Valuable Reprints

These three paperbacks are each reprints. R.G. Collingwood’s classic essays should be of value to a wider audience than history students. Like many Englishmen who also happen to be specialists, he is not content to expound a discipline; he simultaneously meditates on the methods of historians and the function of the human mind itself in its labours to apprehend reality. In a sense, he sees history not as ‘what happened’ but as the re-enactment of ‘what happened’ in the mind of an historian. There are dangers of excessive subjectivity in this approach; and Collingwood, being idealist in philosophy, does not wholly avoid them. He will shake the confidence of any reader who naïvely supposes that any historical work can be a simple record of knowable facts.

A.D. Nock, in his survey of religious conversion to Christianity and to pagan cults during the Roman Empire, sidesteps one difficult issue – that to a convert his conversion does not seem a sociological event, but an event which establishes a new relation between him and God, or at least the cosmos. Mr Nock’s approach sidesteps the actual meaning of conversion; and consequently he tends to under-rate the difficulties of conversion and see Christianity too simply as a mystery cult which has happened to outlast the others.

Dr Geddes is a New Zealander, at present Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. His account of life among the Dyaks of Borneo is a very lively and attractive document, well-illustrated with photographs, and comparable in miniature to Grimble’s Pattern of Islands. The long Dyak yarn which he seasons with comment is almost a picaresque novel in itself. The book is a delight to read.

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