The ideal and the real are not mutually exclusive. A thing may be ideal and also real. - R. G. Collingwood

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 questions themselves.

For Hellenistic thought, self-consciousness is no longer, as it was for Hellenic thought, a power to conquer the world; it is a citadel providing a safe retreat from a world both hostile and intractable.

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.