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.

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    3IQ development; or a world of objects over against it, in beating itself against which it comes to the use of its own powers ; or a series of stages through,which, as along a railway line, it necessarily runs. All these assertions of something other than the absolute mind itself are versions of a single error : the error of abstraction, of failing to realize that subject and object, condition and conditioned, ground and consequence, particular and universal, can only be distinctions which fall within one and the same whole, and that this whole can only be the infinite fact which is the absolute mind. A fact which has anything outside it is not the concrete fact. If that which falls outside it is its own law or nature, we have fallen into the abstraction which tears apart the individual into particular and universal; if another fact, we have torn apart the individual into two individuals unrelated and therefore both fictitious. Our inquiry has not only abolished the notion of a map of knowledge distinct from knowledge itself: it has also abolished the notion of an external world other than the mind. It has not, of course, abolished the distinction between subject and object : on the contrary, it has established our right to use that distinction by showing its necessity in the life of thought. It is no more abolished than are the distinc¬ tions between truth and error, good and evil, particular and universal: these distinctions are only abolished by the coincidentia oppositonim which is the suicide of abstract thought, and conserved by the synthesis of opposites which is the life of concrete thought. Just as we began by assuming a map of knowledge, so we began by assuming an external world, a world of which we could say with the realists that it really is what, errors apart, we think it to be : a world of which we could even say that it was what it was quite irrespective of any ignorance or error of our own about it.