3 Quotes by R.G. Collingwood

Every kind of language is... specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this sense it may be said that the dance is the mother of all languages... an original language of total bodily gesture.This "original" language of total bodily gesture is thus the one and only real language, which everybody who is in any way expressing himself is using all the time. What we call speech and the other kinds of language are only parts of it which have undergone specialized development.

The question what presuppositions underlie the 'physics' or natural science of a certain people at a certain time is a purely historical question as what kind of clothes they wear. And this is the question that metaphysicians have to answer.

History is for human self-knowledge…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.