Barfield Scholarship
Essays, Book Chapters, and Monographs
on Owen Barfield and His Work

 R. J. Reilly
Anthroposophical Romanticism

Anything like a general recognition of Barfield's work has been a long time coming, and since he does not work in such popular forms as fiction or poetry, it is unlikely that he will ever be as well known as Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien. His reputation, if it grows--as it surely should--is likely to be in the areas of literary theory, philology, and theology. A recent writer, for example, has discussed his work in connection with that of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and theologian Robert W. Funk has cited his work often and approvingly in a discussion of the New Testament parables. To my knowledge Barfield has made only one real attempt to popularize his general views, an essay entitled "The Rediscovery of Meaning" which he contributed to the Saturday Evening Post series entitled "Adventures of the Mind." It is a remarkably readable and condensed version of arguments he has been advancing for some forty years, but even so it did not create a Tribe of Owen. Barfield's work, even when popularized, remains, as Huck Finn said of Pilgrim's Progress, interesting but tough.1

Probably most readers who know Barfield were first led to read him from Lewis' remarks about him in Surprised By Joy and other books. In trying to assess his own intellectual development, Lewis places Barfield along with Chesterton and Macdonald as among the most important conscious influences on him. They studied together at Oxford after World War I, and he notes that Barfield and he carried on what he calls a "Great War," but that Barfield "changed me a good deal more than I him. Much of the thought which he afterwards put into Poetic Diction had already become mine before that important little book appeared. It would be strange if it had not. He was of course not so learned as he has since become; but the genius was already there."2 And Lewis' Allegory of Love is dedicated to Barfield, the "wisest and best of my unofficial teachers." This is indeed high praise from one of the most respected of modern scholars, and perhaps many readers of Lewis turn to Barfield with some anticipation at the thought of finding the Real Lewis or the Man Behind Lewis, as a generation ago they might have turned with some eagerness to find the Real Kittredge or the Man Behind Lowes.

What they find, probably to their dismay, is an Anthroposophist, a man who insists on referring to Rudolf Steiner as his master: in short, an "occultist." It is no doubt Barfield's unabashed association of himself with the Anthroposophical movement that has helped to keep him relatively unread until quite recently. The general reader, once he has assimilated the almost unpronounceable name, very likely connects Anthroposophy with Theosophy, and thus with Madame Blavatsky, automatic writing, seances, ectoplasm, and so on, and dismisses the whole thing with a shrug and a superior smile. Barfield has said little about his own relative obscurity, but he has commented on that of Steiner, and his comments indicate his belief that a great mind has been left largely unexplored. People who have been willing to listen to what they thought were Barfield's ideas have simply stopped listening when he began to speak of Steiner. Even Lewis, "who was meticulous, if ever a man was, about passing on hearsay judgments," simply rejected Steiner out of hand. The resistance to Steiner has been a "combination of a refusal to investigate with a readiness to dismiss." It may be the very word occult, Barfield thinks, which has played a great part in this rejection, since the "principal source-book" of Anthroposophy is entitled Occult Science: An Outline. And yet any fair-minded scholar concerned with the history of thought would soon discover on reading Steiner that the word occult "signifies no more than what a more conventionally phrased cosmogony would determine as "non-phenomenal," "noumenal," "transcendental." However, the word, connoting as it does for the contemporary mind secrecy and concealment, even magic and witchery, has helped to seal Steiner's work off from the larger public. But this will not always remain the case, Barfield believes: "future historians of Western thought will interpret the appearance of Romantic philosophy towards the close of the eighteenth century as foreshadowing the advent of Rudolf Steiner towards the close of the nineteenth. . . ."3

To readers who react to occultism as Lewis did--that is, to most of us--Barfield's comments on the word occult itself may seem merely an ad hoc argument. For Steiner's work. Yet it is worth reminding ourselves that perfectly respectable and even "great" writers have not disdained certain forms of occultism; we think at once of Blake and Emerson and Yeats, perhaps of Milton, and Thomas Browne and his love of "the Hermetic Philosophy." We may assume that we can separate the occult elements in these men's work from the "legitimate" elements, but this is surely an illusion. Further, as Evelyn Underhill has pointed out, it has always been difficult to draw a clear line between mystical experience and certain occult writings. It is also a truism that we live in an age of empirical science and are thus suspicious of anything not verifiable by empirical evidence. Depth psychology, for example, has achieved respectability by assuming the status of empirical science; this scientific position, particularly in clinical psychiatry, has been buttressed by the popular analogy between mental and physical illness. Yet, recalling Barfield's synonyms for occult, we may say with real truth that the psychiatrist deals with "noumenal" or "transcendental" realities--with invisible forces that he calls the Id or the Ego or the Super Ego--that these things are not verifiable or demonstrable as the phenomena of the botanist or biologist are verifiable and demonstrable. The Id or the Ego or the unconscious mind itself are not things at all in the empirical sense; they are mental constructs--what Barfield might call "notional models"--in short, "occult" phenomena, if we can forget the connotations of the adjective. I am not marshaling an argument for occultism in general, but a last point should be made about Anthroposophy. If it is not a religion itself, it surely has religious implications. Chesterton long ago pointed out that religion of its very nature will produce cranks and fanatics; and the observation is true of any religion that has not been reduced to sheer rational theology, such as eighteenth-century Deism or nineteenth-century Unitarianism. In any system of worship that produces what Jonathan Edwards called "religious affections," there will be some who go too near the fire, and there will be mystics--and fanatics and cranks--whether the religion is Anglicanism, Catholicism, or Buddhism. Anthroposophy no doubt has its share of cranks and eccentrics, but that fact of itself proves nothing one way or the other except that the movement helps shape one's religion. That Barfield himself is not a crank or eccentric will be clear to anyone who reads him.

Barfield's clearest assessment of his debt to Steiner occurs in the book I have been citing, in the introduction to Romanticism Comes of Age. Here Barfield speaks of two early "discoveries" that he had made for himself about literature. The first was that there is something "magic" about certain combinations of words, that they have a power not easily explained. "It seemed there was some magic in it; and a magic which not only gave me pleasure, but also reacted on and expanded the meanings of the individual words concerned" (9). The second discovery was connected with the first; it was

The beliefs about poetic combinations of words led him at once to the romantic poets and their doctrines of imagination and then to the general conclusion that romanticism had never fulfilled itself, that in spite of Coleridge and Goethe, it had never been philosophically "justified." It was at this point in his studies that he discovered Steiner's work, and particularly three things about it. "The first was that many of the statements and ideas which I found there produced an effect very similar to the combinations of words to which I have already alluded . . . . Something happened; one felt wiser. This was a fact." The second thing was that Steiner's scattered remarks on language showed that he had anticipated Barfield's own philological theories. And the third thing was "that Anthroposophy included and transcended not only my own poor stammering theory of poetry as knowledge, but the whole Romantic philosophy. It was nothing less than Romanticism grown up."

