Collingwood's Idea of History & Speculum Mentis

[Laura]

Re: R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History


I thought I would mention at this point that "Speculum Mentis" appears to describe the three types of man and the five states. I would almost be willing to swear that this is where Gurdjieff got his "three brained beings" and man numbers 1 through 5 from.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

Re: R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History

I thought I would mention at this point that "Speculum Mentis" appears to describe the three types of man and the five states. I would almost be willing to swear that this is where Gurdjieff got his "three brained beings" and man numbers 1 through 5 from.

It would be cool if he did, but the years don't add up. Collingwood published in 1924. Around that time, Ouspensky parted with G, having been with him since 1915. While G didn't use the term "three-brained being" until he started writing Beelzebub, the idea was already there in his earlier thought - same with man #1-5. Maybe Collingwood knew Ouspensky? Tertium Organum was published in 1920 in English, so it's at least possible Collingwood would've known of him and maybe corresponded with him...

 

[Laura]

Re: R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History

I thought I would mention at this point that "Speculum Mentis" appears to describe the three types of man and the five states. I would almost be willing to swear that this is where Gurdjieff got his "three brained beings" and man numbers 1 through 5 from.

It would be cool if he did, but the years don't add up. Collingwood published in 1924. Around that time, Ouspensky parted with G, having been with him since 1915. While G didn't use the term "three-brained being" until he started writing Beelzebub, the idea was already there in his earlier thought - same with man #1-5. Maybe Collingwood knew Ouspensky? Tertium Organum was published in 1920 in English, so it's at least possible Collingwood would've known of him and maybe corresponded with him...

Yeah, I know the numbers don't add up. But Gurdjieff's ideas weren't well developed. There is also the connection between Collingwood and Russia via Arthur Ransome who was in Moscow at the time that Gurdjieff was there.

On the other hand, he certainly may have been inspired partly by Gurdjieff, but he sure went a different direction with the ideas.

 

[nicklebleu]

Re: R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History

This is a Patristic doctrine: the Devil is defined by the early Christian writer Hippolytus as ho antitatton tois kosmikois.

Tried to find the translation of the Greek bolded part, but wasn't able to find it. Anyone an idea how that translates?

Thanks!

Google Translate gave me: "against the cosmic ones".

Literally it means: the opponent of the cosmic ones (i.e. cosmic forces, heavenly powers, angels etc.). In short: the universal adversary.

Thanks all! I was surprised I didn't get any results from Google ... ?!?

 

[Divide by Zero]

Re: R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History

I'm a bit confused at this passage in part V, in my reader it is on page 54 of 150 of that chapter or 73.7% overall of the book.

It comes up right after explaining inference and then explaining inductive thinking.

What confuses me is how are religious beliefs required for inductive reasoning in science? If anything, what if an open mindset of discovering what may not have been discovered can be had instead of an assumption of religious beliefs?

I bolded the parts that mention this below quoted from the book.

n what is called ‘inductive’ thinking there is no such compulsion. The essence of the process, here, is that having put certain observations together, and having found that they make a pattern, we extrapolate this pattern indefinitely, just as a man who has plotted a few points on squared paper and says to himself ‘the points I have plotted suggest a parabola’, proceeds to draw as much of the parabola as he likes in either direction. This is technically described as ‘proceeding from the known to the unknown’, or ‘from the particular to the universal’. It is essential to ‘inductive’ thinking, though the logicians who have tried to construct a theory of such thinking have not always realized this, that the step so described is never taken under any kind of logical compulsion. The thinker who takes it is logically free to take it or not to take it, just as he pleases. There is nothing in the pattern formed by the observations he or someone else has actually made which can oblige him to extrapolate in that particular way, or indeed to extrapolate at all. The reason why this very obvious truth has been so often overlooked is that people have been hypnotized by the prestige of Aristotelian logic into thinking that they see a closer resemblance than actually exists between ‘deductive’ and ‘inductive’ thinking, that is, between exact science and the sciences of observation and experiment. In both cases there are, for any given piece of thinking, certain starting-points, traditionally called premisses, and a certain terminal point, traditionally called a conclusion; and in both cases the premisses ‘prove’ the conclusion. But whereas in exact science this means that they enforce the conclusion, or make it logically obligatory, in the sciences of observation and experiment it means only that they justify it, that is, authorize anybody to think it who wishes to do so. What they provide, when they are said to ‘prove’ a certain conclusion, is not compulsion to embrace it, but only permission; a perfectly legitimate sense of the word ‘prove’ (approuver, probare), as there should be no need to show.

