The historian (and for that matter the philosopher) is not God, looking at the world from above and outside. He is a man, and a man of his own time a… - R. G. Collingwood

If it is asked why Socrates permits certain forms of art to be retained in the ideal state instead of consistently banishing all alike, the answer is surely obvious: these are, in the opinion of Socrates, the forms which art will take in the hands of men who understand its true nature.

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.

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