Did historian R.G. Collingwood keep cats? His biographer makes no mention of feline companions, but nonetheless they appear in The Idea of History (Collingwood Citation1946; Inglis Citation2009). As cats do, they slip in on padded paws and then fade away, almost before you notice. Their presence requires some explanation in a text as remote from multispecies history as Collingwood’s famous book with its dictum that history means tracing the thoughts of man. Collingwood (1889–1943) is quite explicit about this:
Historians habitually restrict the field of historical knowledge to human affairs. A natural process is a process of events, an historical process is a process of thoughts. Man is regarded as the only subject of historical process, because man is regarded as the only animal that thinks, or thinks enough, and clearly enough, to render his actions the expression of his thoughts. (Collingwood Citation1946, 216).