If in practice this permission, like so many permissions, amounts to virtual compulsion, that is only because the thinker who avails himself of it does not regard himself as free to extrapolate or not, just as he pleases. He regards himself as under an obligation to do so, and to do it in certain ways: obligations which, when we inquire into their history, we find to have their roots in certain religious beliefs about nature and its creator God. It would be out of place to develop this statement more fully here; but not, perhaps, to add that if today it seems to some readers paradoxical, that is only because the facts have been obscured by a smoke-screen of propagandist literature, beginning with the ‘illuminist’ movement of the eighteenth century and prolonged by the ‘conflict between religion and science’ in the nineteenth, whose purpose was to attack Christian theology in the supposed interests of a ‘scientific view of the world’ which in fact is based upon it and could not for a moment survive its destruction. Take away Christian theology, and the scientist has no longer any motive for doing what inductive thought gives him permission to do. If he goes on doing it at all, that is only because he is blindly following the conventions of the professional society to which he belongs

 

[mkrnhr]

Re: R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History

I'm not at part V yet but this is how it looks to me.
Inductive thinking means generalization. You see a few cycles of a pattern for example and you deduce that it goes on cycling forever. Induction requires a leap of faith in which one assumes that the data points contain the whole information about the "ordering" process that generates the observed phenomenon. This thinking assumes that there is a super-order behind the observed phenomena, an order made by god where creation (nature) has been created once and for all (in a big bang/fiat lux), and the laws of nature are the laws that god imposed on his creation. OSIT

Added:
Inductive reasoning is not bad, it's how it is used, especially if it becomes a matter of dogma. For example, in deductive reasoning there is the famous syllogism of All men are mortal+Socrates is a man->Socrates is mortal. We know that "all" men are mortal by inductive reasoning because one observes that people die and nobody so far has observed immortal humans, in which a sane deduction would give "most men are mortal". Same with Socrates humanity (we know that logic is "true" by inductive reasoning as well ;) ). On the other hand, we can see that "eternal and universal laws of physics" is just a generalization of what we observed on earth for the last couple centuries, and can be more or less wrong. The famous example of a faulty inductive reasoning is Uniformitarianism where the observed present (especially from the geological point of view) is the only key to the past (and to the eons to come). It's a necessary intellectual tool but one has to acknowledge its utility and domain of validity, and to be able to accept changes and updates.

 

[whitecoast]

Re: R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History

I'm a bit confused at this passage in part V, in my reader it is on page 54 of 150 of that chapter or 73.7% overall of the book.

It comes up right after explaining inference and then explaining inductive thinking.

What confuses me is how are religious beliefs required for inductive reasoning in science? If anything, what if an open mindset of discovering what may not have been discovered can be had instead of an assumption of religious beliefs?

{snipped quote}

I am on part IV only, but I'll share my understanding of what you shared above. The writer seems to use "religious belief" but really just mean "an act of faith", or holding something to be true without sufficient evidence. He accuses inductive reasoning of doing this for the following reason:

When we use data points (the blue dots, aka "the specific") to construct a predictive model (the line, aka "the general"), we can either interpolate or extrapolate, depending on the type of predictions we are trying to make. To interpolate means to predict the behavior of future data points within the observed history of dots (between x=0 and x= about 45 there are many data points). To extrapolate means to predict the behavior of data points outside of the observed history of dots (past x=50 there is no data).

What the author seems to be saying is that it is an act of faith to extrapolate, since going from the specific (the data points) to the general (the predictive model) does not actually take into account sufficiently the specificity of the specifics (that they only exist between x=0 and x=45ish). Hence it is an act of faith to think specifics in one instance can teach us anything about the behavior of specifics in another instance.

In a philosophy of science class I took, inductive and deductive reasoning were differentiated by the how much a true premise (either a law or generalization) guaranteed a true conclusion. In a deductive argument, a guaranteed generalization (one understood to always be true) always guarantees a true conclusion, whereas in inductive reasoning guaranteed specifics forming a generalization do not necessarily guarantee the conclusion, if only because you may not draw a guaranteed generalization from the specifics.

