Our age is characterized by a variety of generalizing theories, each of which is applied to everything in the universe except itself, and each of which would fall to the ground if it were so applied since it at once becomes apparent that it has been busy sawing off the only possible branch on which it could have been sitting.

Owen Barfield

Once upon a time there was a very large motor-car called the Universe. Although there was nobody who wasn't on board, nobody knew how it worked or how to work it, and in the course of time two very different problems occupied the attention of two different groups of passengers. The first group became interested in invisibles like internal combustion but the second group said the thing to do was to push and pull levers and find out by trial and error what happened. The words "internal combustion," they said were obviously meaningless, because nobody ever pushed or pulled either of these things. For a time both groups agreed that knowledge of how it worked and knowledge of how to work it were closely connected with one another, but in the end the second group began to maintain that the first kind of knowledge was an illusion based on a misunderstanding of language. Pushing, pulling, and seeing what happens, they said, are not a means to knowledge; they are knowledge. It was an odd sort of car, because, after the second group had with conspicuous success tried pushing and pulling all the big levers, they began on some of the smaller ones, and the car was so constructed that nearly all of these, whatever other effect they had, acted as accelerators. Meanwhile the first group held its breath and began to think that their kind of knowledge might perhaps come in useful after the smash.

Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction

Men do not invent those mysterious relations between separate objects, and between objects and feelings or ideas, which it is the function of poetry to reveal. These relations exist independently, not indeed of Thought, but of any individual thinker. And according to whether the footsteps are echoed in primitive language, or late on, in the made metaphors of poets, we hear them after a different fashion and for different reasons. The language of primitive men reports them as direct perceptual experience. The speaker has observed a unity, and is not therefore himself conscious of relation. But we, in the development of consciousness, have lost the power to see. Our sophistication, like Odin's, has cost us an eye; and now it is the language of poets, in so far as they create true metaphors, which must restore this unity conceptually, after it has been lost from perception. Thus, the "before unapprehended" relationships of which Shelley spoke, are in a sense "forgotten" relationships. For though they were never yet apprehended, they were at one time seen. And imagination can see them again.

Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction

First, the poet was conceived of as being definitely "possessed" by some foreign being, a god or angel, who gave utterance through his mouth and gave it only as and when it chose. Then the divine power was said to be "breathed in" to the poet, by beings such as the Muses, at special times and places, over which he had some measure of control, in that he could go himself to the places and "invoke" the Muse. Finally this "breathing in" or inspiration took on the more metaphorical sense which it has today definitely retaining, however, the original suggestion of a diminished self-consciousness. Inspiration! It was the only means, we used to be told, by which poetry could be written, and the poet himself hardly knew what it was a kind of divine wind, perhaps, which blew where it listed and might fill his sails at some odd moment after he had whistled for it all day in vain. So we were told not long ago; but today we are more inclined to think of inspiration as a mood, a mood that may come and go in the course of a morning's work.

Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction

Even by the end of Plato's career Greek consciousness had not yet succeeded in distinguishing either of the two opposed concepts of "being" and "becoming" from a third concept of mere logical "predication," as we do. The struggle to achieve this can actually be overheard, at an acute stage, in the dialogue called the Sophist. And if we go a little further back we come to a period when the Greek mind had not even succeeded in distinguishing "being" from "becoming." For up to this point Greek consciousness had actually lived in this experience of "becoming." And because of this the Greek mind could not at first be conscious of it as such. Thus, although the Greek philosophers were indeed occupied with a problem which we are now able to name as that of "coming into being," or "becoming," they themselves could have no such name for it, for being conscious in it, they could not get outside it and be conscious of it. So that, in a sense, this too was the problem of early Greek philosophy to acquire, as far as possible, the idea of such a world of becoming. And it began to do so, when Anaxagoras set over against the for-ever-changing world of growing and decaying substance (the "universal flux" of Heraclitus) the other principle of Nous or Mind. This was the beginning of the antithesis (hitherto unapprehended) between Spirit and Matter, and by Plato's time the central problem of philosophy was how spirit, or Nous "becomes" matter, or how matter, at certain times and seasons imitates or takes the "form" of spirit. It is no wonder that the Greeks were a nation of artists!