Since what I hope to do in the following pages is to examine Barfield's avowedly romantic notions about poetry and language and imagination, and to show their religious implications, it will be best to begin with a sketch of his "world view," his basic vision of being or things in general. But such a sketch, as we have seen, will have to be preceded by some brief examination of Steiner's thought. I am not competent to conduct more than a cursory examination of Anthroposophy, and for the most part I shall cite Barfield's own comments on Steiner's work. Occasionally I shall cite Steiner himself--his Mystics of the Renaissance and one of his major books, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity--a book which (as Lewis said about Anthroposophy in general) has "a re-assuring Germanic dullness about it."4

Anthroposophy is usually described as an offshoot of the older Theosophical movement popularized about the turn of the century by Madame Blavatsky; and one of the ways of distinguishing between the two schools is to say that they differ in their philosophical orientation or background. Theosophy stresses Eastern elements of thought, mostly Buddhist, while Anthroposophy (at least, so far as Steiner is its spokesman) works largely within the framework of German nineteenth-century Idealism. But a better distinction is that Theosophy is hardly philosophical at all, but is rather a mystery religion, a modern Gnosticism--in short, it is "occult" in the usual modern sense of that term. Anthroposophy does not ignore Eastern thought--in fact. it does not ignore Idealistic thought of any kind--but it attempts to systematize it. The Buddhist doctrine of maya--of the phenomenal world as illusion, or of matter itself as unreal--contains an element of truth for the Anthroposophist, as it did for romantics like Emerson and Coleridge and Goethe, who often described the phenomenal world as spiritual in essence but perceived under the mode of matter, The romantic imagination, in fact, as Barfield says, was "the emergence in the West of an experience which the East had cultivated for ages." And he quotes Sir Walter Raleigh: "'Time and again, when East meets West, the spirit of Romance has been born.'"

Now Steiner's philosophy, as Barfield notes, is primarily epistemology. It begins with the process of thinking itself, not with the concepts which are the results of this process. Steiner refers to his philosophy interchangeably as Monism or Objective Idealism; it differs from Subjective Idealism in that a Subjective Idealist like Hegel, for example, "'regards the concept as something primary and ultimate.' " But the concept cannot be the primary phenomenon; nothing in fact can be the primary phenomenon except thinking itself. As Barfield says, the epistemologist must start from zero, with no a priori assumptions. When this is done, when one begins with thinking itself, one finds that "thinking is anterior even to the elementary distinction between subject and object," because, as Steiner says, thinking "produces these two concepts just as it produces all others." Steiner elaborates:

When this process of thinking is combined with the percepts--what is taken in by the senses--then real subjectivity is achieved: "my separate existence apart from nature and apart from my fellow human beings."

It would seem then that we can make a neat division between the subjective human entity and the phenomenal world outside him, since, though thinking itself is not subjective, at least the percepts are. But this division cannot be that sharp, since the percepts themselves are meaningless without the concepts which thinking attaches to them. A phenomenon perceived but not thought about cannot really be said to be perceived at all; perception without thought would be only what William James called "blooming, buzzing confusion." As Steiner puts it: "The percept . . . is not something finished and self-contained, but one side only of the total reality. The other side is the concept. The act of cognition is the synthesis of percept and concept. Only the percept and concept together constitute the whole thing."5 Thus, if we regard the phenomenal world as the "Given," then we must suppose that "If there is to be knowledge, everything depends on there being, somewhere within the Given, a held in which our cognitive activity does not merely presuppose the Given, but is at work in the very heart of the Given itself." The link between phenomena and the perceiving-thinking subject supposes that "the object of observation is qualitatively identical with the activity directed upon it." And that activity, Barfield adds, is thinking itself.

Barfield clarifies the issue by distinguishing between the "net Given" and the "specious Given," borrowing from William James's distinction between the "real" and "specious" present. The net Given is what is really "out there," what Kant meant by the noumenal world; the specious Given is what we experience by the synthesis of perceiving and thinking, Kant's phenomenal world. We never experience the net Given as such, only the specious Given. The net Given is "saturated at all points with the activity of thinking, past and present." The empirical methods of science, to the extent that they confuse the net Given which is independent of human thought) with the specious Given, are thus fallacious. Any "edifice of knowledge or science erected on the specious Given is incomplete and unreliable--for we know that the latter already includes the results of thinking-and may well, therefore, be tainted with subjectivity and error." What, then, would a truer and more accurate method be for the achievement of knowledge? The answer comes by analyzing that link between phenomena and knower, that process which is qualitatively the same as the object known: thinking.

It is in this realm where language is born, the imagination, that Barfield has been working for forty years. In fact, as we shall see, his work may really be called Anthroposophy philologically considered.

One of the most important elements of Barfield's thought is his view of evolution, a view which is in many respects the reverse of the commonly held post-Darwinian notion, no matter how much that basic notion is modified. In fact, it is possible to give a rough outline of Barfield's thought based on just this point of evolution; in effect, that is what he himself did in the Saturday Evening Post article already mentioned. Here, however, I wish to discuss as briefly as possible Steiner's view of evolution, again using Barfield himself as my Virgil. The closeness of Steiner's and Barfield's views will be clear from later discussions. Steiner speaks of the "moral" aspect of Anthroposophy as spiritualized Evolutionism applied to the moral life6 and refers to his thought as supplemental to that of Darwin. Barfield has remarked that if one had to say in a few words what Anthroposophy is, he might well say "the concept of man's self-consciousness as a process in time--with all that this implies." The concept implies a great deal indeed. It implies an evolution of human consciousness which Barfield never tires of establishing on philological grounds but which, I believe, for Steiner must have been basically a religious dogma. "Through Rudolf Steiner," as Barfield says, "there was revealed the process of that gradual entrusting of the Cosmic Intelligence to man, of which the Incarnation of the Word was the central event, and which is the meaning of history." And again, "In language, as it develops and changes through the course of its history, we can watch a cosmic intelligence gradually descending and incarnating as human intelligence. We behold the microcosm emerging from the macrocosm."7 We have seen Steiner's argument that thinking as such is neither subjective nor objective but a process which precedes both classifications, and, further, that it is not thinking which makes man a subjective being but rather the combination of thinking with the subjective percepts. The implication is that thinking is not personal, not of itself subjective, but a part of a larger extrapersonal process. As Steiner puts it, plainly and repetitively:

Where all the heads "go" is into the Logos, the Cosmic Intelligence. Barfield reminds us that Steiner once said by way of illustration, "The mind is related to thought, as the eye is to light." And to this Barfield adds, "Everyone accepts the very special relation that exists between the eye and light; but no one suggests that light is simply something that goes on in the eye."9 The reader will no doubt feel at this point that he is not very far from Plato's World of ideas, nor perhaps from Jung's race memory, and certainly close to Yeats' Spiritus Mundi. In 1901, after Yeats had studied with Madame Blavatsky, he wrote in an essay on magic that he believed

But it is important to distinguish between resemblances and real similarities. Steiner's and Barfield's ideas (and perhaps Yeats' are more akin to Plato's than to Jung's. Jung assumes the general postulate of Darwinian evolution, the ascent of matter up to mind. Steiner and Barfield do not.

