The Formative Years of R. G. Collingwood (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 219 view and not from reading the works of other philosophers (2). According to Rambaldi, this crisis began in a political-cultural battle which the young Hegelians waged in all fields, for example, religion, law, historiography. When these followers of Hegel felt that the latter's philosophy was inadequate for their needs, they abandoned it and seized a practical, empirical philosophy that justified and moreover demanded an attack upon the social-political situation of that time. In Feuerbach's early writings and even in his major work, The Essence of Christianity , he consistently strove for empirical concreteness in his corrections of Hegel's doctrine. According to The Essen'ce of Christianity, the only solution to the religious alienation of Christianity is to return religion to its earthly and human origin and thereby to reduce it to anthropology. Thus for Feuerbach the objective essence of religion--and of Christianity in particular--is nothing other than the essence of human feeling (48). Here Feuerbach distinguished between his philosophy of religion and preceding philosophies of religion and explained that his "metodo genetico critico" (which he defined as "speculativo empirico'" and "speculativo razionale") presupposes a solid bond between empiria and thought (49). The Essence of Christianity involves two constructive parts: it proposes a new religious consciousness which is superior to the common mentality of the people, and moreover it has a practical, therapeutic, and pedagogical character. Thus this work is to eradicate all diffuse, speculative attitudes towards religion, not only from the minds of the philosophers, but also from those of governing officials. It was not, however, until Feuerbach was called upon to defend The Essence of Christianity that he finally "'overthrew" his Hegelianism. Thus according to Rambaldi an essay written in 1842 provides an explicit example of Feuerbach's altered attitude towards Hegel's philosophy of religion. And finally Feuerbach's new view of philosophy as religion and politics found its completion in the concept of the state, which is the sum of the multiple, particular attitudes of man in a qualitatively new entity. The state then becomes for Feuerbach the real incarnation of God, the overcoming of individual limits in human intersubjectivity, and the completed divinity of man. However Rambaldi concludes that throughout all the vicissitudes of the passage of Feuerbach's thought from Hegelianism to anti-Hegelianism, he preserved the original Hegelian historical attitude of presenting true philosophy as universal consciousness of the course of history. MYRA M. MtLntn~N University o] Santa Clara The Formative Years of R. G. Collingwood. By William M. Johnston. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967) This is an engaging and unpretending study, from the point of view of "the history of ideas," of R. G. Collingwood's thought down to the publication of Speculum Mentis (1924). In Part I, along with a sketch of Collingwood's career as a writer in philosophy, in which he follows T. M. Knox (10-13), William M. Johnston discusses the influence of Ruskin on Collingwood, as mediated by his father; Collingwood's training in the Oxford school of "Literae Humaniores" ("Greats"); and his lifelong work in RomanoBritish archaeology. Except for the reservation that "its students [tended] to neglect natural science altogether" (118), Johnston is awed by the "Literae Humaniores" program. He even furnishes an oddly selected list of "prominent" "'Literae Humaniores" candidates (omitting A. E. Housman, England's most distinguished classical scholar for a 220 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY century, who failed). At least one of the results tabulated (Ronald Knox, a "first" in Classical Moderations) is dubious, being contradicted by the candidate's biographer (see Evelyn Waugh, Ronald Knox, chap. IV). With respect to Collingwood's archaeological work, Johnston confesses: "[A]s far as I know, [his] volume in the Corpus lnscriptionum Latinarum has yet to see the light" (39). After Johnston had sent his book to the press, part of this monumental work saw the light as The Roman Inscriptions o/ Britain, Vol. I: Inscriptions on Stone, by Collingwood and R. P. Wright (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). The core of Johnston's book falls into four divisions. In the first (chap. V), he examines two themes in Religion and Philosophy (1916), the publication of which, he suggests...