It is with no feigned modesty that I acknowledge, as a limited and superficial student of philosophy, the honour you have done me by your invitation to deliver the Manson Lecture. But if the honour is undeserved, it is by fortuitous circumstance the more appreciated. Dr. Manson was a family doctor in Warrington, Lancs., with whom I was privileged to have close professional associations. He was a man of many parts who regarded the isolation of medicine from philosophy as an unintelligible and lamentable phenomenon of our time. He wished to see philosophy restored to its earlier and rightful basic rôle in medical education. He recognized that medicine and, indeed, the cognate basic sciences were occupying themselves almost exclusively with so rapidly accelerating an accumulation of facts, that little time remained for reflection and interpretation, and for pondering on the place of medicine in, and its contribution to, the general corpus of knowledge. And he was especially interested in the topic which I have chosen for this commemorative lecture, for he recognized, and translated into practice, the dictum that “No disease is wholly physical, and none wholly mental.” He saw in his patient the “whole” man, not a summation of such isolates as body, mind, environment, and family.

In this article I want to consider a short passage from R. G. Collingwood's The Idea of History. I have chosen the passage in question both because it seems to me, for reasons which will become clear later, to contain the kernel of much that Collingwood himself wished to say on the subject of historical knowledge, and also because it implies a still widely held (and, I shall maintain, incorrect) conception of the nature of such knowledge.

In his article on “The Nature and the Status of the Study of Politics”1 Professor White raises, whether explicitly or by implication, some of the most important and, probably permanent problems of the subject. The solutions that he attempts to provide seem to me, however, to be less satisfying than might be expected.

In his recent book, English Poetry; A Critical Introduction, Mr. F. W. Bateson makes the observation that as romantic criticism is now dead it should receive “decent and final interment.” By “romantic” criticism he seems to have in mind either what he calls the Pure Sound theory of poetry, which would have us believe that meaning has nothing to do with poetry, that poetry makes nothing but an emotional or physiological impact upon us; or the suggestion theory which argues that “a good poem should mean very little while suggesting a good deal.” Both of these, according to Mr. Bateson, attempt “to justify the exclusion of meaning from poetry.”

There is, naturally, no more ambiguous factor in all human knowledge than the possible bearing of what we do not know on what we do know.