For Steiner, evolution was not, as it was for Darwin, simply a process by which matter grew ever more complex and highly organized until it finally produced human consciousness. It was rather, as Barfield says, "a descent, an involution of the Spirit into the Material, which it, the Spirit, organizes and transforms and through which it acquires a new intensity, a new level of self-awareness." But it was not only a descent. At a certain point in time--the time of the historical Incarnation of Christ and His subsequent death--the process became one of ascent, or re-ascent. Diagrammatically, Barfield says, the process of evolution appears not as a straight line sloping always upward but more as a capital "U."

This journey "down" Steiner elsewhere calls a "flight From Nature" and comments that "we must find our way back to her again," presumably as we ascend the right-hand limb of the U.12 Spirit, then, or God--sooner or later I think we must make the equation--progressively incarnates itself in the phenomenal world, then narrows itself into human consciousness, and at the point of the Incarnation begins a movement back upward toward Spirit again, having assumed, or subdued, all things to itself. Barfield sums up the cyclic movement by speaking of it as

Here the reader may be reminded of Chardin's belief that all things are evolving upward toward ultimate spirit, the Omega point of Christ. Barfield clearly has some sympathy with Chardin's view, but his criticism of it is that it begins as Darwin's does, with inanimate matter, not spirit, and thus misses the whole beginning of the story. One may think, too, of other views of the evolution of human consciousness, such as that of Richard Bucke, who believed he had found evidence that man was evolving toward what he called "cosmic consciousness," and that such people as St. Paul and Whitman were forerunners of this ultimate state. But Steiner has defined the phases of man's evolution of consciousness with some precision. I mention only the two stages which I think have most relevance to Barfield's work: the age of the Intellectual Soul and the age of the Consciousness Soul. The Age of the Intellectual Soul is what Barfield calls the Graeco-Roman period and extends roughly from B.C. 750 to A.D. 1450. It is the age in which conceptual thinking begins and develops, and with it the slowly growing sense of the subjectivity of human thought. Thus in the Platonic dialogues as Barfield says, it is possible to feel the sense of the speakers that their thoughts are not precisely inside them but both inside and out, partly fused with a process other than that going on in their own minds. Rut by the end of this period the sense of the subjectivity of human thought is complete, and it is just this sense of complete subjectivity that leads man into the next phase, that of the Consciousness Soul. That is the time from A.D. 1450 to our own time and beyond; and the time of the Consciousness Soul may be described as the time when the "severance, or birth, of the human microcosm from the macrocosm has just been completed." The Consciousness Soul, we may say, is "the having been cut off."

As over-simple as the preceding analysis is, I hope it may serve to make Barfield's own arguments seem less strange, may serve as a frame of reference which the general reader often needs when reading Barfield. Barfield is a philologist, among other things; most of his philosophical anti-religious arguments are supported by philological evidence. His "proofs" are frequently philological proofs, and if one does not carefully fellow his linguistic dialectic, one is likely to feel that he has flown from alpha to omega on viewless wings. Steiner's notion of God as a kind of Hegelian cosmic thought, for example, Barfield documents by philological evidence, and in Barfieldian terms God (on this level) becomes Meaning. Steiner's "process God" becomes for Barfield the evolution of Meaning from Unconsciousness to Consciousness in the human mind and imagination, and this too Barfield establishes by an analysis of language. T. J. J. Altizer has referred to "Steiner's mystical thesis that nature is man's unconscious being,"14 and Barfield arrives at this conclusion by tracing the evolution of language, which originated in the interaction between the human mind and nature. The dissolving of the subject-object relationship between man and phenomenon, which in Steiner seems alternately Kantian and then mystical, is a conclusion that Barfield uses explicitly as a major thesis in Saving the Appearances--where his arguments echo those of Kant and Steiner--but he has also satisfied himself elsewhere on linguistic grounds that the relationship is only an apparent one. All these arguments, and others, I shall examine more closely later on, but here, as a means of moving from Steiner's thought to Barfield's, I shall briefly recapitulate what I have already called the best introduction to Barfield's thought, his argument against Darwinian evolution. Inevitably it repeats much of what has just been said about Steiner's thought, but the angle of vision is just different enough, just philological enough, to show the difference of approach.

Barfield objects even to Chardin's "mystical" evolution, as I have said, just because it begins with the old Darwinian assumption that matter preceded mind, that, over aeons, matter evolved into ever more complex organisms, and that eventually the increasing complexity of structure in matter produced consciousness. With the arrival of consciousness in man--so the Darwinian argument goes--there came the correlative subject-object dichotomy between man and phenomena, and that is as it must be: it is true and inevitable relation. Man, detached from and initially different from, natural phenomena, can now study phenomena scientifically and can even bring much of nature under his control. He can do this because mind is essentially different from matter; that is where its power lies. Matter cannot meaningfully control matter: landslides, earthquakes, and floods are phenomena that man can understand, but they are not phenomena that the phenomena themselves can understand. Now Barfield's argument--conducted in great part on philological grounds--is that all the facts are present in this usual idea of evolution but that the perspective from which they are seen is wrong and, further, undemonstrable. And to the extent that this perspective has been taken over by anthropology, philology and religion it has caused great confusion. The historical study of language shows that mind (or spirit, or meaning) preceded matter; as the tutelary spirit in Barfield's Unnancestral Voice tells the hero categorically, "Interior is anterior." All the evidence buried in language shows that in illo tempore, as the mythologists say, in the beginning, man participated in, was part of, the phenomenal world, and that this phenomenal world was mental, not material. Primitive or mythic thinking suggests the same organic connection. There was no subject-object relationship. In the beginning was the Word (thought and speech, potential language), what Barfield calls "unindividuated meaning." The true evolution that has taken place, and is taking place, is the evolution of meaning in the human imagination. By analogy, we may say that unconscious meaning is gradually becoming conscious. It is this evolution of self-consciousness that leads to the notion of Personal subjectivity which we assume today, and the corollary sense that we are cut off from the phenomenal world. But in man evolution has become conscious of itself. Applying the corrective of Kantian epistemology, we can become aware that our independence of the phenomenal world is only a seeming one, that really we are still part of it, in the obvious sense that by our perceiving--processes we help to create it. We are distinct from the phenomenal world only as the conscious mind is distinct from the unconscious.

