the traditional philo-sophical sense, where differences of degree are understoodas involving differences of kind; as in Locke's 'three degreesof knowledge', where each 'degree' is at once a fullerrealization of the essence of knowledge than the one below(more certain, less liable to error) and also a fresh kind ofknowledge. See Essay on Philosophical Method, pp. 54-5,69-77. (PA 1871n)

This reading of 'degrees' became available only oncompletion of the train of thought culminating inthe Essay. In his essay on Bradley Collingwoodmade Bradley's position his own by projecting onto him a reading derived from his new under-standing of what 'degrees' in philosophy meant.He boldly points out that:

Bradley is here using the conception of overlappingclasses.A distinction has been made between appearance and reality;Bradley accepts it, but points out that the things so distin-guished overlap to a vast and unverifiable extent, whereas the


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liv EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONsubjectivist or phenomenalistphilosophershave assumed theabsence of such overlap. (MB 29)

Shortly after he suggests that Bradley, in puttingforward the notion of degrees of truth and reality:

is passing from the overlap of classes to the scale of forms,without which further conception that of an overlap ofclasses must remain incomplete and unintelligible. For hisdegrees are not measurable degrees; they are variations inwhich the variable is the same as the genericessence. And byadopting this notion he is able to accept as his own the doc-trines of the phenomenalismwhich he is criticising,while yetcriticising them and rejecting them as inadequateand to thatextent untrue. (MB 31)

Collingwood's essay on Bradley should be seen asa re-engagement with, and a fresh endorsement of,Bradley's philosophy in the light of his ownconcerns and made possible by his work in philo-sophical method.46

Correspondence with Gilbert Ryle

The correspondence with Ryle illustrates, in thecourse of a discussion centred on nature and valueof the ontological argument, Collingwood's under-standing of philosophical concepts and his associ-ated attempt to resist their assimilation toenumerative empirical classifications not subject tooverlap. For Collingwood philosophical concepts

46 For more on Collingwood'sunderstanding of Bradley,see J. Connelly, 'Bradley, Collingwood and the "Other

Metaphysics"'.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION Ivare distinct from others and necessarily overlap;this Ryle denied: the correspondence brings outsharply some of the leading points at issue betweenthe two approaches to philosophy typified by eachman. The correspondence took place in May and earlyJune 1935 and comprised a spirited and detailedphilosophical debate centred on three lengthyletters, initiated by Collingwood's reaction toRyle's article in Mind concerning his rehabilitationof the ontological argument, a rehabilitation whichRyle considered scandalous. The discussionrapidly went beyond the ontological proof per seand became a symposium on the nature of philo-sophy, what could and could not be proved byphilosophical inquiry, the nature of philosophicalconcepts, the nature of universals, and the distinc-tion between an intensional and an extensionalunderstanding of concepts. The letters makeimplicit reference to Russell's theory of classes andCollingwood's contribution constitutes an attackon the naturalism implicit in the new empiricist

movement. His letters thereby also serve to clarifyhis disagreement with the presuppositions ofempiricism and the rising analytical school inBritish philosophy. The exchange took placeshortly after Collingwood had been appointed tothe Waynflete Chair of Metaphysical Philosophy inMay 1935 and illustrated some of his developingthinking on the role and nature of metaphysics inthe period between the earlier essay on Methodand the later Essay on Metaphysics.


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Ivi EDITORS' INTRODUCTION To set the scene for the debate, it is necessary togive a flavour of Ryle's article, 'Mr Collingwoodand the Ontological Argument', published in Mindin 1935. It did not purport to be a review of the Essayas such (indeed the essay had already been reviewedin the journal by the self-consciously iconoclasticpragmatist F. C. S. Schiller). Ryle's focus wasentirely centred on Collingwood's understandingof philosophical propositions as both universaland categorical, and with his exhumation of theontological argument--something which he sup-posed logically dead and buried. In the article Ryleclassified Collingwood 'for what such labels areworth, as an Idealist'.47 He began by frankly statingthat he intended to be merely destructive in that heonly wanted to show the mistakes whichCollingwood had made in propounding his claimthat philosophical propositions are categorical andstand in a peculiarly close relation to what exists. Heclaimed that if Collingwood were right about thisthen constructive metaphysics was the proper busi-ness of philosophy and Hume and Kant were wrong

in so far as they maintained that a priori argumentscould not establish particular matters of fact. For Ryle, Collingwood's claim that philosophicalpropositions are categorical meant that they mustrefer to something which exists, or contain or reston propositions which do so; and, he continued,'this must mean, to use language which is not

