SOURCE: "The Dialectic of Experience," in Mind, History, and Dialectic: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, Indiana University Press, 1969, pp. 7-58.

In the following excerpt, Mink discusses Speculum Mentis as a work that introduced and coordinated the major issues elaborated in Collingwood's later writings.

1 collingwood's Pentateuch of Forms of Experience: a Summary

Throughout his life Collingwood occupied himself with the relations and differences among art, religion, science, history, and philosophy, regarded sometimes as ways of life, sometimes as types of experience, and sometimes as modes of knowledge. At least one of his books is devoted to each of these, as their titles indicate: Religion and Philosophy (1916); Outlines of a Philosophy of Art (1925) and Principles of Art (1938); The Idea of Nature (1945); The Idea of History (1946); and, of course all of these, but also the Essay on Philosophical Method (1933), the Autobiography (1939), and the Essay on Metaphysics (1940) occupy themselves specifically with...