Owen Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age

On the occasion of the Fall . . . Lucifer induced man to begin hiding and hoarding his inner life, and to take pride in it as a "room of one's own" making it into something separate and detached alike from its own outward manifestation (nature) and the inner world of Spirit-Beings. In the inner-life: instead of the old "being filled with Spirit-Beings"—Egotism. In the outer life: instead of the old experiencing of nature as one's own manifestation—a complete falling-apart of Man and Nature. Man is now started on the long road which ends in his present normal relation to nature, wherein nature is not merely his own outward manifestation, nor that of the higher Spiritual Beings who shine through him; wherein nature is not a manifestation at all, but an object—a finished work.

Owen Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age

When we think about the word Thinking today, we ordinarily mean by it something which is confined within our skins or, if you like, in a corner of our brains. But I am asking you to imagine it coming to mean something very different. Just as we look back to a time before Kepler and Newton, when Gravity had such a cramped and parochial meaning quite other than the spacious one we now attach to it so, I am persuaded that our descendants will look back, perhaps with amusement, to a time when Thinking and Thought had the strangely cramped and parochial meaning it has today. Because, for them Thinking will be something as to which one simply takes it for granted that it permeates the whole world of nature and indeed the whole universe.

Owen Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age

The way out may still lie through and not back. The best way of escape from deep-rooted error has often proved to be, to pursue it to its logical conclusion, that is, to go on taking it seriously and see what follows. Only we must be consistent. We must take it really seriously. We must give up double-think. For inconsistent and slovenly thought can abide indefinitely in error without any feeling of discomfort.

Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances

When we look back on past periods of history, we are often confronted with inconsistencies and blind spots in human thinking, which to us are so palpable that we are almost astonished out of belief. We find it hard to credit the inescapable fact that they remained, for decades or for centuries, completely invisible not only to the generality of men but also to the choicest and wisest spirits of the age. Such are the Athenian emphasis on liberty with the system of slavery accepted as a matter of course; the notion that the truth could be ascertained and justice done with the help of trial by battle; the Calvinist doctrine of pre-election for eternal damnation; the co-existence of a Christian ethic with an economic doctrine of ruthless laissez-faire. . . .

I believe that the blind-spot which posterity will find most startling in the last hundred years or so of Western civilization is, that it had, on the one hand, a religion which differed from all others in its acceptance of time, and of a particular point in time, as a cardinal element in its faith: that it had, on the other hand, a picture in its mind of the history of the earth and man as an evolutionary process; and that it neither saw nor supposed any connection whatever between the two.

Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances

To put it mildly, any reasonably honest fool can be objective about objects. It must be a different matter altogether, should we be called on to attend, not alone to matter, but to spirit; when a man would have to practice distinguishing what in himself comes solely from his private personality memories, for instance, and all the horseplay, of the Freudian subconscious from what comes also from elsewhere. Then indeed subjectivity is not something that was handed us on a plate once and for all by Descartes, but something that would really have to be achieved, and which must require for its achievement, not only exceptional mental concentration but other efforts and qualities, including moral ones, as well. The self which uses language is indeed the personal self; but the self which utters it which had made utterance possible at all is a something more within the personal self; and this is a distinction about which it is not easy to become objective.

Owen Barfield, The Rediscovery of Meaning

[Scientists] have now got hold of this method of knowledge, which by definition, excludes man and all his values from the object to be known and they have found it very useful. But not content with this, they go on insisting that the method itself has a human value and enhances human dignity. They are like children thinking they can have it both ways. First they insist on cutting out awe and reverence and wisdom and substituting sophistication as the goal of knowledge; and then they talk about this method of theirs with reverence and awe and expect us to look up to them as wise and venerable men.

Owen Barfield, Worlds Apart

It is in association with the symbols which we call names that we build up, from childhood on, the coherent world of distinct shapes and objects which we call 'nature.' The "merest" sense-experience we can imagine ourselves having is also a process of formulation. Whatever else it is . . . the world that actually meets our senses is not a world of "things," which we are then invited to speculate on or experiment with. Any world which pure sensation xxx pure sensitivity to stimuli xxx could experience must be a mere plethora, what William James tried to suggest with his phrase "a blooming, buzzing confusion." Yet we never do in fact consciously experience such a world. We have converted the percepts into concepts, and moreover into systems of concepts, before we even know we have been hit by them. As far as our conscious experience is concerned, the perceptual world comes over its horizon already organized. But who has done the organizing? What are you going to call this preconscious organizing of perceptual experience, which gives us the world as we actually and consciously experience it? Coleridge called it "primary imagination." My friend Barfield called it "figuration." Langer, who has dealt with it much more fully and authoritatively, calls it "formulation." Both of them, and Cassirer, and many others, agree that it is the same activity as the activity which we call, when we are aware of it, thinking.

Owen Barfield, Worlds Apart