Danielle asked:

I'm having trouble understanding R.G. Collingwood's scissors and paste method of philosophy and
what it has to do with critical thinking and historical evidence in his book The Idea of History.I need to
write a paper on it so your help would be greatly appreciated!

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There are many ways of writing history, for example Caesar's or Xenophon's accounts of their own
campaign based on first person experience; or by being a witness or participant in the events being
described, as happened to be the case with (say) Sallust; or you can study the civil records and the
stories of a region and piece together an account of the events reflected in them. All these methods
possess value; some in virtue of being the evidence for events in themselves, others in evaluating
their evidence conscientiously and critically, so that the end result may qualify as an acceptable vision
of the historical segment being treated. A good historian taking up such documents much later and
using them as sources, would be required to do much critical thinking and evaluate them together
with appropriate research being done in related fields such as, for example, archaeology.

Now there is a problem with some areas of historical study where everything we are ever likely to
know (barring some fortunate accident) is already known. This relates mostly to the human interface.
What historical people said, their speeches, arguments, their promises and treachery etc. is laid down
for large tracts of history in sometimes very few documents which serve everyhistorian of those
historical segments as sources and often enough nothing else but those accounts exist. Archaeology
cannot, of course, retrieve the real interactions among people, only the artefacts they left behind
them. In some few cases, legends and mementi add colour to the historical records, but they are in
general very unreliable and indeed take most of their value from the accounts which pre-exist their
discovery.

So when Collingwood talks about the cut-and-paste jobs in history, he is referring to just such
problem cases: to 'history' writing which is nothing more than a particular writer snipping bits and
pieces out of (say) three existing sources and re-arranging them according to taste, prejudice or in
some cases for the purpose of manufacturing a literary masterpiece. A famous specimen of this kind
is A History of the Worldby Sir Walter Raleigh, a magnificent tapestry of glorious English prose, but
completely worthless as a history. On a slightly higher rung you find Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the
Roman Empire,'higher' only because there is some scholarship in it, though by Collingwood's
standard not enoughbut in any case it's whole value rests on its merits as a literary performance.
Until the rise of such ancillary sciences as archaeology, the overwhelming bulk of history writing was
in fact scissors-and-glue-pot.

Collingwood makes the additional point (on p.258) that even a lot of supposed 'source' material is of
the same worthless variety (and without much redeeming literary merit), which we are obliged to
evaluate merely because of its antiquity: great reams of regurgitated history were produced in the last
2—3 centuries of the Roman Empire as well as in the Middle Ages which is nothing other than
cut-and-paste stuff. But beggars can't be choosers. We know that most of this is gibberish, but when
some author claims he got story X from historian Y, and we don't know who Y was, then unfortunately
you are reduced to taking on trust what strictly speaking deserves no trust at all.

On the same issue, one of Collingwood's important points relates to the concept of 'authority'. In
cut-and-paste jobs, the appeal to authority is constantly misused. Author A has his prejudice; in
appealing to author B he compounds the prejudices, and then along comes author C, who appeals to
A and adds merely another layer of prejudice. All this is just cribbing, of course. None of these
authors knew anything, or any more, than any of the others. The point is that one of the significant
methodological advances of late 19th century historiography was the redefinition of that concept:
either all sources are authoritative or none. Thus in one fell swoop the pitfalls of prejudice were
plugged up. In its wake, every historian was forced to evaluate sources objectively. (This works
wonderfully well in theory, but in reality it is, of course, nothing but a crutch. Objectivity is simply not
attainable to a human being. But historians at least strive to, in order to get at the real facts of history
which are often glazed over not only by legendry, but also by partisanship, common likes and dislikes,
love and hatred and one's private notion of morality).

This is more or less the gist of it; and one reason why it is important to Collingwood is because the
notion of evidence itself is very tenuous; and he quotes an hypothetical case in law (p. 266 et seq) to
show why. Reading that section of his book (i.e. b 3 of the 'Epilegomena') is not all that difficult,
except that in being addressed to experts and philosophers makes it difficult for anyone to work
through who is not familiar with all the different philosophical and methodological trends being
examined here. But just bear in mind what I wrote above and, additionally, that one very good reason
for not trusting a scissors-and-paste history job, is because there is literally no-one who bears
responsibility for the truth or even mere factuality of the eventsthese types of works inaugurate an
infinite regress of authorities!

On the other hand, though it is a bugbear, the scissor-and-paste history can't simply be ignored,
because there is so much of it which, due to historical circumstances, is now our only source!
Between the devil and the deep blue sea!

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney