R. G. Collingwood - The idea of history

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The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind.

R. G. Collingwood

Science is finding things out; and in that sense history is science.

R. G. Collingwood

To regard such a positive mental science [psychology] as rising above the sphere of history, and establishing the permanent and unchanging laws of human nature, is therefore possible only to a person who mistakes the transient conditions of a certain historical age for the permanent conditions of human life.

R. G. Collingwood

To the scientist, nature is always and merely a 'phenomenon,' not in the sense of being defective in reality, but in the sense of being a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation; whereas the events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to discern the thought within them.

R. G. Collingwood

Science in general does not consist in collecting what we already know and arranging it in this or that kind of pattern. It consists in fastening upon something we do not know, and trying to discover it.

R. G. Collingwood