But even this realization that we unconsciously participate in the creation of our phenomenal World is only the penultimate step, If, to repeat Altizer's comment, nature is man's unconscious being, then the phenomena that man creates, he creates out of the depths of his own mind, and "what he let loose over Hiroshima, after fiddling with its exterior for three centuries like a mechanical toy, was the forces of his own unconscious mind."15 But if nature is man's unconscious being--or, in other terms, generalized Meaning which is yet to be concretized in phenomena--it should be possible for man to choose more carefully the meaning he realizes; it should be possible just because man has become conscious of his creative powers, has become aware that he can make new meanings and thus ultimately new phenomenon. Since it is the imagination which makes new meanings by new and different combinations of words that lead to new knowledge, it follows that if man could become more fully aware of the workings of the imagination he would, or could, more consciously individuate new meaning from the vast well of potential meaning that is both nature and his unconscious being. And this hypothesis necessarily involves a systematic study of the imagination and a willingness to put the imagination to work in the fields of science. The primary people whom Barfield usually cites at this point in the argument are Steiner, Coleridge, and Goethe. Coleridge held that the Primary and Secondary Imagination are parts of a single power. It is by means of the Primary Imagination that we "create" the phenomenal world by our unconscious structuring of the Kantian noumena. It is by means of the Secondary Imagination that we create new metaphors and thus new meaning. But as we have some control over the Secondary Imagination, so we have some control over the Primary. When we have understood how a poet creates new knowledge in a poem, we will have begun to understand how a scientist can create new phenomena. Barfield believes that Goethe came closest to this sort of imaginative science in his work on the morphology of plants. Committed by his poetic theory to a belief that there is an inside to nature, that natural phenomena have meaning, he did not approach his subject empirically but imaginatively. He saw what the plant "stood for" or "meant" or what it "symbolized." It meant "metamorphosis," he said; all the disparate parts of the plant are explainable as metamorphoses of the leaf, from seed to leaf is a process of sameness in difference, or transformation. The empirical approach can only show change from one thing to another--what Barfield calls substitution. In the same way the empirical approach to evolution can only show the same sort of substitution, not continuity, not sameness in difference. Darwinian evolution is committed to saying that matter evolved into something wholly different from matter: mind. But Barfield's notion of evolution is one of transformation, not substitution; it is a process of essentially the same thing metamorphosing into many forms but yet remaining itself: mind, meaning, spirit. And here Barfield's argument turns finally to the "mystic": for the systematic training of the imagination is really a religious matter, involving certain forms of introspection and meditation. It is, perhaps, a form of the contemplative life. And for instruction in the contemplative way we are usually sent to the masters of that way--the Zen masters, or St. Theresa. Barfield at this point usually directs the reader to Steiner.

I shall now examine Barfield's argument in some detail, an argument that has been remarkably consistent from its beginning in History in English Words (1926) to its present stage in Speaker's Meaning (1967) I believe it is obvious from what has been said at this point that Barfield's romanticism is closely allied with his religious views, that in fact romanticism and religion are for him almost interchangeable terms. A closer look at his argument, and the evidence for his argument, will demonstrate this union even more clearly.
 

Barfield has called History in English Words a "slight attempt at a semantic approach to Western history."16 The book introduces two of Barfield's basic notions, which I have already discussed in very general terms. The two notions--they are really two aspects of a single notion--are the "evolution of consciousness" and internalization." They are both arrived at and demonstrated by means of philology. As the title indicates, the book is not an ordinary "history of the language" text; it is an attempt to construct a history of humanity (beginning with pre-history, actually) from the history of the changing meanings of words. There are, according to Barfield, "secrets which are hidden in language" which only an evaluation of the shifting meanings of words can reveal to us. Other kinds of history can give us other kinds of information: geology, for example, can give us a "knowledge of outward, dead things--such as forgotten seas and the bodily shapes of pre-historic animals and primitive men." But the study of language gives us the inner secrets, for "language has preserved for us the inner, living history of man's soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness." What the book attempts to do, then, is to formulate a history of the development of the soul of western man, the history being based largely (though not entirely) on evidence gained from philology. For philology, combined with the findings of anthropology, can do more than tell us what the past was; it enables us to "feel how the past is." Language is a window in the soul of man, and as man looks out by means of it, so the philologist looks in.17

Abstracting the idea from the documentation in which it is embedded, we see that it comes to something like this: the history of meanings shows an evolution of the human mind from relative unself-consciousness to relatively complete self-consciousness. It shows a progression away from the aboriginal unity of man and nature and toward a human consciousness of self as distinct from things. In short, the history of meanings reveals Steiner's "flight from Nature." Recognizable consciousness of self as a matter of importance arrives (approximately) only in the period of the Reformation. With the arrival of self-consciousness comes the corollary belief that the meanings of things (what might be called the essences of things) are not in the things themselves, as primitive and early man presumably thought, but in the minds of men. The progression toward this belief Barfield calls the "internalization" of meaning. The romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Coleridge in England and Goethe in Germany, were the first to sense this process and its significance; they were the first to use, or at least to use well and artistically, a means of coming to terms with this process: imagination.

The first part of the book, entitled "The English Nation," is devoted to an imaginative retelling of the story of the Aryans (Indo-Europeans), which of course is nearly the story of western civilization. The second part, "The Western Outlook," begins the real thesis, and we begin to see the philological evidence for the evolution of consciousness, evidence which indicates that language pictures a "vast, age-long metamorphosis from the kind of outlook which we loosely describe as 'mythological' to the kind which we may describe equally loosely as 'intellectual thought'" (84) Approaching the level of the Aryan pre-historical consciousness from the point of view of religious thought, Barfield notes that the words "diurnal," "diary," and "dial" derive from the Latin "dies," and that "journal" comes to us through French from the same source. "These syllables," according to Barfield,

This is, in part, Barfield's picture of the pre-historic Aryan consciousness. It is not a consciousness dwelling in some distant age of metaphor, although the way the consciousness operates inevitably suggests metaphor. It is rather a consciousness which has not yet become aware of the distinction--or more accurately, in Barfield's terms--has not yet made the distinction between literal and figurative it is a consciousness for which the thought, or perception, of sky is the equivalent of the thought or perception of God. It is a dreaming consciousness which does not make metaphors but which is the substance out of which later metaphors must come. For it is the basis of western language, and embedded in it are the "natural" metaphors of later consciousness--the equation of good with light and evil with dark, of height with power and depth with wretchedness. (We must put on the armor of light, and facilis descensus Averno.)

