[17]A Study of History, I, 176.
[18]Op. cit., I, 193.
[19]Op. cit., IV, 130.
[20]R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), 328-30, especially 328-9. The whole section should be read, since our quotations give but an inadequate impression of its cogency.
[21]R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), 328-30, especially 328-9. “There is only one genuine meaning for this question. If thought in its first phase, after solving the initial problems of that phase, is then, through solving these, brought up against others which defeat it; and if the second solves these further problems without losing its hold on the solution of the first, so that there is gain without any corresponding loss, then there is progress. And there can be progress on no other terms. If there is any loss, the problem of setting loss against gain is insoluble.”
[22]A Study of History, III, 216.
[23]Op. cit., I, 159.
[24]Op. cit., III, 381.
[25]Ibid. et passim.
[26]Op. cit., I, 172-3. Edgar Wind, “Some Points of Contact Between History and Natural Science,” in Philosophy and History, Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer (Oxford, 1936), 255-64, shows that the latest developments of science, which make it so much less “exact,” lead to the raising of questions by scientists “that historians like to look upon as their own.” But if these latest developments have made science more “humanistic,” Wind is over-optimistic when he says that “the notion of a description of nature which indiscriminately subjects men and their fates like rocks and stones to its ‘unalterable law’ survives only as a nightmare of certain historians.” For many of them (not to mention sociologists) it seems still to be a cherished ideal.