Inductive reasoning seems to me just a formalized way of describing the unconscious pattern recognition and heuristics that our system 1 minds use to construct a working model of the world prior to conscious, explicit thought. Inductive reasoning is more organic and tacit. From that perspective, induction can in some circumstances produce much more valuable results if only because of the incredible power of our unconscious system 1 processing (at least, that's what Khanemann said in Thinking: Fast and Slow in his chapters on "experts"). Deductive reasoning requires much more system 2 participation it seems, since its reasoning must be consciously intelligible (i.e. you can write it out in symbolic logic and submit it as a proof). Induction doesn't really have that burden. Does this also mean that using deductive reasoning effectively also requires more self-knowledge?

 

[Laura]

Re: R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History

I'm a bit confused at this passage in part V, in my reader it is on page 54 of 150 of that chapter or 73.7% overall of the book.

It comes up right after explaining inference and then explaining inductive thinking.

What confuses me is how are religious beliefs required for inductive reasoning in science? If anything, what if an open mindset of discovering what may not have been discovered can be had instead of an assumption of religious beliefs?

This is a topic that Collingwood goes into in much greater detail in "Speculum Mentis". The idea is that religious thinking is born out of a "search for the truth" and that search drives the individual - compels, impels, whatever - to speculate about god, to try to "know god" or know about him, or how the world works, etc etc. What he works with is inductive thinking because he is searching for something that is thought to be outside, beyond, above, etc, his own position in the world and thus can only know it by extrapolating via inductive reasoning. Thus it is that the idea/belief that there is something more or beyond underwrites the beginnings of inductive reasoning which has been with us a long time, and we seldom stop to think about where it developed, why, and for what purpose.

Also, previous answers develop this, but that's the narrative.

ADDED: Since I've already mentioned that "Speculum Mentis" appears to present the different "minds" of the three main types a la Gurdjieff, plus Man numbers four and five, maybe it is not too far off to suggest that Inductive Reasoning can be related to emotional center thinking? Because it seems obvious that if you have a few data points and want to extrapolate, this can be seriously influenced by your emotions. I think we see that on a daily basis. The reasoning may be right or wrong. It may be based on certain data and exclude other data.

 

[luc]

Re: R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History

Not there in the book yet, but this seems on track to me:

Inductive reasoning seems to me just a formalized way of describing the unconscious pattern recognition and heuristics that our system 1 minds use to construct a working model of the world prior to conscious, explicit thought. Inductive reasoning is more organic and tacit. From that perspective, induction can in some circumstances produce much more valuable results if only because of the incredible power of our unconscious system 1 processing (at least, that's what Khanemann said in Thinking: Fast and Slow in his chapters on "experts"). Deductive reasoning requires much more system 2 participation it seems, since its reasoning must be consciously intelligible (i.e. you can write it out in symbolic logic and submit it as a proof). Induction doesn't really have that burden. Does this also mean that using deductive reasoning effectively also requires more self-knowledge?

In other words, when people (say scientists) use inductive logic, they are at least in part working with often unconscious assumptions/"leaps of faith" that no doubt are a result of historic developments. As such, in Western science, they are based on Christian tradition. The problem is that many scientists will deny all of that and think they are practicing "pure science", when in truth, they bring a whole lot of "leaps of faith" to the table.

In other words still, the question is whether we can do anything at all without "judging", certain motivations and taking decisions. That is to say, we can't just say "these pure facts demand this and that conclusion", we will always need to evaluate them based on our current understanding/being, we will always take decisions which facts to include, how we connect them and which generalizations we derive from them, we will always be motivated by this or that feeling etc. - in fact, we literally might not even see certain things based on our motivational and ethical system, while creating wild generalizations. So in this sense, if you take away Christian theology [or whatever belief system], you take away the perceived certainty of inductive conclusions.

As for the concrete example of Christian theology, Ruppert Sheldrake talks about many such hidden assumptions in science in his book, "The Science Delusion". For example, most scientists that are not trained (or interested) in philosophy have a rather materialistic world view, i.e. "all there is is matter". Now what about physical laws? If everything is matter, these too would be subject to change and other natural processes. But that's not what scientists think; they think physical laws are unchangeable - which is an inductive conclusion based on a "leap of faith". But if this is so, what are physical laws? Where are they? The only way out, if you think physical laws are universal, is to hold some kind of Platonian view that there is a duality between the material world and a "sphere of ideas" where these physical laws reside. In other words, you need something "out there". In Christianity, this is God, the creator, who could be viewed as the source of the natural laws.

