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

I have already said that a thing which 'exists in a person's head' and nowhere else is alternatively called an imaginary thing. The actual making of the tune is therefore alternatively called the making of an imaginary tune. This is a case of creation, just as much as the making of a plan or a disturbance, and for the same reasons, which it would be tedious to repeat. Hence the making of a tune is an instance of imaginative creation. The same applies to the making of a poem, or a picture, or any other work of art.

All history is art, because to tell a story is art, whereas to tell a true story is history: thus history is art, but a specification of art, art qualified by a condition (truth) which deprives it of a part of its character but not of all.

Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, The only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.