47 G. Ryle, 'Mr. Collingwood and the OntologicalArgument', in G. Ryle, Collected Essays, vol. 2,101.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION IviiMr Collingwood's, that philosophical propositionsare or contain or rest on propositions embodyingeither at least one logically proper name or else atleast one definite description which does in factdescribe something. In short, every philosophicalproposition is or contains or rests on a genuinesingular proposition', and he confessed that hecould not make head or tail of this. Indeed, he wasupset 'to find that apparently after all some judge-ments may be universal and so (I suppose) express-ible in purely general terms and yet categorical inthe sense of referring to something actually exist-ing. I fear that the principle of the overlap of classeswill be brought in to give us carte blanche to have itboth ways when it suits our convenience!'48 Ryle then observed that Collingwood's firstargument for this conclusion was that theOntological Argument is valid, and is indeedpresupposed by all other philosophical arguments.He notes Collingwood's recognition of the standardobjection to the argument, where he states that'Anselm's argument that in conceiving a perfect

being we are conceiving a subject possessed of allpositive predicates, including that of existence, sothat to think of this is already to think of it as exist-ing, is an argument open to objection on the logicalground that existence is not a predicate; but thesubstance of his thought survives all such objec-tions'(EPM 125). Ryle was deeply puzzled by thisbland acceptance of what, to him, was a decisive

48Ibid. 105.


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Iviii EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONobjection, and still more puzzled (or perhapsaffronted) by Collingwood blithely sailing past theobjection with the high-handed comment thatnonetheless Anselm's argument survives all suchobjections. This, maintains Ryle, is precisely thepoint where recent logicians would dig their heelsin and 'say that the argument is an obvious fallacyunless existence is a "predicate"; and that existenceis not a "predicate" '. And he then asks the questionof how a particular matter of fact can be deducedfrom a priori or non-empirical premisses.49 Collingwood had in Ryle's view 'rather cavalierly'dismissed Kant's refutation of the argument as aresult of false subjectivism and scepticism and thencompounded the felony by making the scandalousassertion that 'with Hegel's rejection of subjectiveidealism, the Ontological Proof took its place oncemore among the accepted principles of modernphilosophy, and it has never again been seriouslycriticised' (EPM 126).50 This bland assertionmoved Ryle to bewildered indignation:

To my mind this dictum almost merits tears. One of thebiggest advances in logic that have been made since Aristotle,namely Hume's and Kant's discovery that particular mattersof fact cannot be the implicates of general propositions, andso cannot be demonstrated from a priori premisses, is writ-ten off as a backsliding into an epistemological or psycho-logical mistake, and all's to do again.51

49 G. Ryle, 'Mr. Collingwood and the OntologicalArgument', in G. Ryle, Collected Essays, vol. 2, 106. 50 Ibid. 106. 5 I Ibid. 106.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION lixCollingwood had thus (for Ryle) dismissed thewhole of what might broadly be called Russellianlogic; this dismissal he regarded as preposterous. Butat this point he went on to address Collingwood'sdenial that the ontological argument made anyspecific theological claims and quoted Collingwood'sconclusion that:

