uman action is inextricably linked with the mind. It is straightforward to perceive physical aggression on a property or territory, but to notice aggression on the level of ideology and intellectual discourse one has to be extraordinarily perceptible.

We find the subtlety of perception in Collingwood. He discerned the implications of the history of the giving mind entirely under the suzerainty of psychology. With the skill of a connoisseur, Collingwood rightly distinguished inside and outside from inside of a historical event. The outside of the event is evident and easy to grasp.

We face difficulty in the case of the inside of the event, as it occurs inside the mind and “can only be described in terms of thought.’’ Despite the difficulty, Collingwood explained it in terms of thought.

It seems that Collingwood realised that if the explanation of the human mind and nature were in the ambit of psychology, which was fast becoming more scientific [in a natural science sense], then history would be deprived of inside or essence and left with the husk of the outside of an event. As a philosopher of history, he was faced with a dilemma. If he acceded to it, then history had to surrender its sovereignty to psychology because its essence was now possessed by psychology. On the other hand, history without thought was like a body without soul.

Collingwood believed that “all history is history of thought; that mind was the source of thought; and that all historical actions were physical manifestations of the thought. Placing mind under psychology meant subsuming history under psychology, largely subordinated to natural science.

Collingwood refused to accept this and revolted against the naturalist tendency in history, in particular, and social sciences and humanities, in general. Megill is of the opinion that ‘‘the subjectivisation of coherence –that is, its relocation into the mind of the historian – placed a premium on the claim that historiography is an autonomous enterprise.’’

His ideas about history are not confined to the discipline of history; they also broach issues that fall in the province of other knowledge, such as psychology, especially epistemology. He tried to offer an answer regarding the mind through the discipline of history.

Before embarking on this project, he had to free history from the contradiction emanating from subsuming mind to psychology and history to the laws informed by natural science. History, he asserted, was a discipline with its own tools. We apply methods of a discipline to study an area in history or field of knowledge, such as area studies.

Divesting the history of its tools and investing it with the tools of physical science amounted to reducing its status as a discipline to instrumental knowledge. It is in physical science that thoughts become instrumental in practice.

According to Collingwood, history is different from natural science, as it does not conduct controlled experiments in a laboratory and general laws of natural science do not govern its study. His idea of history is informed by William Dilthey’s distinction between scientific knowledge and cultural knowledge on the one hand and his idea of history on the other.

Dilthey argued that “historical knowledge was derived through some kind of internal [sic] process, that is to say through living experience and understanding, rather than being merely apprehended externally [sic] as in the natural sciences.” We clearly observe the bearing of Dilthey’s ideas on Collingwood idea of the inside and outside of the event. His idea of history puts it on a high pedestal.

Even when Collingwood defends social science against natural science, he marshals his arguments to demonstrate that history is stronger as compared to the other fields of humanities and social sciences. It becomes more obvious when he selects history as a spearhead in social science’s fight against colonisation by natural science. Collingwood elevates the status of history by making philosophy and psychology less important. His whole thesis about human nature and history hinges on the mind. Therefore, Collingwood has to take the entire mind under the fold of history. By doing so, he also subordinates natural science to history.

The failure of history answers Collingwood’s misconception and misplaced hopes of history as the redeemer and torchbearer of social science. More importantly, it reveals a significant difference between natural and social science: the absence of tangible results in the latter. 

Though Collingwood’s argument is intended to destroy the arguments of natural science, it also denies universality of his claims. His claim about the relationship between the mind and history and the idea of a historian’s discovery of the implicit thought in a historical event paved the way for relativism in history.

If history depends on the historian’s mind or his/ her empathy with historical characters, then it follows that every historian’s method or approach can be called an ordering principle or coherence. This approach gives birth to a multiplicity of coherences at the individual level. What is lacking in this approach is overarching rules or laws, which give coherence to a myriad of scattered coherences of individual historians.

Furthermore, by locating coherence in a historian’s mind, we bring a historical event or object into the subjectivity of the historian’s mind. By doing so, we blur the boundaries between subject and object. What follows is that we create umpteen events from a single event by robbing it of its independent status and projecting our own understanding into the event, whether it is inside or outside.

Collingwood is reckoned among the group of historiographers like Droysen and Ranke who represent the attitudes that favour the idea of a single history. These people locate coherence in the autonomous discipline of history, not in the told or anticipated story but in the unified mode of thinking of the discipline.

A cursory glance at the definition put forward by historians and social scientists shows a lack of coherent views about the method and nature of their disciplines vis-à-vis natural science. Such shortcomings and want created loopholes in the bastion of history and other disciplines of social science.

It is from these vulnerable points that the strong legion of criticism of natural science enters into the province of humanities and history, claiming that history can be made compatible with general laws of natural science. These laws can make historians’ modes of inquiry coherent. The laws also impose order on otherwise disorderly conditions at the macro level of discipline.

Hampel tried to bring history under the fold of natural sciences ‘‘by showing in some detail that general laws have quite analogous functions in history and in the natural sciences, that they form an indispensable instrument of historical research.’’ Hampel’s objections are not valid and viable for history because ‘‘to explain action,’’ writes William Dray, ‘‘in terms of covering law would be to achieve, at most, an external kind of understanding. The historian, by the very nature of his self-imposed task, seeks to do more than this.’’

Nevertheless, they still contain significant elements of truth and pose questions to be addressed by historians and social scientists. William Dray’s argument is cogent, but we are still left with questions about the nature of laws and coherence in history.

Collingwood’s effort to free social science from natural science contradicts his assertion. Whilst discrediting the employment of natural science methodology in social science on the one hand and making history an independent discipline, he grants history a role in social science that is analogous to physics in natural sciences.

Though he asserted that history would play a similar role as physics enacted between the Seventeenth and the Nineteenth Centuries, history can still not validate his claim. It might result from the dissimilarity between the sphere of historical activity and natural science activity.

The failure of history answers Collingwood’s misconception and misplaced hopes of history as the redeemer and torchbearer of social science. More importantly, it reveals a significant difference between natural and social science: the absence of tangible results in the latter.

It is this difference that makes social scientist’s task more difficult and demanding. Collingwood’s endeavour to define history against all its complexities offers a good, if not perfect, explanation about the nature of human nature and human history.

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