The general conception here maintained is not new; it is one already familiar from the works of Coleridge, Croce and many others; it is the view that… - R. G. Collingwood

A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a
master in that science when he has learned that he is going to be a
beginner all his life.

Thus natural science is not a way of knowing the real world; its value lies not in its truth but in its utility; by scientific thought we do not know nature, we dismember it in order to master it.

Knowledge as a past fact, as something dead and done with — knowledge by the time it gets into encyclopaedias and text-books — does consist of assertion, and those who treat it as an affair of encyclopaedias and text-books may be forgiven for thinking that it is assertion and nothing else. But those who look upon it as an affair of discovery and exploration have never fallen into that error. People who are acquainted with knowledge at first hand have always known that assertions are only answers to questions. So Plato described true knowledge as 'dialectic', the interplay of question and answer in the soul's dialogue with itself; so Bacon pointed out once for all that the scientist's real work was to interrogate nature, to put her, if need be, to the torture as a reluctant witness; so Kant mildly remarked that the test of an intelligent man was to know what questions to ask, and the same truth has lately dawned on the astonished gaze of the pragmatists. Questioning is the cutting edge of knowledge, assertion is the dead weight behind the edge that gives it driving force