 In his later philosophy Collingwood will abandon the terminology of the overlap of classes, but the commitment to the view that philosophical distinctions are “distinctions without a difference”, and that the task of philosophical analysis is to distinguish between concepts which coincide in their instances remains even after this terminology is left behind. In his second metaphilosophical treatise An Essay on Metaphysics (1940) he sets out to disambiguate the different senses of the term “cause”. The term cause can be used, in what he refers to as sense I to mean “reason” or “motive”. In sense I