Barfield, through the scattered hints and insights of language, traces the evolution away from this sort of consciousness up as far as the pre-Homeric Greeks, where he pauses over the word "panic." The word, he says, "marks a discovery in the inner world of consciousness" (82). Before the word itself came into being, the thing we call panic must have been, not perhaps a different thing, but a thing differently perceived by humanity. He sees in the word a miniature of the whole process from mythological to intellectual thinking:

And he goes on to note that with the Romans this consciousness of a real being, a god or presence, becomes much less real; the analytical mind, a product of Aristotle and later Greek philosophy, is moving toward fruition and the "mythical world" of the Romans is more like "a world of mental abstractions."18

One of the clearest examples of the evolution of consciousness is to be found in the traditions and beliefs of medieval science. Medieval logic, says Barfield, is Aristotelian, but medieval science is based on pre-Aristotelian Greek science. The important point is that medieval science was content to build on Greek foundations because there remained in the Middle Ages enough of the ancient Greek consciousness to make the Greek medicine seem worth continuing. In spite of that strong and growing sense of the individual soul, man was not yet felt, either physically or psychically to be isolated from his surroundings in the way that he is to-day. Conversely, his mind and soul were not felt to be imprisoned within, and dependent upon his body. Barfield then lists a group of words taken from medieval science "ascendant," "atmosphere," "complexion," "cordial," "disaster," "disposition," "indisposed," "influence," "temperament," and "temper." These, he says, "give us more than a glimpse into the relations between body, soul, and cosmos, as they were felt by the medieval scientist" (136). He next reviews the general tenets of medieval science. The body contained four humours (moistures). Diseases (distempers) and character traits were connected with the temperament (mixture). Through the arteries flowed three different kinds of ether (Greek, the upper air) or spirits--the animal, vital, and natural.

What has happened to the meanings of the terms of medieval science, says Barfield, is evidence of the process (corollary to the evolution of consciousness) which he calls internalization. Man is no longer thought to have any connection with the world beyond himself. Conscious of himself now as distinct from what is not himself, he has retained the former terms by rooting them out of their objective phenomena and transferring them to himself. So he is perhaps still saturnine, but no longer "influenced" by anything beyond the confines of his own will and imagination. That transferring, says Barfield, is the penultimate step in the evolution toward intellectual thought.

(Here, as elsewhere in Barfield there are echoes of Emerson, especially "Nature," which Barfield praises highly in Poetic Diction. In the sixth chapter of "Nature," Emerson wrote of the changing relationship between mind and matter: "The astronomer, the geometer, rely on their irrefragable analysis, and disdain the results of observation. The sublime remark of Euler on his law of arches, 'This will be found contrary to all experience, yet it is true,' had already transferred nature into the mind, and left matter like an outcast side world, away from our own warm corpse.")

Barfield then takes the same argument into another area--the rise of astronomy. The three Arabic words "azimuth," "nadir," and "zenith" appear in English for the first time towards the end of the fourteenth century (two of them are to be found in Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe). But they appear as a new part of the old context of classical astronomy; for the most part, the astronomers of the Dark Ages had relied on the Greek zodiac, and had mapped out the heavens into twelve signs. But the three Arabic words "express something which the ancients had, apparently, never felt the need of expressing--that is, an abstracted geometrical way of mapping out the visible heavens" (140). The new words express a new concept, and the new concept is possible only because human consciousness has taken another forward step is probable that, with the use of these words, there came for the first time into the consciousness of man the possibility of seeing himself purely as a solid object situated among solid objects" (140)· Anticipating the argument that Plato and other early Greeks formulated geometrical laws, Barfield points out that these laws were not so much intellectual generalizations; they were rather felt to be "real activities of the soul--that human soul which . . . the philosopher could not yet feel to be wholly separate from a larger world Soul or planetary Soul" (141). The progress of astronomy through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then, may be seen as an illustration of that same process of internalization which we have already seen in astrology and medicine. The notion that mathematics had its origin in the observing of the movements of the stars may well be true if we can account for its later progress by means of internalization.

The preceding arguments lead us to a rough statement of the chronology of the evolution of western consciousness. Modern consciousness began roughly about the time of the Reformation and became fairly widespread only in the seventeenth century. The Reformation, "with its insistence on the inwardness of all true grace," Barfield sees as "another manifestation of that steady shifting inwards of the centre of gravity of human consciousness" (153). But until the days of the revival of learning this progress towards self-consciousness is an unconscious one. "Up to the seventeenth century the outlook of the European mind upon the world has yet always felt itself to be at rest, just as men have hitherto believed that the earth on which they trod was a solid and motionless body" (161). But with Bacon we get the first real historical distinction between the ancients and moderns, and the beginning of historical perspective. The seventeenth century first gives us words that indicate this perspective: "progressive," "antiquated," "century," "decade," "epoch," "out-of-date," "primeval.' Also, as an aftermath of the Reformation, we begin to finds words hyphenated with "self" appearing in the language: "self-conceit," "self-confidence," "self-contempt," "self-pity"--the centre of gravity has shifted from phenomena to self. The seventeenth-century provides us with the most spectacular of proofs that man has arrived at something like total awareness of self in Descartes, who thought of himself as starting philosophy anew, nearly all philosophy since his time has been fundamentally the same, beginning with a kind of cogito ergo sum, moving from the mind outward rather than from phenomena to the mind. Locke adopts the word consciousness itself, and gives the newer term self-consciousness its "distinctive modern meaning" (165).

The last argument for the evolution of consciousness and the consequent internalization of meaning concerns the changing views of the emotions, what the medieval writers called "the passions." The philological evidence shows, says Barfield, that even in respect to the passions, which might be supposed a fortress of subjectivity, the shift from outer to inner has taken place. "The nomenclature of the Middle Ages generally views them from without, hinting always at their results or their moral significance. As evidence of this Barfield lists such medieval terms as "envy," "greedy," "happy," "malice," "mercy," "pence," "pity," "remorse," "rue," "sin." Not until the seventeenth century do we find words that express "that sympathetic or 'introspective' attitude to the feelings," words such as "aversion," "dissatisfaction," "discomposure," "while 'depression' and 'emotion'--further lenient names for human weakness--were used till then of material objects." The eighteenth century gives us words which indicate attempts to "portray character or feeling from within": "apathy," "chagrin," "ennui," the expression "the feelings." The same century transfers words like agitations, constraint, disappointment, embarrassment, and excitement from the outer world to the inner. It also gives a class of words which depict phenomena not as they are but as they affect us: affecting, amusing, boring, charming, diverting, entrancing, interesting, pathetic. And Barfield concludes the argument:

The day was merry and fair enough

Having established the reality of the evolution of consciousness and the internalization of meanings, Barfield finds that two results follow from these processes. First, the "peculiar freedom" of man is felt to derive largely from within himself; it is a product of those "spontaneous impulses which control human behavior and destiny." This is seen in the semantic evolution of such words as "conscience," "disposition," "spirit," and "temper;" in the transferring of words like "dissent," "gentle," "perceive," and "religion" from the outer world to the inner; and in the Protestant Reformation which, as was noted above, stresses the inwardness of all true grace. Second, the spiritual life which had been assumed to be immanent in phenomena fades: the life "in star and planet, in herb and animal, in the juices and 'humours' of the body, and in the outward ritual of the Church--these grow feebler." There arises the concept of impersonal laws which govern the world: "words like 'consistency,' 'pressure,' 'tension' are found to describe matter objectively' and disinterestedly, and at the same time the earth ceases to be the centre round which the cosmos revolves." The European mind has cut itself loose from its environment (fled from nature); it has become "less and less of the actor, more and more of both the author and spectator" (166-67).

