History tells you what happened, right? How can it have or be, an idea?
Like a good historian, R.G. Collingwood gives a history of what history was thought to be from the first known historian in western civilization, Herodotus, to his own time, the late 1930s.
Is history just one damn thing after another? No matter who said this, one might call this the atheist version. Atheists believe there is no order or reason to existence. The universe began as an accident with no meaning other than it just happened and everything since then has followed from this accident. Thus this saying looks at the events of human life and society in a similar manner.
Collingwood disagrees. R.G. Collingwood stands out among historians, not in his particular corpus of writings on history itself, but in his eclectic approach to study. He was not an historian bound to a table in an archive somewhere, thinking and writing amongst cobwebs and curious spiders in these cellars. He was also an archaeologist, digging and studying the remnants of the Roman Empire in Britain and he was a philosopher. History requires textual evidence and today combines that with material remains. Collingwood may have been the first to do this and then to sit and think.
[The quote investigated: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/09/16/history/ ]
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