THE first obstacle to understanding Collingwood's later philosophy
is his own narrative of its development, which beyond doubt is
untrue. The Principal of St. Andrews, T. M. Knox, his literary
executor, first drew attention to this. ¹ Collingwood's narrative,
which may be found in his Autobiography, affords melancholy evi-
dence of the power of an intellectual temptation he had himself
exposed. Only two years before he wrote it, he had warned auto-
biographers that in reconstructing their past thoughts, 'recollection
is a treacherous guide'; and had sighed over politicians writing their
memoirs, who 'remember very well the impacts and emotions of a
crisis, but are apt, in describing the policy they then advocated, to
contaminate it with ideas that belonged in fact to a later stage in
their career' ( IH, 295-6).

The story of Collingwood's philosophical thought, as he himself
recollected it, is as follows. After a thorough training in the 'realist'
principles and methods of Cook Wilson and his school, he came to
doubt their soundness. While yet an undergraduate he had found
time to serve an apprenticeship in archaeology under Haverfield,
and he soon discovered that realist epistemology did not assort with
scientific history. The realists took knowing to be a simple act of
'apprehension' which a mind would perform of itself when placed
in 'compresence with' what was to be known; but you cannot get
historical knowledge so. An historian cannot place his mind in com-
presence with what he wants to know, because it is past; nor will
compresence with relics of the past by itself enable him to 'appre-
hend' the facts of which they are evidence ( A, 25-26).

-1-