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3. Against this is to be set the consideration that the "dependence" in question might be merely objective--as objective—as it presumably is in the case of beings incapable of understanding-whereas understanding—whereas what is obviously required is a mode of dependence that is also subjective, in that it involves somehow the understanding of one's dependence on the part of the one who is dependent. But this requirement is hardly all that hard to satisfy--witness satisfy—witness Schleiermacher's talk of "the feeling of absolute dependence." In that event, however, the question would obviously be whether the difference between talking about "having confidence" and "being (understandingly, or feelingly) dependent" is more than a merely verbal difference.

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"Yet faith cannot be the product of reason. . . . People do not, and never can, come to believe in God, or in anything else, as a result of ratiocination. The function of ratiocination is not this, but the development or reasonsed reasoned statement of what faith finds within itself. To say that is not to deny all value to apologetics and to debates; that would be hardly necessary, for everyone knows that the value of these things is extraordinarily slender if they are to be judged by their net result in the shape of conversions. They have a very real value in leading people to answer the question, 'What do I believe?' and that is a question always worth answering. Indeed, if the view I have been maintaining is right, anything that led people to answer the question would be in the interest of religion; for on this view everyone believes in God, if only he could be brought to see it. Reason cannot generate faith, but reason alone can reveal faith to itself, can display to it its own nature" (R. G. Collingwood, Faith & Reason: 118 f.).

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Above all, I carry away the conviction that, while Collingwood is certainly right that "the whole of life, regarded as a whole, is the sphere of religion, and . . . the same whole, regarded as made up of details, is the sphere of science" (Faith and Reason: 145), he is almost certainly wrong that "[t]he proper sphere of faith is everything in the collective sense--everything sense—everything as a whole," while "[t]he proper sphere of reason is everything in the distributive sense--every sense—every separate thing, no matter what" (142). In other words, Collingwood misleads in representing the distinction between religion and science as only another way of talking about the distinction between faith and reason--and reason—and vice versa. For just as faith, in its way, has to do with parts as well as the whole, so reason, in its way--in way—in the way of philosophical, as distinct from scientific, reason--has reason—has to do with the whole as well as parts. There are passages, indeed, where Collingwood himself clearly says as much (e.g., 91), so his position on the matter is simply not consistent.

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I also carry away the conviction that Collingwood seriously misleads in speaking of our most fundamental certainties, which he takes to be matters of universal and necessary (and therefore "’rational”rational”) faith, as simply ”indemonstrable" (114, 119). Certainly, they are indemonstrable if the only way in which something can be demonstrated is the deductive or inductive demonstration of the sciences. But "transcendental deduction," or "presuppositional analysis," is arguably yet another form of demonstration; and so far as I can see, our most fundamental certainties can all be demonstrated, directly or indirectly, by this kind of demonstration and therefore are precisely not indemonstrable.

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