What it does prove is that essence involves existence, notalways, but in one special case, the case of God in the meta-physical sense: the Deus sive natura of Spinoza, the Good ofPlato, the Being of Aristotle: the object of metaphysicalthought. But this means the object of philosophical thoughtin general; for metaphysics, even if it is regarded as onlyone among the philosophical sciences, is not unique in itsobjective reference or in its logical structure; all philosophicalthought is of the same kind, and every philosophical sciencepartakes of the nature of metaphysics, which is not a separatephilosophical science but a special study of the existentialaspect of that same subject-matter whose aspect as truthis studied by logic and its aspect as goodness by ethics.Reflection on the history of the Ontological Proof thus offers

us a view of philosophy as a form of thought in which essenceand existence, however clearly distinguished, are conceivedas inseparable. On this view, unlike mathematics or empiricalscience, philosophy stands committed to maintaining that itssubject-matter is no mere hypothesis, but something actuallyexisting. (EPM 127-8)

To which Ryle responded by suggesting that'surely Russell's theory of descriptions and hisconsequential analysis of existential propositionsas a species of general proposition has been beforethe philosophical public long enough for this


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1x EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONontological fallacy to merit immunity from anymore exhumations.'52 At this point Ryle turned his attention toCollingwood's claim concerning the normative self-referentiality of propositions in logic. Collingwoodhad argued that logicians 'enunciate principles oflogic in propositions which themselves exemplifythose principles. So their propositions exist. So theessence of the principles of logic involves the exist-ence of examples of them.'53 This argument Rylefound 'so extraordinary' that (presumably to ensurethat his readers should believe the evidence oftheir own eyes) he felt obliged to quote the relevantpassages at length. The passage concernedCollingwood's claim that logic has thought for itssubject matter and does not give a merely descript-ive account of it; further, Collingwood maintainsthat neither is logic purely normative, becausea purely normative science would expound a norm or ideal ofwhat its subject matter ought to be, but would commit itselfto no assertion that this ideal was anywhere realized ... inlogic the subject matter is propositions, and the body of the

science consists of propositions about propositions . . . thepropositions of which logic consists must conform to the ruleswhich logic lays down, so that logic is actually about itself; notabout itself exclusively,but at least incidentally about itself. Itfollows that logic cannot be in substance merely hypothet-ical . . . logic, by existing, . . . constitutes an actually existingsubject matter to itself. Thus . . . when we say 'all universalpropositions distribute their subject', we are not only discussing

52 G. Ryle, 'Mr. Collingwood and the Ontological Argument',in G. Ryle, Collected Essays, vol. 2, 109. 5 3 Ibid. no.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION 1xiuniversal propositions, we are also enunciating a universalproposition; we are producing an actual instance of the thingunder discussion, and cannot discuss it without doing so.Consequently no such discussion can be indifferent to theexistence of its own subject matter; in other words, thepropositions which constitute the body of logic cannot ever bein substance hypothetical. A logician who lays it down that alluniversal propositions are merely hypothetical is showing atrue insight into the nature of science, but he is underminingthe very possibility of logic; for his assertion cannot be trueconsistently with the fact of his asserting it. Similarly withinference. Logic not only discusses, it also contains reasoning;and if a logician could believe that no valid reasoning any-where existed, he would merely be disbelieving his own log-ical theory. For logic has to provide not only a theory of itssubject matter, but in the same breath, a theory of itself; it isan essential part of its proper task that it should consider notonly how other kinds of thought proceed, and on what prin-ciples, but how and on what principles logic proceeds. If it hadonly to consider other kinds of thought, it could afford to dealwith its subject matter in a way either merely normative ormerely descriptive; but towards itself it can only stand in an

attitude that is both at once. It is obliged to produce, as con-stituent parts of itself, actual instances of thought which real-ize its own ideal of what thought should be. Logic, therefore,stands committed to the principle of the Ontological Proof. Itssubject matter, namely thought, affords an instance of some-thing which cannot be conceived except as actual, somethingwhose essence involves existence. (EPM 129-31)

Ryle's exasperation is palpable in his expostulationthat 'I shall find it hard to condense within reas-onable limits my objections to this argument'.54His first point was that it had nothing to do with

54 Ibid. III.


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1xii EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONthe Ontological Argument, and his second that itdid not establish the general conclusion that thepropositions of logic are not hypothetical. He thenproceeded to gnaw at three 'subsidiary bones' hehad to pick with Collingwood.

