COLLINGWOOD'S VIEW OF HISTORY 737

tion to say that a constant use of the Imagination is one of the primary
necessities of life for the Human Race, and that, if Mankind were to
take Plato's castigation seriously enough to pluck this vital faculty out
and cast it from them, they would be sentencing themselves to the
doom of the legendary Kilkenny Cats.

While Plato pillories the Imagination by stigmatizing its exercise as
a fraud practised by painters and poets on the public, Collingwood
saves the historian's reputation, according to Collingwood's own lights,
by ruling out any psychic activity other than thought about thought
from his definition of what constitutes the historian's legitimate busi-
ness. In thus committing himself to a doctrine that cannot be reconciled
with the facts, Collingwood has fallen a victim to a common human
infirmity. Each of us is prone to exaggerate the importance of the organ
or faculty or activity—hand, ear, or eye; sensation, intuition, or feeling;
will or thought—that happens to be the principal instrument or medium
of his own dealings, personal or professional, with his fellow human
beings; and Collingwood the historian has been led up this prim garden
path by Collingwood the philosopher. An idolization of thought is the
philosopher's idolatrous sacrifice on the altar of his professional patriot-
ism;1 but it is as true in the Academy as it is in the world outside its
garden walls that 'patriotism is not enough' ;2 for there are always more
things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of
any of our Horatios.3

* Collingwood has also laid a wreath on the Imagination's cenotaph, but^he has
nullified the signature of this tribute by the terms in which he has composed his inscrip-
tion. The idea, he declares (op. cit., p. 349) that governs an historian's work 'is the idea of
the Historical Imagination as a self-dependent, self-determining, and self-justifying form
of—thought [sic]'.

* Edith Cavell at Brussels on the lath October, 1915.
3 Shakspeare: Hamlet, Act I, scene 5.

Bb