he Twentieth Century was unique not only for its astonishing achievements in science and technology but also for the emergence of various discourses against the increasing trend of making various disciplines in social science and humanities ‘scientific.’ Some of the discourses in the later field were attempts by its proponents to emancipate their field of knowledge from the colonialism of natural sciences.

The tangible results of developments in natural science, especially physics, seemed to validate its claim of having discovered appropriate rules and laws for studying nature. Impressed by the phenomenal success of natural sciences, some social scientists extrapolated its tools into their fields.

Over time, natural science started casting every discipline and field of study in its iron mould. Within social sciences, some scholars embarked upon a project to make their fields more ‘scientific’ to make their methods of investigation more effective and accurate. The euphoria about the success and confidence of natural science eventually ebbed away and criticism of across-the-board extrapolation of natural sciences into various disciplines of social sciences and humanities surfaced in the early Twentieth Century.

It was during this period and in this context that RG Collingwood appeared on the intellectual scene.

While expressing his ideas about art, religion, history, philosophy and science, Collingwood relied on certain prejudices of his age against natural science’s ‘colonisation’ of some disciplines in social science. He discerned the internal tensions due to the hegemony of natural sciences over other fields of knowledge and their inability to cope with this challenge.

He wanted to protect specific knowledge from the ‘violence’ of natural science. History was one of the disciplines under the threat of whole-sale extrapolation. His article ‘Human Nature and Human History was a strike against the followers of natural sciences who favoured extrapolation. Collingwood attempted to define history in its own terms.

In doing so, he sometimes exaggerated the significance of history and broadens its net to catch other disciplines that were losing their mooring in social science. Collingwood can thus be called a humanist. Man and mind are central to his idea of human nature and human history.

His essay Human Nature and Human History opens with the word ‘Man’, the man ‘‘who desires to know everything, desires to know himself’.” The unifying strand between the diverse and heterogeneous disciplines of social science and humanities is history. Man is the seminal factor in history.

According to Collingwood, man’s desire for knowledge provides conditions with which ‘‘other knowledge can be critically justified and securely based.’’ Hence, the basis of knowledge is man because he engages himself with epistemological questions about his knowing faculties, thought, understanding and reason.

In his essay Grand Narrative and the Discipline of History, Allan Megill mentions two crucial claims in Collingwood’s historiography: historiographical coherence has its roots in the mind of the historian; and history is an autonomous discipline.

Before Collingwood’s emergence on the global philosophical scene, philosophers such as Locke, Hume and Reid had tried to provide an account of the mind and human nature. Their efforts failed because they explained the human faculty of understanding through ‘‘methods analogous to those of natural science.”

Collingwood declares history an autonomous discipline. It is his second crucial claim about history. He means that historians have to be independent from other disciplines.

By implication, Collingwood rejected the whole English and Scottish tradition of a “philosophy of the human mind,” derived from the investigation of mind through natural science. A part of the onus for failure was placed on psychologists, for they either avoided the issue by declaring their field an infant or fed their infant discipline on the methods of natural science to enable it to address epistemological questions concerning the understanding of the human mind and nature.

Collingwood counted Immanuel Kant alongside Locke, Hume and Reid in the litany of failures. It might appear that his judgment of Kant was unjustified, as Kant differs from these philosophers in several ways, especially in his ideas of human understanding and knowledge. Hume holds that knowledge comes only through the senses. He also rejects the reasoning behind cause and effect relations.

Kant is concerned with the possibility of knowledge, not truth or falsehood. He says that knowledge comes through experience, not only experience. There are organising principles or categories that impose order on our sense impressions. The mind is creative, not passive. And reason is a priori to experience.

Yet reality does exist: things are out there. The point is that the world would not appear rational if one did not have a mind equipped with a rational structure. The world appears rational not because the world is rational; it appears rational because the mind is rational. In a nutshell, the mind, in a sense, creates knowledge.

The purpose of treating Immanuel Kant’s idea of knowledge in detail is to explore strands of Kantian thought in Collingwood’s concept of history and his treatment of human nature and mind. Carefully perusing Collingwood’s oeuvre reveals that Kant’s idea of mind and knowledge influenced his epistemological posture and methodology.

Collingwood used historical events, which are out there, as data or experience and proceeded to impose order or coherence on the unorganised experience. In Kant’s work, the mind imposed order. Collingwood also employed the mind to explain historical events, but he used the mind of a historical actor instead of his own.

He reached into the mind of a historical character through his mind with the help of empathy. The thought that created a historical event was creative and existed before the historical event. Collingwood’s method of historical explanation follows the same line as Kant’s and introduces thought as a priori to historical experience or event, though he does not say so explicitly.

In other words, historians create historical knowledge by discovering the thoughts of historical characters. Here, the organising principle is the historian’s work with the mind of a historical character.

Collingwood’s explanation of the human mind and nature through history can be better understood in the context of the developments in and reformulation of various fields of humanities, especially psychology, which is in line with natural science. Like psychology, history explains the actions of men in that it deals with the actions of historical actors.

Collingwood declared history an autonomous discipline. It was his second crucial claim about history. He meant that the historians had to be independent from other disciplines. He had to elaborate a coherent philosophy of history to prove its independence. At the same time, he had to avoid the methods and concepts of natural science.

He achieved this objective by explicating the difference between history and natural science and then elaborating on the historian’s method of understanding a particular event by studying the thought implicit in its historical characters. Thus, it was inevitable for him to study the mind to explain the thought in an event.

The writer is a social scientist interested in the history of ideas. Email: azizalidad@gmail.com