Mr Collingwood is at pains to show that a logician who deniesthe existence of any instances of logically regular thinkingmust be wrong because he himself is producing an instanceof that which he denies to exist. Now this might, per accidens,be so (though a man might, if he troubled, deny theoccurrence of genuine singular propositions withoutproducing one, or argue against the occurrence of syllogismsin Disamis by syllogisms in Baroco). But it has no bearingon the point. For (general) hypothetical propositions do notdeny the existence of their subjects, they only do not affirmor imply their existence. So a man who maintained that allthe propositions of logic are (general) hypotheticals wouldnot be denying the existence of anything. So his exposure ashimself a producer of propositions would no more disconcerthim than a lecturer on canine diseases would be disconcertedby hearing the bark of a dog.55

This became one of the major themes of the cor-respondence. The second bone dealt withCollingwood's concern that if logic were purelynormative 'it would resemble the exact sciences: itwould in fact either be, or be closely related tomathematics' (EPM 129). Ryle clearly did notobject to such a conclusion and suggested thatCollingwood had forgotten that 'this is preciselywhat is desired for logic by many logicians, past

55 G. Ryle, 'Mr. Collingwood and the OntologicalArgument', in G. Ryle, Collected Essays, vol. 2, 111-12.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION 1xiiiand present'.56 The third and final bone was that,in Ryle's view, it was not a fact peculiar to logicalpropositions that they belong to the subject matterwhich they discuss:

The English grammarian writes grammatically about gram-mar; the educationist lectures instructively about lecturinginstructively; the signalling instructor may signal instruc-tions about signalling to his pupils; Horace writes his ArsPoetica in poetry. Have these anything to do with theOntological Argument? I suppose Mr Collingwood wouldreply that it is accidental if the principles of grammar orelocution or poetry are conveyed in vehicles whichthemselves exemplify those principles, but it is necessary thatlogicians' propositions should instantiate the principleswhich they themselves propound. But even this seems to menot to be so. For after all one can talk about singularpropositions in general propositions, negative propositions inaffirmative ones, relational in attributive and attributive inrelational propositions. One can reason about the syllogismin non-syllogistic arguments and vice versa. But let ussuppose that sometimes logicians have to formulate logical

principles or rules in propositions which are instances ofthem. Even so, the writer or reader might and usually wouldattend to what the propositions say without noticing that thepropositions themselves were cases in point, just as he maystudy grammar without noticing that the grammarian iskeeping the rules.57

This is where, in his original article, Ryle left hiscriticism; the sequel is published for the first timebelow and the controversy follows directly thelines set in Ryle's original critical foray.

56 Ibid. 112. 57Ibid. 112.


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Ixiv EDITORS' INTRODUCTION Leaving to one side the period detail of thiscrossing of swords and gnawing of bones, it isinstructive to make one or two general commentson the relation between Ryle and Collingwood.Although each would have regarded the other asfirmly placed in a different philosophical camp,nonetheless, from the distance of half a century ofhindsight, it is possible to see that the two philo-sophers perhaps shared more in common than theymight have acknowledged at the time. In manyways Ryle's own philosophy and philosophicalprocedures, together with some of his conclusions,do not appear so far removed from Collingwood'sown. Although Ryle did not acknowledge thepoint, their views on mind are strikingly similar inthat both tend to resolve mind into activity; 'mindis what it does' was a slogan derived from Gentile,a philosopher studied by both Collingwood andRyle.58 For both thinkers a body-mind dualism wasanathema; equally, their view of philosophy wasthat it is not deductive nor inductive but both atonce; that its method is in some sense dialectical;

that philosophy reflects on lower-level experience;that philosophy is concerned with uncoveringpresuppositions and that it makes clear what insome sense we already know.59 We might further

58 See G. D'Oro, 'Collingwood and Ryle on the Concept ofMind'. 59 See 'Philosophical Arguments', Collected Essays, vol. 2,196-7 and 'Taking Sides in Philosophy', Collected Essays,vol. 2, 162--3.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION 1xvspeculate that some of Ryle's work was stimulatedby the correspondence, for example, his 1937 paperon 'Taking Sides in Philosophy', which takes as itsstarting point some of the issues which arose in thecorrespondence with Collingwood.60

