Collingwood wishes us to see that history is systematic knowledge. Its purpose is not to provide emotional satisfaction, but ‘to command assent’ (Principles of History, 73).
And third, once we have come up with a good design for an institution, we still face the often huge challenge of overcoming political opposition to it, or (to put it differently) devising the political bargain among different interest groups that will actually allow the institution to be created.
And what we can do for our memories of the past, we can also do for our visions of the future: we can insert sequences of our imagined future consciousness into our present consciousness.
The Hitler biographer Alan Bullock has written, “despite the Gestapo and the concentration camps,” his power “was founded on popular support to a degree, which few people cared, or still care, to admit.”
Quite simply, the Nazi movement was built on Hitler’s oratory. There are numerous testimonies to the otherworldly spell he could weave with his words. Hanfstaengl declared, “He had the most formidable power of persuasion of any man or woman I have ever met, and it was almost impossible to avoid being enveloped by him.”
Understanding precedes and succeeds knowledge. Preliminary understanding, which is at the basis of all knowledge, and true understanding, which transcends it, have this in common: They make knowledge meaningful.
In other words, there are no truths beyond and above factual truths: all scientific truths are factual truths, those engendered by sheer brain power and expressed in a specially designed sign language not excluded, and only factual statements are scientifically verifiable. Thus the statement “A triangle laughs” is not untrue but meaningless, whereas the old ontological demonstration of the existence of God, as we find it in Anselm of Canterbury, is not valid and in this sense not true, but it is full of meaning. Knowing certainly aims at truth, even if this truth, as in the sciences, is never an abiding truth but a provisional verity that we expect to exchange against other, more accurate verities as knowledge progresses.