So again, if you take away this Christian (or Platonic) doctrine, the whole inductive argument about natural laws collapses. Obviously, most scientists have no idea about such things and their own theological assumptions.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

Re: R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History

What confuses me is how are religious beliefs required for inductive reasoning in science? If anything, what if an open mindset of discovering what may not have been discovered can be had instead of an assumption of religious beliefs?

If in practice this permission, like so many permissions, amounts to virtual compulsion, that is only because the thinker who avails himself of it does not regard himself as free to extrapolate or not, just as he pleases. He regards himself as under an obligation to do so, and to do it in certain ways: obligations which, when we inquire into their history, we find to have their roots in certain religious beliefs about nature and its creator God. It would be out of place to develop this statement more fully here; but not, perhaps, to add that if today it seems to some readers paradoxical, that is only because the facts have been obscured by a smoke-screen of propagandist literature, beginning with the ‘illuminist’ movement of the eighteenth century and prolonged by the ‘conflict between religion and science’ in the nineteenth, whose purpose was to attack Christian theology in the supposed interests of a ‘scientific view of the world’ which in fact is based upon it and could not for a moment survive its destruction. Take away Christian theology, and the scientist has no longer any motive for doing what inductive thought gives him permission to do. If he goes on doing it at all, that is only because he is blindly following the conventions of the professional society to which he belongs

The "scientific worldview" was originally based on theological foundations. Ideas about God and purpose in nature justified scientific thinking and discovery, i.e. reading God's "book of nature", making sense of the order of the universe (order being the product of a divine mind), etc. By rejecting the theological underpinnings of this philosophy, the anti-religionists undermined their own position. This is still playing out in philosophy and philosophy of science. The biggest and best philosophical minds operating under materialism admit that they cannot account for consciousness, reason, value, mathematical objects, apprehension of reality, etc. That's because all these things were only previously made possible by theological premises. Of course, that doesn't mean those premises were fully correct. But it does mean that philosophy today is incoherent, because it can't justify the actual practice of science as a pursuit of truth. That's one of the reasons postmodernism flourishes.

 

[Yas]

Re: Gurdjieff's Primitive Cosmology

On reading the opening post to the thread this passage cames to mind:

[quote author=In Search of the Miraculous]"But first of all another thing must be understood, namely, that knowledge cannot belong to all, cannot even belong to many. Such is the law. You do not understand this because you do not understand that knowledge, like everything else in the world, is material. It is material, and this means that it possesses all the characteristics of materiality. One of the first characteristics of materiality is that matter is always limited, that is to say, the quantity of matter in a given place and under given conditions is limited.

<snip>

That quote has been raised before as the final paragraph seems to fit with what we see actually happening, so there’s a degree of projection (if that fits then make the rest of it fit!), G must know. But you don’t need the 'knowledge is matter’ idea for those latter observations to still be accurate / relevant. He just came at it from the wrong angle.

Indeed. And certainly, according to the theories of Information, knowledge/information is NOT limited in any way, shape, form or fashion. This is something that will be made abundantly clear in Collingwood.

The Cs have equated knowledge with love, and love is not limited either.

But certainly, Gurdjieff lived in a time similar to our own and it's understandable why he drew such a conclusion. Well, it was based on his materialist grounding combined with rather simplistic logical processes. And I don't mean this last to impugn Gurdjieff; what I mean is that it seems that the scientific method itself is grounded in simplistic logic.

Nowadays, people seem to glory in their ignorance. But that's not because knowledge is limited, it is because emotion has been abused and suppressed and has taken over their thinking. Gurdjieff should have figured that out!!! When emotion takes over the thinking processes, real thinking, real assimilation of knowledge and utilization, simply cannot take place. Cs have even referred to this by saying we should learn to "separate limiting emotions based on assumptions from emotions that open one to unlimited possibilities." And, as we well know, assumptions are almost the opposite of knowledge.
[/quote]

This has always been a big question mark in my head... how can knowledge or information be material??? I understand that we have "interfaces" that "convert" information into material things, but in the end, it isn't material. And how can it be limited, too?