'Method and Metaphysics'

The correspondence between Collingwood andRyle took place in May and early June 1935. On19 June Collingwood delivered a paper on 'Methodand Metaphysics' to the Jowett Society in Oxford.In this lecture he showed how the scale of formsmethod of analysis and the associated conception ofphilosophical method could be applied to a meta-physical question, the general nature of reality. Heendeavoured to show that reality is not a class con-cept but a philosophical concept to which the rulesof classification appropriate to the empirical or theexact sciences do not apply. The possibility of meta-physics was thereby defended on the grounds that

60 For further contemporary discussion, see E. E. Harris,'Mr. Ryle and the Ontological Argument', in which he cameto Collingwood's defence from a broadly Hegelianviewpoint.Ryle responded to Harris in his 'Back to the OntologicalArgument'. Having had his reply to Ryle's reply turneddown by Mind, Harris returned to the fray in 1972 with hispaper on 'Collingwood's Treatment of the OntologicalArgument and the CategoricalUniversal'. For Ryle'sgeneralestimation of Collingwood see Philosophical Arguments andAutobiographical', 13-14.


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1xvi EDITORS' INTRODUCTION(because reality is not a class concept) metaphysicsas the search for the general nature of reality is notan empty search for a bare abstraction. This lecturewas delivered two weeks after the final letter toRyle and its composition must have overlapped theoccasion of the correspondence. It serves toamplify some of the points developed in thatcorrespondence, in particular concerning thenature of philosophical concepts and classes; it isevident from the text that there are several directreferences to some of the issues dealt with in thecorrespondence, together with several oblique ref-erences to some of Ryle's comments. 'Method and Metaphysics' is interesting notonly as a systematic application of the doctrines ofthe essay on Method, but also as an illustration ofCollingwood's acceptance of some of the mainthemes of Bradley's philosophy, in particular thedoctrine of degrees of truth and reality. It wasremarked earlier that the Essay finally allowedCollingwood to accept this doctrine which he hadpreviously found objectionable. As we have seen,

Collingwood interpreted Bradley in the light of hisconception of the scale of forms, finding him thusinterpreted perfectly acceptable. The papers onBradley and on 'Method and Metaphysics' aretestimony to Collingwood's willingness, finallyafter years of doubt, to approve and employ theidea of degrees of truth and reality. Bradleianechoes also sound in the reference to the 'unearthlyballet of bloodless categories'.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION 1xvii In 'Method and Metaphysics' Collingwoodaddresses reality as a philosophical concept:

I have to show, then, that when I speak of the general natureof reality I am using the words general nature in a differentsense from that in which we speak of the general nature ofmen or triangles. These are what I call class-concepts; andthus what I have to show, in order to defend the possibilityof metaphysics against the kind of objection I am consider-ing, is that reality is not a class-concept. For the purpose of the present paper, I need not show thatthis demonstrandum is true; I need only show that it followsfrom, or is contained in, the argument of my Essay. It is in facta particular case of a generalization there stated in the secondchapter: viz. that no philosophical concept is a class-concept. Ihave argued in that chapter that whereas concepts like man andtriangle consist of characteristics common to all men and alltriangles and are for that reason amenable to the ordinarylogical rules of definition, classificationand division, philosoph-ical concepts, of which reality is one, do not consist of commoncharacteristics and are not amenable to these rules. [MM 3--4]

Later he explains that:

I should expect the concept of reality, like other philosophicalconcepts, to exhibit the structure of a scale of forms, wherethe different kinds of real things differ both in the kind andin the degree of reality that they possess; a scale nowhere goingdown to zero, so that there is no such thing as the completelyunreal, but one in which every term is relativelyunreal by con-trast with higher terms, except the highest of all, and I shouldnot expect that we could know, except in a very dim and imper-fect way, what the absolutely highest term is. (MM 8)

This seems to imply that there is no distinction in

philosophy between the concept of reality and realityitself. Our understanding of reality is necessarily


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1xviii EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONconceptual and therefore reality, as we understandit, is arranged as a scale of forms. Collingwood'sidealism, revealed here, was recessive (althoughimplicit) in the Essay but emerges more strongly insome of the manuscripts written immediately afterits publication.

