R.G. Collingwood defined history as the re-enactment of past thoughts, emphasizing the historian’s role in understanding…

R.G. Collingwood defined history as the re-enactment of past thoughts, emphasizing the historian’s role in understanding and interpreting the mental actions and ideas of the past, rather than merely recounting events….

 

The present is, in the words of Hume, nothing but a bundle of perceptions, without a
past there is no way we can make sense of them and form a personal identity. Memories
are of two kinds of which the so called episodic is what we usually think of, namely the
recollection of past events out of which we form our personal histories1
. The second kind,
need to concern us less, in fact not at all, although it is more fundamental, because it
constitute our skills as an organism, from the higher levels of language use down to the
very basics2
. Although people can survive without their conscious episodic memory, they
cannot do so without their unconscious ones. But personal history is not history, history
should not be confused with memory (pace Francis Bacon). Every human being is through
his own memories acquainted with the past,

but the awareness of a deeper past stretching
back far beyond his own brief span usually comes later, and is our first real intimation of
mortality, as the void that preceeds us surely must have a counterpart ahead, linking our
own unique fate to those who have preceeded us. In my case this realization of a historical
past must have come around the age of six. I knew my age but I did not know the year
I lived in, the calibration of my own personal history with that of universal through the
convention of dating was a momentous one, and I still clearly remember being told the birth
years of my grandparents, preserving that information as well as the occasion at which it
was transmitted intact until the present day. The learning of historical dates is usually
considered a chore in historical instruction,

yet of course chronology is an inescapable
aspect of history, and the dates are not just mere numbers, they are in fact loaded with
associations, and the more extensive the knowledge of the student, the more loaded they
are, and hence the more historical information do they carry. In my case it certainly linked
history to counting, admittedly a very primitive and trivial connection between history and
mathematics, and it will be one of the purposes of this essay to prove that there exists a
far deeper one.
So what is history? This is the purpose of Collingwoods book to explain. It is a