We did not assume that any one form of experience could be accepted as already, in its main lines, wholly free from error. Led by this principle, we … - R. G. Collingwood

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 what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, The only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

One of Collingwood's earliest attempts to define the aesthetic essence of art. His aim, he writes in the preface, is to state a general conception of art and develop its consequences. His conception is one already familiar through the writings of others -- "that art is as bottom neither more nor less than imagination" -- but from his observation he goes on to outline the various distinctions between subordinate conceptions of art, and to attempt to demonstrate their place in the general conception, and the place of both in life. He urges that the meaningfulness of art cannot be torn from the imaginative setting in which it is embedded, and that we must attempt to explain the process by which an artist reaches a particular point of view on reality.

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.