Those who see nothing but selfish interest in all human action cannot explain why, for some causes, good and bad—nationalism, racism, religion, patriotism—people sacrifice themselves. Of course, selfish aims can be masked as all these “higher” goals. But dissimulation of selfishness, faction, or zealotry is a social lubricator, and in some cases an essential one. It must, admittedly be a plausible pretense. To work, make-believe must be believable, and an array of talents, political and poetic, labored the illusion into place for Elizabeth.
First there was the myth of the unity of science – the left hemisphere's view that there is one logical path to knowledge, irrespective of context; whereas in reality science is, to quote Gaukroger again, ‘a loose grouping of disciplines with different subject matters and different methods, tied in various ways each of which work for some purposes but not for others’
The invisible source of personal consistency, for which I am using the word “habit,” psychology today calls character.
Given that Collingwood’s philosophy of history is based on a sharp distinction between history and science, we may be surprised by his insistence that it is as a science that he wishes history to be recovered. But history does not become a science by aping natural science. Rather it becomes a science only through a greater self-consciousness of its autonomy. It is the distinctiveness of history that is the source of its creativity and its capacity for systematic understanding.