An Essay on Philosophical Method and An Essay on Metaphysics

We noted earlier the peculiarity that An Essay onMetaphysics neither refers to the earlier Essay nor(so it would seem) employs its method. This wouldbe merely an interesting quirk were it not thatvarious commentators have argued that in themeantime Collingwood fundamentally changed hismind on the relation between philosophy andhistory and embraced an historical relativism inwhich history swallowed philosophy whole. Forthis reason it is worth outlining the reasons forbelieving that the appearance of radical change has

no corresponding substance in reality. This shouldnot be taken to imply that there was no change ordevelopment in Collingwood's thinking or that itis free of tension, occasional obscurity and contra-diction. Nonetheless the later position is compat-ible with the earlier position. Let us consider howthis assertion might be justified. First, Collingwood neither referred to such achange, nor showed any indication that he believed


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION 1xixthat there had been such a change, and (further) allof his later references to the Essay are positive.This is especially clear in An Autobiographyand The Principles of Art. Nonetheless, it shouldbe conceded that it seems remarkable that AnEssay on Metaphysics should contain no referenceto the earlier Essay. Paradoxically, this absence ismade more rather than less remarkable byCollingwood's express desire that the two Essaysshould be regarded as companions. Indeed, heissued explicit instructions to the Clarendon Pressthat the two Essays should be regarded as VolumeI and Volume II in his series of PhilosophicalEssays; and he changed the title from AnIntroduction to Metaphysics to clarify their status ascompanion volumes. This deepens the puzzle as towhy he made no reference in the later work to theearlier, but it was not the action of a man who hadconsciously repudiated the earlier work. Of courseCollingwood could have been radically mistakenabout the import of his own doctrines and failedto recognise or acknowledge the contradictions and

differences. But this is surely implausible. Theabsence of internal cross reference is, then, remark-able, but it does not point to the conclusion thatthere was a radical conversion. Of course it shouldbe recognised that Collingwood used a differentvocabulary in the later work, but this was hardlyunusual for him: in fact it is precisely what he didthroughout his philosophical career, fashioning his


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1xx EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONthinking anew for each philosophical occasion,problem and audience.61 Secondly, absolute presuppositions (to which themetaphysician is allotted the task of discoveringand cataloguing) clearly have a close affinity withwhat Collingwood earlier identified as philosoph-ical concepts or transcendentals. They are non-empirical concepts concerning the general natureof reality; they are both universal (not aggregativeor enumerative) and categorical. They are notgeneralizations derived from experience but yard-sticks brought to bear on experience. On thisunderstanding they are aligned with the themes ofthe Essay on Method and other writing pre-datingit, for example, Faith and Reason published in 1928. Thirdly, it is worth considering another level ofconnection between the two essays. Both wereregarded by Collingwood as examinations of thepresuppositions of philosophy itself, and heregarded such an examination as vital to philosophyas a self-reflective discipline. In the Essay onPhilosophical Method this emerges most strongly in

his criticism of the failure of the analytical schoolto address the issue of their own presuppositions--see Chapter VII, §2below. There he argues that the

