Nor was that all. Realism was essentially critical: its principles
were for the most part negations of those of idealism. Yet the realists'
historical technique was so weak that again and again they spent
their shot on positions which were not held by those against whom
they set up as adversaries. Cook Wilson, for example, 'constantly
criticized Bradley for views which were not Bradley's' ( A22)., The
results were calamitous. The better realists unwittingly stole more
and more from idealism; the worse 'little by little destroyed every-
thing in the way of positive doctrine that they had ever possessed'
( A, 45, 49).

The impacts and emotions of his emancipation from realism thrust
into the back of Collingwood's mind other memories of his early
career as a philosopher; and in crediting that emancipation almost
entirely to his progress in historical understanding he did his other
interests scant justice. Although as a young man he had done serious
work on the relations between theology and philosophy, which bore
fruit in his first book, Religion and Philosophy, he had no more to say
of it in his Autobiography than that it had revealed to him the in-
capacity of psychology to justify or condemn any belief ( A, 93-95).

For information about his work on the philosophy of art, he was
content to refer his readers to his Principles of Art. He had been
reared in a family of artists. As a child he had written incessantly,
in verse and in prose, 'lyrics and fragments of epics, stories of adven-
ture and romance' ( A, 3). At school he learned to play the violin,
and although he came to think of his compositions there as 'a great
deal of trash', he continued to play ( A, 7, 13). He painted. It was
from experience of this kind, not looking at pictures and reading
books about them, but spending time and trouble in the actual
practice of the arts, that in 1925 he wrote his lively Outlines of a
Philosophy of Art.

A year earlier he had published his first comprehensive philo-
sophical treatise, Speculum Mentis. It is a philosophical analysis of
five 'forms of experience', Art, Religion, Science, History, and
Philosophy, in an endeavour to ascertain the proper character and
limitations of each, and the relations between them.

Collingwood's writings on religion and art held no interest for his
realist colleagues; and he despaired of bringing them to understand

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