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.

    53/336 (page 49)
    * in the quarrel of religion and science and tries to persuade them that each expresses ‘ one side of the truth ’, the disputants reply with perfect unanimity * God or nature, by all means : offer us the choice between religion and science, and we will try to choose, though no doubt the choice is hard ; but do not offer us God and nature, for that means offering us neither religion nor science, but the corpse of religion chained to the corpse of science \ Religion and science know their own business a great deal better than these impartial persons who attempt to ‘ re¬ concile ’ them and only show how utterly they fail to under¬ stand either. And the theory which makes them species of a genus fails not only when we thus try to put it into practice, but when we try to think it out coherently. For when we do this, we find that the notion of genus and species is a logical notion, and therefore logic is somehow a master-science having jurisdiction over the whole field of knowledge ; for the notion of species is applied to every one of our five forms of experience. But in so far as logical conceptions apply to all five forms, they are all reduced to the same form and all judged by the same logical standards. There is therefore only one form of knowledge, describable in terms of logic, which is directed indifferently upon five classes of object. This is pure intellectualism, and leads us to look for syllogisms in music, inductions in religion, and so forth : which precisely contradicts the thesis with which this view began, namely the independence of these various fields of thought. This is what realty happens when people attempt to maintain this view of the forms of experience as co-ordinate species : they assert, without in the least realizing it, the absoluteness of formal logic and reduce all alike to that Procrustean standard. Of this, however, we shall have more to say in a later chapter in 2792 d