Now Barfield sees the romantic movement as essentially a triumph because, utilizing the end product of the long evolution of consciousness (the end product is, of course, self-consciousness), the romantic poets saw the fatality of a dead world moving in a void, a world drained of its immanent life by the very evolution which enabled them to perceive its deadness. They may not have understood how the world came to be dead, but they saw the necessity of somehow revitalizing it, of bringing it back to some kind of life. There had been some stumbling poetic attempts before them, evidence that the poet at least cannot deal with a world of Hobbes' matter in motion. Both Denham and Milton had taken up the new word "conscious" and had applied it to inanimate things. Denham had written: "Thence to the coverts and the conscious Groves . . ."; and Milton: "So all ere day-spring, under conscious Night / Secret they finished. . . ." Barfield comments that

But it was left to the romantics and their theories of the power of the imagination really to resuscitate the lifeless world. Coleridge, in his distinction between the Fancy and the Imagination, is largely responsible for their success; for Coleridge defined Imagination (in Barfield's words) as "the power of creating from within forms which themselves become a part of Nature--'Forms,' as Shelley put it,

For Wordsworth and Coleridge, Nature is not only what we perceive but also what we half-create; "the perception of Nature . . . depends upon what is brought to it by the observer. Deep must call unto deep." Coleridge had said that Imagination was essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead" (211). The world as perceived by the senses and evaluated by the Understanding was indeed dead; but the world as "perceived" by the Imagination was alive, for the Imagination as much created it as perceived it. Imagination, for Coleridge, was "organic"; as it was alive itself, so what it bodied forth was also alive. In Kantian terms, it created phenomena, not ex nihilo, but out of the noumena. It gave shape, form, existence itself to the phenomenal world.

And this re-animation of Nature was possible because the imagination was felt as creative in the full religious sense of the word. It had itself assisted in creating the natural forms which the senses were now contemplating. It had moved upon the face of the waters. For it was "the repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation"--the Word made human. (213)

The book ends on this curious and rather challenging note; any explicit conclusion is left for the reader to draw. At the risk of being obvious, I shall draw it briefly. Barfield's book culminates with the romantics because the romantics were the first to do consciously what ancient and early man had done unconsciously--that is, participate actively in the construction of the very world itself. And conscious participation in the world-process, as Steiner says in his praise of Angelus Silesius, is at least analogous to divine creation.

Poetic Diction (1928, 1952), is dedicated to Lewis ("'Opposition is true friendship'"). It is Barfield's closest approach to purely "literary" criticism, and it is as a theory of poetry that it has achieved its reputation. But it is really a part of, or an application of, Barfield's larger argument which I have tried to summarize some pages back. It presents a philological theory of poetry and in so doing assumes the evidence and conclusions of History in English Words. But there is more than a theory of poetry involved; as the subtitle, A Study in Meaning, indicates, the book is also a theory of knowledge, as Barfield admits in the preface to the second edition.19 This preface is long and combative. Since one of the main arguments of the book is that it is the poetic and metaphoric element in language that leads to new knowledge, I. A. Richards, the logical positivists, and later linguistic analysts, and modem empirical science bear the brunt of Barfield's attack. Richards, in his distinction between "emotive" (poetic) language and "referential" language of course argued that poetic language never "communicates" anything, but is simply "expressive." The linguistic analysts, insisting on the principle of empirical verification in order for a statement to be meaningful, have attempted to reduce language to the state which the logician desires: a state in which the words used have a fixed and unchangeable meaning or referent. Their abhorrence of metaphor is actually a fear that the language will change under their hands and thus render their logic meaningless: ". . . logical judgments, by their nature, can only render more explicit some one part of a truth already implicit in their terms. . . ." The logician "is continually seeking to reduce the meaning of his terms. . . . he could only evolve a language whose propositions would really obey the laws of thought by eliminating meaning altogether" (16). And the empirical scientist, blind to the evidence of the history of language and the lessons of Kant, insists on dealing with the phenomenal world as if it were the net Given and man played no part in constructing it:

In brief, the book is a double-edged argument for the validity of the creative imagination; or rather it is an argument for both Coleridge's Primary and Secondary Imagination. In its simplest form, the argument goes: as the secondary imagination makes meaning, so the Primary imagination makes 'things'" (3I).

I have already mentioned Barfield's early discovery of the "magic" of certain combinations of words and the belief that they not only give pleasure but lead to new knowledge. He begins his argument proper in Poetic Diction from the same absolutely subjective state, the reactions of the individual reader to the individual poem. There must be an emotional reaction; if not, then for that reader what he is reading is not poetry. But the reaction, when it occurs, may be analyzed, and thus Barfield finds that appreciation of poetry involves a "felt change of consciousness.'" It is precisely at this moment of change that the pleasure occurs. Further, a significant new metaphor enables us to see the phenomenal world differently; it modifies the meaning of the phenomena for us. In this sense it repeats what language in general does for us on the perceptual level. If a man were somehow deprived of all the stored knowledge in his language, all his power of recognition would disappear as well. The phenomenal world would dissolve into chaos: colors would blur, sounds would fuse into a meaningless roar. Thus both language in general and the striking new metaphor in particular may truly be described as "an expansion of consciousness"; in the first case an ordering, in the second case re-ordering of the phenomenal world. When this new knowledge of the world remains a permanent possession it may be called wisdom (52-57).

Having asserted that metaphor may lead to knowledge and comes into being in language, Barfield turns to the problem of metaphor itself, really the problem of language itself. Max Müller and many other nineteenth century philologists advanced a view of language that is still, with some modifications, widely held today. Briefly, it is this: all language is dead metaphor; even when we speak most literally, the words we use bear traces of a metaphorical origin. The fallacy of Ogden and Richards' book The Meaning of Meaning, for example, is that they attempted to be scientific about language but did not realize that their own terminology--"reference," "organism," "stimulus"--was not miraculously exempt from the nature of language itself; thus the book is "a ghastly tissue of empty abstractions" (135). Müller and others supposed that metaphor came into language always as a conscious imaginative attempt on the part of an individual speaker to convey an abstract meaning by using the words at hand in a new way; and the words at hand for "primitive man" were assumed to be "literal" words, names for material objects or for discernible physical processes. But this is an absurd assumption, Barfield argues. If the etymological evidence suggests that the farther back one goes in language, the more metaphorical it is, then how can one posit a period when it was not metaphorical at all, but perfectly literarl? Such an argument does not proceed from linguistic evidence but from a different assumption entirely, the assumption of Darwinian evolution. When that assumption is brought over into the history of language it has to posit a primitive mentality to go with its picture of primitive man; it has to assume that early man evolved mentally as well as physically, and that as he did so his language had to change in order to express the abstract notions now becoming possible for him to conceive. Thus he began to use language as a tool, just as he used flint and bone as tools. But if we stay within the limits of the evidence in language itself, we see that Emerson's view must be more nearly right: language is fossil poetry. Early language is all metaphor, in the sense that an early word never meant simply a physical object or a discernible physical process. We recall from History in English Words that the Aryan word for "sky" included the meaning "God," or vice versa. And linguistic evidence will take us to no other conclusion about the nature of early language. The individual word always had multiple related meanings, or rather had what Barfield calls "an old single meaning" (91) which had as its referents a number of disparate phenomena, both interior and exterior to man, both mental and material. The natural tendency of language is to move "from homogeneity towards dissociation and multiplicity" (81). Müller's view of the origin of metaphor ignores this fact and is thus an example of what Barfield calls "logomorphism," which is "projecting post-logical thoughts back into a pre-logical age" (90). Barfield takes as an example the Latin spiritus (Greek pneuma). Müller would have it that the word originally meant "breath" or "wind" and that there then came a time when man felt the need to express the abstract notion of "the principle of life within man or animal" (80). But Barfield argues that