And I followed the path of thinking that maybe Gurdjieff meant another thing related to his Hydrogens theory that I just wasn't able to grasp. Or even that maybe I had some sort of illusion about the subject and was naive to think the knowledge and information are immaterial and unlimited. But, well... I could never grasp it... as well as other Gurdjieff ideas that are mentioned here.

I think that this thread is very exciting because we are discovering many things and trying to have a much deeper understanding of our reality, our thinking and even cosmology. It's great to go back to those gaps that were "left for later understanding" and actually try to understand them with the input of new information.

I started Collingwood's Idea of History now but I'm very slow, so for now, I don't think I have much to say about it, except that it is indeed very interesting and that I really like the concept of "thought of the second degree" which is, I think, a thought that includes self-observation. Very interesting!

Edited: Spelling

 

[Neil]

Re: Gurdjieff's Primitive Cosmology

I find the idea of hydrogens rather useful, actually. I interpreted it in the context of how al-Arabi divided creation into spiritual, imaginal, and corporeal realms. Gurdjieff was just trying to create some type of graduated scale that measured the "distance" from 7D or the Absolute or "Allah." The closer one got to the Names of God, the more intense the emanations of consciousness and the lower the hydrogen number. I took some exception to his hydrogens always combining in multiples of 2, (there should be hydrogen 97s just as easily as 96s) and his attempts to make some sort of chemistry out of it really seemed to be muddying the waters, but my interpretation was that he was creating a model to illustrate a generalized principle and that he never had the will or knowledge available to actually turn it into an operational theory. What is the relationship between matter and consciousness, is matter not a reflection of consciousness? I could create a system where "God" is represented by H1, archetypal cosmic information fields are H2, thoughts of spiritual curiosity H100, various little understood quantum energies which are on the edge of perceptibility by science are perhaps H200, and a block of lead is H10000. Consciousness organizes information, which can create energy, which can solidify into matter. Or e=mc2 and with the divine cosmic mind being fundamentally present in all of the forms, just with greater or lesser degrees of "charge," it allows the equation to work both ways. Matter, energy, information, and consciousness are all part of the same unified field. The purity of the charge is what Gurdjieff was making a vague attempt to quantify with his hydrogens. My scale of hydrogens from 1 to 10k is just a rough illustration, it is not enough to do any real work, and I thought that this idea is what Gurdjieff was grasping at, knowledge was just harder to come by in his time. It would appear based on what Laura said that I was reading too much into it and substituting my own ideas into his work.

The biggest objection I had was that knowledge was limited, I really thought he was slipping here, and I raised the question in this post https://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,40295.msg620088.html#msg620088 to which Obyvatel responded in a way that sort of made sense. Still, I maintain my original assertion that if we are dealing with a cosmic scale interaction where all realms connected, you cannot really say that knowledge, information, or whatever is limited in any real sense. The realm that you're in may impose certain boundaries, but there are no hard and fast rules about limitations to the availability of knowledge.

I did think Gurdjieff's ray of creation was a little bit off, because it doesn't really match up to anything, but again it is a model and not an operational tool. It may be true that the Milky Way is the "world" of 4D and higher beings, but the way he presents it does seem to favor a hard nuts and bolts interpretation where I favor a soft nuts and bolts interpretation. Yeah, there are things in starships that move around to various planets and engineer things, but their existence is so much broader and more nuanced than just being interplanetary beings. There is most definitely a hierarchy of celestial objects which governs how things happen, but it must also be transdensity and more than just a chain of physical locales. The part of the Milky Way that we see probably only consists of the "hydrogens" that are perceptible by 3D awareness, with many of the beings exisitng in the same galaxy but in an environment of more mental level hydrogens that is unnoticeable by physical instrumentation. Yes, the Cassiopaeans' density cosmology is a lot more to the point.

I agree that the enneagram is pretty much completely made up. It's a cool design, and Mouravieff does some "tricks" with it in Gnosis III which allow you to summarize some of the material in a quick compact format, but I do not believe it is the archetypal sacred form it is made out to be. I'm interested in esoteric stuff, and when Gurdjieff and Mouravieff started getting heavily into the enneagram stuff, my brain lost focus and my eyes sort of glazed over. I've learned in many cases that this is kind of a signal to myself that what I'm reading is BS.

Lastly, there was always a certain flavor of "heartlessness" around the material of ISOTM that I couldn't quite shake. Gurdjieff was going through great pains to share this material, and it seemed to be mostly true, but there didn't seem to be much "love" in it for lack of a better term. Mouravieff and the Cassiopaeans have a more inviting tone the way they read... It's weird, I've never really been able to figure out why I feel that way.

