@vincent
Perhaps, but I would urge you to go to the source, because the
re-enactment that #RGCollingwood calls history is re-enactment of
*thought*:

> Military history, again, is not a description of weary marches in heat
> or cold, or the thrills and chills of battle or the long agony of
> wounded men. It is a description of plans and counter-plans: of
> thinking about strategy and thinking about tactics, and in the last
> resort of what the men in the ranks thought about the battle.

That's from *An Autobiography* (1939; new edition, 2013; page 110)

https://archive.org/details/autobiography0000coll/page/110/mode/2up?view=theater

@vincent
Can this be what you have in mind?

> All thought exists for the sake of action. We try to understand
> ourselves and our world only in order that we may learn how to live.
> The end of our self-knowledge is not the contemplation by enlightened
> intellects of their own mysterious nature, but the freer and more
> effectual self-revelation of that nature in a vigorous practical life.

That's the beginning of the Prologue of #RGCollingwood, *Speculum
Mentis* (1924, but I understand a new edition is in the works)

@EgyptianAphorist @bodhidave
Thanks, Dave, for the essay. It incidentally shows why I question
quotations that are not properly sourced. Thanks then, Yahia, for
responding to my request for more precision.

In another thread today I've quoted #RGCollingwood, who in his first
book, *Religion and Philosophy* (1916), identified the two title
subjects with one another and with theology; in his next book, *Speculum
Mentis* (1924), he backed off from this.

You make me wonder now how much this confusion owes to Socrates, whom
(with justification) you make sound like an early Protestant. I've heard
something like the idea told to tourists in a pre-Ottoman mosque here in
Turkey: nobody else can tell you what God wants you to do.

@dunadigital
I'm not sure, but you may have in mind how, once an artist makes a new
discovery, he or she and others may just go on milking it.

This is how I understand words of #RGCollingwood in *Speculum Mentis*
(1924) that #HerbertRead quotes in *A Concise History of Modern
Painting* (1968):

> To the historian accustomed to studying the growth of scientific or
> philosophical knowledge, the history of art presents a painful and
> disquieting spectacle, for it seems normally to proceed not forwards
> but backwards. In science and philosophy successive workers in the
> same field produce, if they work ordinarily well, an advance; and a
> retrograde movement always implies some breach of continuity. But in
> art, a school once established normally deteriorates as it goes on. It
> achieves perfection in its kind with a startling burst of energy, a
> gesture too quick for the historian's eye to follow. He can never
> explain such a movement or tell us how exactly it happened. But once
> it is achieved, there is the melancholy certainty of a decline.

@mariapopova

I like McPhee's question,

> How could anyone ever know that something is good before it exists?

The #Bible suggests that even God cannot know.

I blogged about this last October, looking also at #RGCollingwood and
Robert #Pirsig on the subject of checking one's work

https://polytropy.com/2022/10/31/it-was-good/

#Thoreau "went to the woods [with the #Iliad of #Homer] because I
wished ... to front only the essential facts of life ... nor did I wish
to practise resignation."

The Achaeans' fear and Hector's anger illustrate *The Principles of Art*
of #RGCollingwood, who is critical of #WilliamJames.

The gates of heaven being "automatic," I look at the concept in
#Herodotus, #Plato, and #Aristotle.

All in 1 blog post

https://polytropy.com/2023/01/19/emotional-contagion-iliad-viii/