R. G. Collingwood

"It (the dream) is essentially a structure which is, in the terminology of the psycho-analyst, unconscious. The dreamer himself is unaware of it until, in collaboration with his psycho-analyst, he brings it to light. The mythological way of stating this fact is to say that the structure was "in the unconscious." This is frankly non-sense . . . because the structure is not in the unconscious but precisely in the dream, for it is the structure of the dream; and the dream is con? scious enough . . . the revelation made by psycho-analysis is not the bringing into consciousness of what was unconscious, but the bring? ing into explicitness of what was implicit, the noticing of something already actually experienced in a light in which it had not been noticed before . . . the new light in question is nothing but the hitherto overlooked structure of the experience in question ...."

"The general conception here maintained is not new; it is one already familiar from the works of Coleridge, Croce and many others; it is the view that art is at bottom neither more nor less than imagination."

"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."

"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."

"The ideal and the real are not mutually exclusive. A thing may be ideal and also real."

"I have already said that a thing which exists in a persons 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."

"If it is asked why Socrates permits certain forms of art to be retained in the ideal state instead of consistently banishing all alike, the answer is surely obvious: these are, in the opinion of Socrates, the forms which art will take in the hands of men who understand its true nature."

"All history is art, because to tell a story is art, whereas to tell a true story is history: thus history is art, but a specification of art, art qualified by a condition (truth) which deprives it of a part of its character but not of all."

"The essence of this conception is .. the idea of a community as governing itself by fostering the free expression of all political opinions that take shape within it, and finding some means of reducing this multiplicity of opinions to a unity."

"Time, as succession of past, present and future, really has its being totum simul for the thought of a spectator, and this justifies its ‘spatialized’ presentation as a line of which we can see the whole at once."

"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."

"Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do."