I've expressed my opinion here and there that I thought Gurdjieff had some issues and never quite embraced him as a Great Teacher, but like Laura said, he did seem to really be trying, and I think a lot of his ideas can be salvaged or expanded upon. I haven't started this latest reading yet, but those are my thoughts on Gurdjieff and his system.

 

[John G]

Re: Gurdjieff's Primitive Cosmology

I find the idea of hydrogens rather useful, actually. I interpreted it in the context of how al-Arabi divided creation into spiritual, imaginal, and corporeal realms. Gurdjieff was just trying to create some type of graduated scale that measured the "distance" from 7D or the Absolute or "Allah." The closer one got to the Names of God, the more intense the emanations of consciousness and the lower the hydrogen number. I took some exception to his hydrogens always combining in multiples of 2, (there should be hydrogen 97s just as easily as 96s)...

I did think Gurdjieff's ray of creation was a little bit off, because it doesn't really match up to anything, but again it is a model and not an operational tool. It may be true that the Milky Way is the "world" of 4D and higher beings, but the way he presents it does seem to favor a hard nuts and bolts interpretation where I favor a soft nuts and bolts interpretation... Yes, the Cassiopaeans' density cosmology is a lot more to the point.

I agree that the enneagram is pretty much completely made up. It's a cool design, and Mouravieff does some "tricks" with it in Gnosis III which allow you to summarize some of the material in a quick compact format, but I do not believe it is the archetypal sacred form it is made out to be...

Lastly, there was always a certain flavor of "heartlessness" around the material of ISOTM that I couldn't quite shake. Gurdjieff was going through great pains to share this material, and it seemed to be mostly true, but there didn't seem to be much "love" in it for lack of a better term. Mouravieff and the Cassiopaeans have a more inviting tone the way they read... It's weird, I've never really been able to figure out why I feel that way.

Well if one was really trying to represent information then multiples of two could make sense; starting early with a (law of) 3 isn't a horrible idea either but nobody was using actual math. The ISOTM diagram of everything living with absolute-eternal unchanging/archangels-angels-man-vertebrates/invertebrates/plants-minerals/metals is getting closer to densities. The enneagram like with information really needs to be seen as actual math aka geometry. Heartless in ISOTM could be due to Ouspensky's writing style.

 

[PhoenixToEmber]

Re: R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History

I only just started the book and I'm still on Part I - Greco-Roman Historiography, but something that's frustrating me about it so far is all of the Greek words and phrases Collingwood keeps citing, written in the Greek alphabet, which are not translated at all. At least the Latin in the book I can Google because I know the Latin alphabet, but I'm at a loss every time a Greek word or phrase is dropped and there's no footnote or in-text translation following it. I'd love to learn Ancient Greek, sure, but that's not practical at the moment. I don't mind Greek words and phrases being referenced in and of itself - I was fascinated by all of the phonetic and etymological relationships that Fulcanelli discussed in his books, but every word was translated in a footnote and even the pronunciation was transliterated into the Latin alphabet. Collingwood's book has neither. Anyone else irritated by this?

 

[Approaching Infinity]

Re: R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History

I only just started the book and I'm still on Part I - Greco-Roman Historiography, but something that's frustrating me about it so far is all of the Greek words and phrases Collingwood keeps citing, written in the Greek alphabet, which are not translated at all. At least the Latin in the book I can Google because I know the Latin alphabet, but I'm at a loss every time a Greek word or phrase is dropped and there's no footnote or in-text translation following it. I'd love to learn Ancient Greek, sure, but that's not practical at the moment. I don't mind Greek words and phrases being referenced in and of itself - I was fascinated by all of the phonetic and etymological relationships that Fulcanelli discussed in his books, but every word was translated in a footnote and even the pronunciation was transliterated into the Latin alphabet. Collingwood's book has neither. Anyone else irritated by this?

Just something you have to get used to - and like Laura has mentioned a few times, you can still follow the line of thought without understanding those phrases. The assumption back than was that anyone educated enough to read such a book would have at least a basic understanding of Latin and Greek, not to mention French and German.

It doesn't take much time to learn the Greek alphabet, though. So you could always do that, which makes searching for the words online a bit easier.