Mengajukan tanya yang, kau tahu, kelak tak berjawab adalah dosa mendasar dalam sains, layaknya memberi perintah yang kau pikir akan diabaikan dalam b… - R. G. Collingwood

In each case an error as to the true nature and meaning of life reacts on that life itself and produces not indeed a reality corresponding to the error — which would in that case cease to be an error — but a reality of a one-sided kind, showing within itself various strains and symptoms of faulty equilibrium resulting from the error.

Societies may die a violent death, like the Inca and Aztec societies which the Spaniards destroyed with gunpowder in the sixteenth century; and it is sometimes thought by people who have been reading historical thrillers that the Roman Empire died in the same way, at the hands of barbarian invaders. That theory is amusing but untrue. It died of disease, not of violence, and the disease was a long-growing and deep-seated conviction that its own way of life was not worth preserving.

It is only when a man's historical consciousness has reached a certain point of maturity that he realizes how very different have been the ways in which different sets of people have thought. When a man first begins looking into absolute presuppositions it is likely that he will begin by looking into those which are made in his own time by his own countrymen, or at any rate by persons belonging to some group of which he is a member. This, of course, is already an historical inquiry. But various prejudices current at various times which I will not here enumerate have tended to deceive such inquirers into thinking that the conclusions they have reached will hold good far beyond the limits of that group and that time. They may even imagine that an absolute presupposition discovered within these limits can be more or less safely ascribed to all human beings everywhere and always.