COLLINGWOOD'S VIEW OF HISTORY 723

history of them'.1 An open-minded student of military history will find
this dictum of Collingwood's less convincing than the picture of Bagra-
tion's generalship in Tolstoy's War and Peace.

We need not, however, subpoena either Tolstoy or Somervell or
Thucydides to rise up in judgement against3 Collingwood, since we can
win our case more expeditiously by appealing from Collingwood theoriz-
ing about history as a philosopher to the same Collingwood studying
and writing history as an historian. An equal eminence in two fields of
intellectual activity was the distinctive mark of Collingwood's genius,
and his characteristic achievement as an historian was his masterly em-
ployment of Archaeology in History's service. 'Everything belonging to*
an event 'which can be described hi terms of bodies and their move-
ments'3 was grist to Collingwood the historian's mill, though it might be
chaff to Collingwood the philosopher's winnowing fan; and, in virtue of
their rare archaeological merits, Collingwood's own historical works
would fail still more ignominiously than Thucydides' or Gibbon's to
pass the test of Collingwood's idea of History.

How has this historian-philosopher arrived at an idea of History which
he has confuted by 'direct action* of Ms own ? Collingwood's confutation
of Collingwood is as irresistible as Doctor Johnson's confutation of
Bishop Berkeley. The historian has given a conclusive kick to a philo-
sopher's stone that is a plain man's stumbling-block. How has the philo-
sopher ever come to erect the artificial obstacle which the historian in
the same philosopher's skin has unceremoniously removed from our
path? An answer to this question may perhaps be elicited from the
following arrestingly paradoxical passage.

*If the discovery of Pythagoras concerning the square on the hypotenuse
is a thought which we today can think for ourselves, a thought that con-
stitutes a permanent addition to mathematical knowledge, the discovery
of Augustus, that a monarchy could be grafted upon the Republican con-
stitution of Rome by developing the implications of proconsulare imperiwn
and tribunicia potestas, is equally a thought which die student of Roman
history can think for himself, a permanent addition to political ideas. If
Mr. Whitehead is justified in calling the right-angled triangle an eternal
object, the same phrase is applicable to the Roman constitution and the
Augustan modification of it. This is an eternal object because it can be
apprehended by historical thought at any time; time makes no difference
to it in this respect, just as it makes no difference to the triangle/4

In this passage Collingwood shocks even an unphilosophic-minded
reader by placing a political improvisation on all fours with a mathematical
proposition on the score of its being 'a permanent addition to political
ideas'. The mathematical theorem which came into the focus of human
consciousness for the first time in Pythagoras* mind, according to the
Hellenic tradition, was in truth 'a permanent addition to mathematical
knowledge* in the sense that, when once this element in an eternally
valid system of mathematical truth had been brought within the pale of
a Collective Human Intellect, it was open, ever afterwards, to any other

i Ibid., p. 310. 2 Matt. xiL 42.

a Ibid., p. 213. * Ibld*» PP- 217-18.