Ideas Matter

History Man

R. G. Collingwood

The Life of
R. G. Collingwood

by Fred Inglis

Princeton, 400 pp., $39.50

"One day when I was eight years old curiosity moved me to take down a little black book lettered on its spine Kant’s Theory of Ethics,” the philosopher R.G. Collingwood recalled in An Autobiography (1939), “and as I began reading it .  .  . I was attacked by a strange succession of emotions. First came an intense excitement. I felt that things of the highest importance were being said about matters of the utmost urgency: things which at all costs I must understand. Then, with a wave of indignation, came the discovery that I could not understand them. .  .  . Then, third and last, came the strangest emotion of all. I felt that the contents of this book, although I could not understand it, were somehow my business.”

Other English boys might have dreamed of being cricketers or engine-drivers, but Collingwood wanted to do something different: “There came upon me by degrees .  .  . a sense of being burdened with a task whose nature I could not define except by saying, ‘I must think.’ ”

Thinking was, indeed, the governing passion of Collingwood’s life, and Fred Inglis, professor emeritus of the University of Sheffield, takes up that passion here with something of his subject’s irrepressible brio. Robin George Collingwood (1889-1943) was born at Cartmel Fell, Lancashire, the only son of the four children of W. G. Collingwood and his wife Edith Mary, the daughter of Thomas Isaac, a corn merchant. His delight in the life of the mind came from his father, a painter, archaeologist, and writer, who later became John Ruskin’s secretary and biographer. After being educated at home, where his father taught him Greek and Latin and included him in archaeological digs in the Lake District, Collingwood, thanks to a rich patron, entered Rugby.