61 Collingwood instructed the Clarendon Press on therelationship between the two Essays in a letter of 3 June 1939.For extended justification of the claim that there was no rad-ical discontinuity in Collingwood's philosophy, see J. Connelly,Metaphysics, Method and Politics, chs. 1-3, and G. D'Oro,Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience, chs. 4 and 6.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION 1xximethods and procedures of the analytic school reston unacknowledged and unanalysed presupposi-tions which need to be brought to light. Just as AnEssay on Philosophical Method is a self-reflectiveaccount of philosophy directed upon itself, anexamination of the presuppositions of philosophyand its method, so An Essay on Metaphysics isalso philosophy of philosophy. Like the earlierEssay it is consciously self-reflective; in some waysit operates on a deeper level of analysis. In theearlier Essay Collingwood assumed the existence ofphilosophical concepts and took that as his startingpoint; in the later Essay he sought to prove the exist-ence of this class of propositions (and show thatmetaphysics was possible) by demonstratingthat absolute presuppositions as logical features ofthought can neither be regarded as analytically truenor derived empirically. The Essay on Method is inagreement, but did not take its task to be thedemonstration of the existence of philosophicalconcepts. Metaphysics sought to demonstrate thatabsolute presuppositions do not operate asordinary

concepts or propositions do; that these lie at theroot of all our thinking; that some are perma-nent and necessary, whilst others are temporaryand contingent; and that the predicates 'true' or'false' do not apply where they are taken to referto normal procedures of empirical verification.Concepts of this type are discussed in chapter II andlater in chapter VIII of Method where Collingwoodconsidered the principles of induction. Some of


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1xxii EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONthese principles are purely logical principlespresupposed by all induction whatever; in additionthere is another set of principles (for example, that'the future will probably resemble the past') whichare 'necessary assumptions' in inductive thinking.These principles are not confirmed by the suc-cessful conduct of the arguments based on thembecause 'unless we assumed them, we could neverconduct arguments of this kind at all', and what isincreased by the success of our inductive inquiriesis not the probability of such principles as that thefuture will resemble the past, but the probabilityof such hypotheses as that fermentation is due tomicro-organisms (EPM 166-7). This account isstrikingly similar to the remark in Metaphysics that'we do not acquire absolute presuppositions byarguing; on the contrary, unless we have themalready arguing is impossible to us. Nor can wechange them by arguing; unless they remainedconstant all our arguments would fall to pieces. Wecannot confirm ourselves in them by "proving"them; it is proof that depends on them, not they on

proof (EM 173). There is a difference in that inthe earlier work these principles are characterizedas assumptions (even if 'necessary' assumptions)whereas later Collingwood drew a sharper distinc-tion between 'assumptions' and 'presuppositions'.But this does not detract from the point becausethe key features of the 'absolute presuppositions'to which he later drew attention are also the keyfeatures of the 'assumptions' of the earlier Essay.


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EDITORS' INTRODUCTION 1xxiiiIt is essentially a verbal rather than a substantialdifference. It has already been remarked thatCollingwood did not generally concern himselfwith terminological consistency between hiswritings, and here is a case in point. However, onthis point he did develop a sharper set of distinc-tions, the intermediary stages of which can be seenin 'The Nature of Metaphysical Study' and'Function of Metaphysics in Civilization'.62 The account of absolute presuppositions in thelater Essay therefore maps closely onto theaccount of philosophical concepts in the earlierEssay. In Method the emphasis is on concepts andon the distinction between philosophical andempirical classifications; in Metaphysics, bycontrast, the emphasis is on presuppositionsand the distinction between propositions andabsolute presuppositions. Absolute presupposi-tions, like philosophical concepts or transcend-entals, are empirically unverifiable and yet mustnecessarily be postulated if certain forms ofinquiry are to be possible.63

A final set of observations serves to bring out theinteresting continuities of doctrine between thetwo Essays. One of Collingwood's central points inboth Essays is that reliance on presuppositions isinescapable and that this also applies to philosophy

62Both reprinted in the rev. edn. of EM. For discussion,see Rex Martin's Introduction. 63 See G. D'Oro, Collingwood and the Metaphysics ofExperience, 65.


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1xxiv EDITORS' INTRODUCTIONitself: hence his critical comments in Method on thefailure of the emerging analytical school to providean account of their own presuppositions. Further,he maintained, as applied to philosophy they giverise to the peculiarities of self-instantiation andself-reference considered in Chapter VI of Method.The issue of philosophy's own presuppositions isaddressed head on in Metaphysics:

Another p

6010.an essay on philascsacosophical method by r. g. collingwood

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