CUl^lNGWOOD'S VIEW OF HISTORY 731

could not have been described more accurately than it has been de-
scribed by Collingwood in the following words:

'To the historian, the activities whose history he is studying are not
spectacles to be watched, but experiences to be lived through in his own
mind; they are objective, or known to him, only because they are also
subjective, or activities of his own;'1

and if it were indeed true of Toynbee, as Collingwood believes it to be,
that

'he regards History as a mere spectacle, something consisting of facts
observed and recorded by the historian, phenomena presented externally
to his gaze, not experiences into which he must enter and which he must
make his own/

then—q.e.d.—Toynbee would have been convicted by Collingwood of
being no historian.

This personal question is, of course, a trivial piece of private business;
and in any case the only line of defence that would be likely to appeal
to the defendant's readers would be for him to whisper Circumspice and
then at once move on to the next piece of public business on the agenda
—and this is the momentous question: How far is it actually possible
for the historian to perform that feat of living through other people's
experience which is agreed on all hands to be the historian's proper aim ?
Collingwood's answer is that it is possible for the historian to achieve
this aim completely; but if he is able to give this simple and satisfactory
reply this is only because, as we have noticed already,3 Collingwood
defines the area of the historian's field of sympathetic magic in terms
that strike an historian-philistine as being arbitrarily restrictive. 'All
history is the history of thought3. ... Of everything other than thought,
there can be no history4. .. . The record of immediate experience, with
its flow of sensations and feelings,... is not history',5 Collingwood main-
tains j and in thus defining and limiting the historian's field he is
alleviating, by the exercise of a royal prerogative, the weight of the load
that the imperious philosopher has legitimately imposed on the his-
torian's devoted shoulders. When Collingwood admonishes the historian
that 'he must always remember that the event' which he is studying
'was an action, and that his main task is to think himself into this
action',6 he reduces this Psyche's Task to finite dimensions by a ruling
that is as merciful as it is arbitrary. 'To think himself into this action' is
to be interpreted, Collingwood rules, as meaning 'to discern the thought
[sic] of its agent'. The same restrictive interpretation is applied again
when Collingwood reminds the historian that 'the events of history are
never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but
things which the historian looks, not at, but through* ;7 for, after thus
demanding of the historian's vision that it should pierce, and not just
strike, its target, he scales down his demand, here too, by defining the

1 Collingwood, op. cit., p. 2x8. Cp. p. 293.

a On pp. 720-2, above. 3 Collingwood, op. cit., p. 215.

* Ibid., p. 304. * Ibid.

* Ibid., p. 213. 7 Ibid., p. 214.