IN the last fifty years the doctrine that there is no genuine know-
ledge outside logic, mathematics, and the natural sciences has
attracted more and more adherents. Yet although it has gained
ground, its opponents, while diminishing in numbers, have not
become less vociferous. Some, like Collingwood in later life, are
conciliatory: they concede that, over the past 300 years, knowledge
has been won faster in mathematics and the natural sciences than
in any other rational pursuits; but they plead that there are other
rational pursuits which also are rewarded with knowledge. Others,
like Collingwood as a young man, are intransigent: natural science,
they contend, is not knowledge at all, but a practically convenient
system of theoretical fictions. The intransigent position has tempted
many philosophers who believe both that knowledge has degrees
and that metaphysics is knowledge in the highest degree; and both
those beliefs are implicit in the distinction, characteristic of post-
Kantian idealism, between Understanding or scientific thought,
and Reason or philosophical thought.

In his early work, Speculum Mentis, Collingwood took his stand
with the post-Kantian idealists. Scientific thought, or Under-
standing, he described as abstract ( SM, 195-6); and he contended
that abstract thinking is necessarily false. 'To abstract is to con-
sider separately things that are inseparable: to think of the uni-
versal, for instance, without reflecting that it is merely the universal
of its particulars, and to assume that one can isolate it in thought
and study it in this isolation. This assumption is an error. One can-
not abstract without falsifying' ( SM, 160). The keynote of the
abstract 'spirit' of natural science is therefore classification. 'For

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