as if any one but a fool imagined that he could compress a thing like art or religion or science into an epigram which could be lifted from its conte… - R. G. Collingwood

One of Collingwood's earliest attempts to define the aesthetic essence of art. His aim, he writes in the preface, is to state a general conception of art and develop its consequences. His conception is one already familiar through the writings of others -- "that art is as bottom neither more nor less than imagination" -- but from his observation he goes on to outline the various distinctions between subordinate conceptions of art, and to attempt to demonstrate their place in the general conception, and the place of both in life. He urges that the meaningfulness of art cannot be torn from the imaginative setting in which it is embedded, and that we must attempt to explain the process by which an artist reaches a particular point of view on reality.

Economics is not a true description of one kind of action but an abstract, arbitrary, and therefore erroneous description of all action; and the ‘economic man’ whom it describes is not, in these days, denied to be a fictitious entity

When the mind becomes conscious of itself as thought it simultaneously becomes conscious of itself as action. Thought and action, truth and freedom ('ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free') are inseparable, and are in fact correlative aspects of an indivisible reality. Hence they became simultaneously explicit in the mind's process of self-discovery.