  In making these points, Oakeshott differs from philosophical Idealists in Germany, Italy, and England who were proposing similar categorial schemes around the same time. These include Benedetto Croce, who distinguishes the theoretical modes of art, history, and philosophy from the practical modes of economics and ethics, and R.G. Collingwood, who in Speculum Mentis, an early work, begins with Hegel’s triad of art, religion, and philosophy, identifying philosophy broadly defined with “knowledge” and distinguishing three kinds of knowledge—science, history, and philosophy narrowly defined—to generate a fivefold hierarchy of modes. In Collingwood’s scheme, art is at the bottom, followed by religion, the former concerned to imagine or “suppose” and the latter to “assert”, and then by the three kinds of genuine knowledge, which are distinguished from art and religion in being critical. Philosophy proper is the most critical of all because it aims to transcend the other forms (Collingwood 1924; Connelly 2015). Oakeshott, partly in response to Collingwood, folds art and religion into practice, denies that modes can be ordered hierarchically, and defines philosophy as the activity of interrogating presuppositions, including its own, and therefore not itself a mode. But despite characterizing philosophy as supramodal, he severs the tie between philosophy and unqualified knowledge—“the Absolute”—that one finds in Idealist metaphysics from Hegel to Collingwood. The distinction between modal thinking and philosophy that Oakeshott asserts in Experience and Its Modes reappears in On Human Conduct as a distinction between “conditional” and “unconditional” theorizing, the former resting on assumptions that the latter questions. 