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 err… - R. G. Collingwood

History is the way in which we conceive the world sub specie praeteritorum: its differentia is the attempt to organize the whole world of experience in the shape of past events. Science is the way in which we conceive the world sub specie quantitatis: its differentia is the attempt to organize the world of experience as a system of measurements. Such attempts differ radically from that of philosophy, for in philosophy there is no such primary and inviolable postulate. If we ask for a parallel formula applying to philosophy and inquire: 'In terms of what, then, does philosophy seek to conceive the world of experience?' there is no answer to the question. Philosophy is the attempt to conceive reality not in any particular way, but just to conceive it.

30. 89. All political life involves change, and all change involves destruction. But a change may be dialectical, orientated away from the Yahoo towards the society of free men, or it may be anti-dialectical, orientated away from the society of free men towards the Yahoo.

The prose-writer's art is an art that must conceal itself, and produce not a jewel that is looked at for its own beauty but a crystal in whose depths the thought can be seen without distortion or confusion ; and the philosophical writer in especial follows the trade not of a jeweller but of a lens-grinder. He must never use metaphors or imagery in such a way that they attract to themselves the attention due to his thought ;
if he does that he is writing not prose, but, whether well or ill, poetry; but he must avoid this not by rejecting all use of metaphors and imagery, but by using them, poetic things themselves, in the domestication of prose : using them just so far as to reveal thought, and no farther.