The natural tendency of language, Barfield holds, is toward division, toward a splitting up of original singular meaning into later diverse meanings. This is what Shelley sensed when he said that "Every original language near to its source is itself the chaos of a cyclic poem" (58). We have, says Barfield, a possible example of meaning in the transition stage from old to new (from singularity to diversity) in the phrases which associate emotions with certain parts of the body. Nowadays we make "a purely verbal allotment" of emotions to the liver, the bowels, and the heart; previously, such allotment was more nearly literal than verbal. In the case of the current use of the word heart, "an old single meaning survives as two separate references of the same word--a physical and a psychic" (80). But in our phrase "I have no stomach for that," we have an expression which is

What looks to us like a metaphor, then, is simply a meaning that was "latent in meaning from the beginning." In earlier consciousness, the material things which served as referents for words were not only sensible and material objects; they were not, "as they appear to be at present, isolated, or detached, from thinking and feeling" (85). There could not have existed the subjective-objective antithesis, for the antithesis presupposes self-consciousness. And self-consciousness "is inseparable . . . from rational or discursive thought operating in abstract ideas" (204). In a prelogical time, then, a time when meaning originates, man is incapable of feeling himself as distinct and cut off from the rest of the universe; or, in plain terms, he is not thus isolated and cut off. This is the state of man before Steiner's "flight from Nature," the preconscious stage of man-Nature unity.

How then can we describe the kind of thinking done by primitive man? As "a kind of thinking which is at the same time perceiving, a picture-thinking, a figurative, or imaginative, consciousness, which we can only grasp today by true analogy with the imagery of our poets, and, to some extent, with our own dreams" (206-7).

The development of consciousness shows us two opposing principles in language. The first is the principle according to which single meanings tend to divide; the second is "the nature of language itself at its birth. It is the principle of living unity" (87). The principle of division indicates the differences between things; the second indicates the resemblances. We find this second principle operative in the metaphors of the poets. It enables them

What the true poet grasps, then, and expresses by metaphor, is the ancient unity of thought and perception. (The "false" poet, then, is presumably one whose imagination does not perceive the essential unity and who thus must rely on fancy--which makes only superficial or "artificial" metaphor, such as Donne's compass.) And this ancient unity, this pre-conceptual mixture which included both the percept and its significance, is well called "figurative" or "pictorial. For the percept and the meaning were one and the same apprehension; the whole of reality, not only the percept or only the concept, was taken in as a kind of meaning figure. The ancient single meaning of the verb "to shine," for example, was "the same definite spiritual reality which was beheld on the one hand in what has since become pure human thinking; and on the other hand, what has since become physical light; not an abstract conception, but the echoing footsteps of the goddess Natura--not a metaphor but a living Figure" (88-89).

In short, ancient man apprehended total reality; or, rather, total reality lived within him and he within it. What existed (and all that existed) was Mind; it existed "as "Life, and Meaning, before became conscious of itself, as knowledge . . ." (179). What we call thinking "was not merely of nature, but was Nature herself" (147). At this point we see that Barfield's view of metaphoric meaning has led us back to the larger framework of his thought previously described. We see that philological evidence has taken us back to a time preceding the Intellectual Soul, when the distinction between subject and object did not exist in the human mind--or, simply, did not exist at all.

For Barfield, then, we may say that language is a tension between the original unity of meaning inherent in language from the beginning and the tendency toward the splitting up of this meaning, "the natural decline of language into abstraction." Since language is correlative with human consciousness, the same two tendencies exist in tension in the human mind: the imagination and the discursive intellect, the unconscious and the conscious mind. The work of the imagination, or the poetic principle, is "the bringing farther into consciousness of something which already exists as unconscious life." The imagination infuses meaning, or discovers it by metaphor; in relation to the intellect it is the "maker," and the intellect is the "user." This interaction between the two principles is the basis of all knowledge, whether "poetic" or "scientific." It is the way that the human entity arrives at truth. The empirical techniques of the experimental sciences are not ways of knowing, only ways of testing or verifying.

And science advances by means of the same process. Barfield quotes approvingly the book Thought and Things by the American psychologist J. M. Baldwin:

At the purely literary level, as we have seen, esthetic appreciation comes from the "felt change of consciousness." Thus in all poetry that is so appreciated, there is an element of "strangeness," which "arises from contact with a different kind of consciousness from our own, yet not so remote that we cannot partly share it. . . ." But the greatest poetry--or the greatest reaction to poetry--comes from the closest possible interaction between the imagination and the intellect, when the two momentarily fuse. This kind of reaction

Historically, great poetry is likely to occur when a given language has not yet become grammatically and syntactically "fixed," when it is still relatively fluid and malleable, as in the cases of Homer and Shakespeare. But what may be called the efficient cause of great poetry is the contact of a fine intellect, such as that of Keats or Shakespeare, with a current of "living meaning, such as that contained in Greek myth itself-Platonism-Esoteric Christianity. . . . " In such poetry, which is "the progressive incarnation of life in consciousness," we best see at work the two great principles of imagination and intellect in the act of creative tension: creating and using meaning. And these two principles, we recall, are principles of language itself, and therefore principles of the World-Soul or Logos itself. But though Barfield has called these two forces "principles," that is not the right word:

Barfield's next major work, Saving the Appearances (1957), is the one which began to draw more general attention to him. By way of preamble I may say that it is less philological than the work we have been examining so far and more directly concerned with religion and epistemology--the Steiner-Kant-Coleridge epistemology we have already briefly seen. Yet it is the mixture as before: the arguments from Steiner, from History in English Words, and from Poetic Diction turned now to a specifically religious application. The book takes its title from Simplicius' sixth-century commentary on Aristotle's De Caelo. The phrase meant that a hypothesis could explain phenomena but was not on that basis necessarily true; even two contradictory hypotheses could explain the appearances, as did the Ptolemaic and Copernican versions of the movements of the planets. Galileo's trouble with the Church, says Barfield, stemmed from the fact that he and Copernicus and Kepler came to think that the Copernican version not only saved the appearances (that is, satisfactorily explained phenomena) but was on that account true. What the Church feared was not a new theory of celestial movements but "a new theory of the nature of theory; namely, that, if a hypothesis saves all the appearances, it is identical with truth."20 Barfield's book is an attempt to explain not merely celestial movements or other phenomena but the reality underlying all phenomena. It is literally an attempt to explain the nature of things, to save all the appearances, by an extension of the theories we have already examined in the earlier books.

