 The question concerning the relation between Collingwood’s two metaphilosophical treatises and whether the conception of the role of philosophical analysis articulated in An Essay on Metaphysics is continuous with that described in An Essay on Philosophical Method is further complicated by the fact that An Essay on Philosophical Method contains a defence of the ontological argument that appears to be at odds with Collingwood’s later claim that metaphysics is a logical, not an ontological inquiry and with the assertion that presuppositional analysis is a form of “metaphysics without ontology”. The ontological proof is normally regarded as the pinnacle of metaphysical knowledge, knowledge that is both necessary (as a priori knowledge) and has existential import (as empirical knowledge). Collingwood’s allegiance to the ontological proof in An Essay on Philosophical Method would therefore seem to provide further evidence for the hypothesis of a rift between Collingwood’s earlier and later conception of philosophical analysis because it seems to be advancing the sort of robust metaphysical claims which Collingwood’s later conception of metaphysics is keen to leave behind. However, the detail of Collingwood’s discussion of the ontological proof suggests that he had a rather unorthodox understanding of what the ontological proof establishes (D’Oro 2002). Paradoxical as this might sound, he did not seem to think that the ontological proof establishes any substantive ontological conclusions and that it yields the sort of metaphysical knowledge he later explicitly claimed to be impossible. His concern with the ontological proof was intricately connected with an attempt to delineate the subject matter of philosophical analysis, not the existence of metaphysical entities. God, for Collingwood, is “that which we are thinking about when we are thinking philosophically” (Collingwood’s 1935 private letter to Ryle, published in the 2005 edition of An Essay on Philosophical Method, EPM 2005: 257). This claim may be clarified by saying that philosophical concepts are not contingently instantiated in an empirical class of objects (as we have seen, they do not sort things into classes); they are necessarily instantiated in the forms of judgement or inference which they make possible. For example, the concept of the good, qua expediency, is necessarily instantiated in hypothetical or instrumental imperatives and the concept of mind is necessarily instantiated in judgements which explain actions qua expression of thought. This is the kernel of truth that, according to Collingwood, is worth restating in the ontological argument.