Speculum mentis, or, The map of knowledge / by R.G. Collingwood.

  • R. G. Collingwood
Date:
1924
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Speculum mentis, or, The map of knowledge / by R.G. Collingwood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    305/336 (page 301)
    3DI of the process of thought we were presupposing the reality of time, since every process is a process in time. Hence time would appear to be something external to the absolute mind, the necessity which stands over Zeus himself. But so to regard time is to forget that the process of which we are speaking is a process not of mechanical change but of thought : a self-knowing process. A mind which knows its own change is by that very knowledge lifted above change. History—and the same is true of memory and even per¬ ception—is the mind's triumph over time. It is a common¬ place of philosophy that whereas sensation is temporal, thought is eternal or extra-temporal: sensation apprehends the here and now, thought apprehends the everywhere and the always. Hence the abstract psychology which splits the mind up into a sensitive and an intellectual faculty paradoxically presents us with a picture of man as standing with one foot in time and the other in eternity. This is mythology, but true mythology. All concrete thought is, in its immediacy, temporal, but in its mediation extra¬ temporal. The mind in its actual thinking at once recog¬ nizes and defies temporal (and spatial) limitations. The opposites, time and eternity, are necessary to one another. Time is not a mere appearance ; it is perfectly real; but like all opposites it can be real only as the correlative of its equally real opposite, eternity. Time in fact is the ab¬ straction of the externality to one another of the phases of a process : eternity is the opposite abstraction of the con¬ tinuity of this process, the identity of the whole in its process. To describe the life of man as temporal or finite and the life of God as eternal or infinite is only a way of saying that time is not real in abstraction, but real only in relation to its opposite. In the absolute process of thought the past lives in the present, not as a mere ‘ trace ’ or effect