Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way; every new historian, not content with giving new answers to old questions, must revise the … - R. G. Collingwood

Man's life is a becoming: and not only becoming, but self-creation. He does not grow under the direction and control of irresistible forces. The force that shapes him is his own will. All his life is an effort to attain to real human nature. But human nature, since man is at bottom spirit, is only exemplified in the absolute spirit of God. Hence man must shape himself in God's image, or he ceases to be even human and becomes diabolical. This self-creation must also be self-knowledge; not the self-knowledge of introspection, the examination of the self that is, but the knowledge of God, the self that is to be. Knowledge of God is the beginning, the center, and end, of human life.

How is the mind to be at once in change and out of change? Only if the mind originates change in itself. For then, as the source and ground of change, it will not be subject to change; while on the other hand, as undergoing change through its own free act, it will exhibit change. This double aspect of the mind as active and passive is the very heart of philosophy [the distinction between fact and act]. The act is out of time in the sense that it creates time, just as it is supernatural in the sense that it creates nature; the fact is temporal, natural, subject to all those laws which constitute its finiteness. But between the act and the fact there is no division: the distinction is only an ideal distinction. In creating the fact, the act realized itself, and does not live apart in a heaven of its own for which it issues mandates for the creation of facts; it lives in the facts which it creates.

The life of absolute knowledge is thus the conscious self-creation of the mind, no mere discovery of what it is, but the making of itself what it is.

The infinite is not another thing which is best grasped by sweeping the finite out of the way; the infinite is nothing but the unity, or as we sometimes say, the "meaning," of finite things in their diversity and their mutual connections. To look for

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.

Every one knows that our civilization is in difficulties, and the stupidity of the suggested remedies only indicates the gravity of the disease, for a sick society has to diagnose and cure its own complaint, and the worse the complaint, the wilder the diagnosis is likely to be But no one denies the disease.