726 RENAISSANCES

Kant's ethical theory expresses the moral convictions of German pietism;
his Critique of Pure Reason analyses the conceptions and principles of
Newtonian Science, in their relation to the philosophical problems of
the day.'1

Here the historian in Collingwood joins forces with the philosopher
in him to proclaim the relativity of political, ethical, and even meta-
physical thought to the local and temporary social milieu in which the
thinker is living and working; and the unphilosophic historian will break
no lance with Collingwood over this issue; he will, though, find himself
all the more curious to discern how it can be that an historian-philosopher
who so resolutely refuses the status of 'an eternal object' to a product of
political thought can at the same time venture to confer this enviable
status upon a product of political action. An act of thought—even when
its object is the parochial, ephemeral, and contingent world of politics—
is at any rate more nearly akin to an act of thought in the realm of
Mathematics than it is akin to an act of state in the realm of practical
political activity. To dub Augustus's principate 'an eternal object', while
describing Plato's Republic as a progress report on the state of political
science up to the date of its publication, is a paradox that demands an
explanation.

What motive has led Collingwood to commit himself to this tour de
force ? He has set his readers a puzzle, but he has also supplied them with
the key. It is evident that, in Collingwood's view, the perfect kind of
knowledge is the mathematician's relation to the objects that he studies.
This mathematical kind of knowledge is Collingwood's ideal; and in the
emotional thermometer of his feelings the prestige of Mathematics*
attains so high a degree that the best turn that Collingwood can think of
doing to the historian is to demonstrate, if he can, that the historian's
kind of knowledge is a knowledge of this mathematical sort. If this
diagnosis is correct, Collingwood's idea of History—like any other idea
entertained by any other philosopher, however intellectually austere he
may be doing his best to be—carries a human charge of emotion in it.
The emotional 'affect' that is just perceptible in this passage may be
presumed to be latent elsewhere; and, if the presence of this emotional
nigger can in truth be detected in Collingwood's intellectual wood-pile,
we have here identified the villain who has betrayed the philosopher's
thought into confusions that have landed him in intellectually untenable
positions. In the equation of an Augustan principate with a Pythagorean
theorem we can detect two intellectual flaws in Collingwood's idea of
History that can both be traced to this 'affective' origin. One of these is a
failure to distinguish between the historian's and the mathematician's
diverse interests in the same mathematical proposition; the other flaw is
a failure to distinguish between the historian's way of apprehending the
thought in a mathematical proposition and the same historian's way of
apprehending a mathematical or any other act of thought in its historical
setting in real life, where acts of thought are always found to be inter-
twined with acts of will and acts of feeling in a psychic rope in which
the intellectual strand is sometimes conspicuous mainly by its virtual

* Collingwood, op. cit., p. zzgt quoted on p. 198, above.