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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    on one’s intellectual record which nothing could remove. If we find a man whom we respect as a sensible and thoughtful person confessing that he was once led into materialism or Mormonism or murder, we expect him to be able to tell us what it was in these things that he found worthy to attract him. If he cannot tell us that, we think worse of him than we did before. Our map is now beginning to take shape. It is to be a statement of the essential nature or structure of each successive form of experience, based on actual knowledge of that form from within, and concentrated upon the search for inconsistencies, rifts which when we come to put a strain on the fabric will widen and deepen and ultimately destroy it. But where are we to begin ? It may not matter very much, to all appearance ; and yet the question of order cannot be altogether irrelevant. We must begin some¬ where. There is an obstacle which we must here remove from our path. This is the theory of art, religion and the rest as co-ordinate species of knowledge, species of a genus, each valid and autonomous in its own sphere but each limited to a single aspect of reality, each constituting a single aspect of the mind. Such a theory admits what we have already shown to be undeniable, that they are all cognitive or theoretical activities, none merely emotional or merely practical. The truth of this is shown by the fact that they all regard themselves as theoretical; and to regard your¬ self, even erroneously, as theoretical is to be theoretical, since nothing but theory can be in error. But it is now suggested that each is a specific type of thought concerned with a specific type of object : art with beauty, religion with God, science with natural law, and so forth. Each is thus competent in its own field and impotent in any other