COLLINGWOOD'S VIEW OF HISTORY 719

follies saved the Humanists from the madhouse, but it also condemned
them to be hustled off the stage of Modem "Western history after a vogue
which lasted no longer than two hundred years in the Transalpine pro-
vinces of an Occidental pseudo-Hellas. A seventeenth-century con-
troversy between the champions of 'the Ancients* and 'the Moderns' had
resulted, as we have seen,1 in the exorcizing of the Renaissance and the
reassertion, in the Modern Western World, of the Western Civilization's
own native bent about a quarter of a millennium before the date at which
Collingwood pronounced that the Western Civilization had identified
itself with the Hellenic and had thereby expressed and achieved its own
individuality.

In the same passage2 Collingwood also asserts that, in performing this
alleged feat of identifying itself with Hellenism, the Western Civilization
has done 'exactly' [sic] what is done by 'the historian who studies a
civilization other than his own* ; and this assertion, too, takes the reader
aback by coming into headlong collision with reality; for, however like
a lunatic the historian may look in any other respect, he does at any rate
hold the diametrically opposite view to the lunatic's view about his rela-
tion to Napoleon. The one mistake about Napoleon that an historian is
sure not to make is to mistake the Napoleon whom he is studying for the
historian himself.

It would, of course, be unlikely apriori that a thinker who, like Colling-
wood, was' an eminent historian, as well as an eminent philosopher
really intended to say what he actually says in this startling passage. The
context in which these assertions occur is a criticism of the present
writer's idea of History as seen through Collingwood's eyes, and these
statements of Collingwood's own ideas are thrown out here just in pass-
ing More carefully considered statements of his views are to be looked
for in the essays, published in the same volume as epilegomena to The
Idea of History, in which Collingwood's first concern is, not the criticism
of other people's ideas, but the exposition of his own; and, if Colling-
wood had lived to revise these sibylline leaves of his for publication, we
may be sure that he would have sorted out and cleared up any incon-
sistencies between them, and may guess that in bringing his divers
statements into harmony he might have reconsidered some of ms
premises. This was, of course, a task which no one but Collingwood
himself could have undertaken; and, in using a posthumously published
edition of his work in which the editor has perforce left the content (as
distinct from the layout and some of the form) of the book in the un-
finished state in which it happened to be when the bnlhant author of it
was overtaken by a premature death,3 the student who wishes to profit
from this skilfully salvaged intellectual treasure must do his best, an the

t- .

Collingwood really meant by saying that an historian id

i On pp. 68-69, above. » Collingwood, op. cit., p. 163,

3 See the Editor's preface to Collingwood, op. at., p. v.