Abstract

The principle which guides the construction of Collingwood's The Idea of History, with the exclusion of the "Epilogomena," is an attempt to trace the stages through which the concept of history expresses itself as a scale of forms. Collingwood has important things to say in An Essay on Philosophical Method about concepts of certain sorts, but is mislead in his attempt to distinguish philosophical from non- philosophical concepts, owing to the positivist strictures current to the time, and his desire to protect philosophy and its concepts. Collingwood would like to offer in The Idea of History an account of the development of the idea of history-as- research, but cannot because he lived before the material needed for such an exposition to be possible was available. Had Collingwood been more sensitive to the way in which the contingent pushes the development of concepts along and leads to the reshaping of their generic essence, he might have come to see that the sort of concept he actually discusses in An Essay on Philosophical Method is not the only kind of concept in which the variable changes, and might have recognized that the idea of history is itself a scale of forms