That is why all science begins from the knowledge of our own ignorance: - R. G. Collingwood

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.

The real is the present, conceived not as a mathematical point between the present and the past, but as the union of present and past in a duration or permanence that is at the same time change. Thus the past as past and the future as future do not exist at all, but are purely ideal; the past as living in the present and the future as germinating in the present are wholly real and indeed are just the present itself. It is because of the presence of these two elements in the present... that the present is a concrete and changing reality and not an empty mathematical point.

The critic must therefore work from within. His negative position is based on his positive: his primary work is to supplement his author's partial account of some matter by adding certain aspects which the author has overlooked ; but, since the parts of a philosophical theory never stand to one another in a relation of mere juxtaposition, the omission of one part will upset the balance of the whole and distort the remaining parts; so his additions will entail some correction even of those elements which he accepts as substantially true.
20. Criticism, when these two aspects of it are considered together, may be regarded as a single operation: the bringing to completeness of a theory
which its author has left incomplete. So understood, the function of the critic is to develop and continue the thought of the writer criticized. Theoretically, the relation between the philosophy criticized and the philosophy that criticizes it is the relation between two adjacent terms in a scale of forms, the forms of a single philosophy in its historical development; and in practice, it is well known that a man's best critics are his pupils, and his best pupils the most critical.