History

   1) The Great Man Theory of History

   For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the great Men sent into the world: the soul of the world's history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these. (Carlyle, 1966, p. 1)

   2) The Value of History

   It is generally thought to be of importance to a man that he should know himself: where knowing himself means knowing not his merely personal peculiarities, the things that distinguish him from other men, but his nature as a man. . . . Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what he can do until he tries, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is. (Collingwood, 1972, p. 10)

   3) The Relation of Psychology to History

   To regard [psychology] as rising above the sphere of history, and establishing the permanent and unchanging laws of human nature, is therefore possible only to a person who mistakes the transient conditions of a certain historical age for the permanent conditions of human life. (Collingwood, 1972, p. 224)