R. G. Collingwood: Call

R. G. Collingwood was British historian and philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on call.
R. G. Collingwood: 32   quotes 3   likes

“The word art has in ordinary usage three senses. First, it means the creation of objects or the pursuit of activities called works of art, by people called artists; these works being distinguished from other objects and acts not merely as human products, but as products intended to be beautiful. Secondly, it means the creation of objects or the pursuit of activities called artificial as opposed to natural; that is to say objects created or activities pursued by human beings consciously free to control their natural impulses and to organize their life in a plan. Thirdly, it means that frame of mind which we call artistic, the frame of mind in which we are aware of beauty.”

R. G. Collingwood

Source: Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, 1925, p. 7

Life , People , Beauty , Art

“a) The definition of history? Every historian would agree, I think, that history is a kind of research or inquiry. What kind of inquiry it is I do not yet ask. The point is that generically it belongs to what we call the sciences: that is, the forms of thought whereby we ask questions and try to answer them. Science in general, it is important to realize, does not consist in collecting what we already know and arranging it in this or that kind of pattern. It consists in fastening upon something we do not know, and trying to discover it. Playing patience with things we already know may be a useful means towards this end, but it is not the end itself. It is at best only the means. It is scientifically valuable only in so far as the new arrangement gives us the answer to a question we have already decided to ask. That is why all science begins from the knowledge of our own ignorance: not our ignorance of everything, but our ignorance of some definite thing-the origin of parliament, the cause of cancer, the chemical composition of the sun, the way to make a pump work without muscular exertion on the part of a man or a horse or some other docile animal. Science is finding things out: and in that sense history is a science.”

R. G. Collingwood

Source: The Idea of History (1946), p. 9

Way , History , Question , Knowledge

“I have already said that a thing which 'exists in a person's head' and nowhere else is alternatively called an imaginary thing. The actual making of the tune is therefore alternatively called the making of an imaginary tune. This is a case of creation, just as much as the making of a plan or a disturbance, and for the same reasons, which it would be tedious to repeat. Hence the making of a tune is an instance of imaginative creation. The same applies to the making of a poem, or a picture, or any other work of art.”

R. G. Collingwood

Source: The Principles of Art (1938), p. 134

Art , Imagination , Personality

“In actual history, events overlap; you cannot, except by a confessed fiction, state the point at which the event called the Middle Ages ends and the event called the Modern Period begins.”

R. G. Collingwood

Source: Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, 1925, p. 41

Age , History

“For I do not think of aesthetic theory as an attempt to investigate and expound eternal verities concerning the nature of an eternal object called Art, but as an attempt to reach, by thinking, the solution of certain problems arising out of the situation in which artists find themselves here and now. Everything written in this book has been written in the belief that is has a practical bearing, direct or indirect, upon the condition of art in England in 1937, and in the hope that artists primarily, and secondarily persons whose interest in art is lively and sympathetic, will find something of use to them.”

R. G. Collingwood

Source: The Principles of Art (1938), p. vi

Books , Hope , Art , Nature