Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing… - 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.

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

Every kind of language is... specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this sense it may be said that the dance is the mother of all languages... an original language of total bodily gesture.

This "original" language of total bodily gesture is thus the one and only real language, which everybody who is in any way expressing himself is using all the time. What we call speech and the other kinds of language are only parts of it which have undergone specialized development.