The book (the foreword to which thanks Lewis for help and advice) begins with a statement of intention: to look at the world in a new perspective and to see what follows from so doing. The new perspective consists of a "sustained acceptance by the reader of the relation assumed by physical science to subsist between human consciousness on the one hand and, on the other, the familiar world of which that consciousness is aware" (11). Modern physics especially has taught us that the actual structure of the universe--what is really "out there" and distinct from us--is nothing like the phenomena which we see or hear or smell or even touch. Realizing this, most post-Kantian philosophers have dealt at length with the extent to which man participates in the constructing of the phenomena which he perceives. Barfield intends, he says, to keep in mind this psychological relationship between man and nature, and also to point out (what we have already seen) that this relationship has not remained static through the centuries but has changed, and will continue to change, as a corollary of the evolution of consciousness. Barfield describes the overall intention of the book:

The opening chapters of the book deal largely with epistemology. Barfield uses the example of a rainbow to illustrate the fact that man participates in the creation or evoking of the phenomena that he perceives. The rainbow is not really "there"; it is simply "the outcome of the sun, the raindrops and your own vision." The analogy between the rainbow and seemingly "real" phenomena is very close. Science tells us that the phenomenal world consists of atoms, protons, and electrons--that even these are perhaps only "notional models or symbols of an unknown supersensible or subsensible base." Now the tree, unlike the rainbow, can be touched, smelled, etc.; but if science is right about the composition of phenomena--if they consist of "particles" (as Barfield calls them)--"then, since the 'particles' are no more like the thing I call a tree than the raindrops are like the thing I call a rainbow, it follows . . . that--just as the rainbow is the outcome of the raindrops and my vision--so, a tree is the outcome of the particles and my vision and my other sense-perceptions" (16-I7). The tree that I perceive, then, is what Barfield calls a "representation." Phenomena consist of my sensational and mental construction of the particles or the "unrepresented." (The particles, or unrepresented, seem close to Kant's noumena, the representations to his phenomena.) The tree that I perceive is not a dream tree or a private hallucination, since both you and I perceive it--that is, you and I construct a smilar representation of the unrepresented. Thus phenomenal nature--the nature studied, weighed and measured, the nature experimented with by scientists--is what Barfield calls "a system of collective representations. We have the same view of the universe because we have arrived at the same (or approximately the same) level of consciousness. "The time comes when one must either accept this as the truth about the world or reject the theories of physics as an elaborate delusion. We cannot have it both ways" (18).

Now a representation consists of the activity of the senses (perception) plus another process. We do not hear a thrush singing, says Barfield, nor do we smell coffee. Another activity must take place before we can say that we hear a thrush or smell coffee, or even be aware that we are perceiving these things. It is the activity that identifies, or puts in their proper places, these raw sensations. This activity Barfield calls "figuration," and the activity recalls to us Steiner's belief that thinking fills out the percept, that objects undergo a "rebirth" in mind or spirit.

Barfield next goes on to make a distinction drawn from the work of Steiner. He distinguishes between two kinds of thinking: "alpha thinking" and "beta-thinking." Alpha-thinking is thinking about phenomena as if they were really objective and independent of our minds; it is thinking which assumes the naively realistic view of the universe; it is the thinking characteristic of the physical sciences (excepting modern physics). Beta-thinking is thinking about thinking and perception; it is reflective thinking, the result of which is that we become conscious of the fact that phenomena are not independent and totally outside us. It is not a different kind of thinking from alpha-thinking; the two kinds of thinking are the same, but their subject matters are different. Barfield is concerned with "the interaction between figuration and alpha-thinking" (26), and is thus himself beta-thinking.

The next step in the theory introduces the most difficult concept of the book, that of "participation." Barfield begins his discussion of participation by citing the anthropological work of Levy-Bruhl and Durkheim among primitive societies. In effect he uses their work as evidence to support his earlier assertions about primitive mentality--its lack of conceptual thinking, its relative lack of self-consciousness. This mentality, Levy-Bruhl holds, is "essentially synthetic . . . the syntheses which compose it do not imply previous analyses of which the result has been registered in definite concepts . . . the connecting links of the representations are given .. in the representations themselves" (29-30). Levy-Bruhl maintains that such thought has nothing to do with the earlier anthropological theory of animism; the primitive does not associate his beliefs with his phenomena (representations). "The mystic properties with which things are imbued form an integral part of the idea to the primitive who views it as a synthetic whole." The primitive does not "dissociate" himself from phenomena, does not perceive himself as distinct from them. And "as long as this 'dissociation' does not take place, perception remains an undifferentiated whole" (31)· Turned around the other way, the lack of dissociation may positively be termed "participation." For us, the only link between ourselves and phenomena--except through beta-thinking--is through the senses. For the primitive, however, there is another link, an extra- or super-sensory one, not only between the percipient and the phenomena (representations) but between the representations themselves and between the percipients themselves. Thus the primitive mind achieves a kind of unity of reality (through synthesis) by means of participation or lack of dissociation. Barfield concludes the anthropological evidence for his assumption that the psychological relationship between man and nature has not remained static, that the primitive outlook is essentially different from ours:

There is a fundamental difference between not only primitive thinking and our own but between primitive phenomena and our own; and the difference in both cases is due to the fact that the primitive participates in both his thinking and in his phenomena as an active experience, while our participation in our phenomena is largely unconscious.21

From the preceding evidence about primitive mentality, it follows, says Barfield, that the general view of pre-history is a myth. We can have no real knowledge, for example, of the evolution of the earth before the arrival of man--and not only of man, but of relatively modem man. For the evolution of phenomena (including the earth) is correlative to the evolution of consciousness, since phenomena are no more representations on the part of that consciousness. So "the pre-historic evolution of the earth as described, for example, in Wells' Outline of History was not merely never seen. It never occurred" (37). Something must have been going on in the "unrepresented," but what it was would depend on the level of consciousness which perceived--and thus constructed--it. In so far as we really think we know what was going on in prehistoric times, we are simply projecting our own collective representations into "the dark backward and abysm of time"; we are creating what Bacon called "idols of the study."

Having come thus far in the argument, Barfield stops and points out the possible alternatives if his view is not accepted. We may adopt the "super-naive realism" of Dr. Johnson; we may kick our stone and say "Nature is nature, and the earth is the earth, and always has been since it all began." But this involves rejecting the findings of physics. Or we may do what Orwell called "double-think": we may ignore the findings of physics except when we are engaged in a physics problem; we may pretend that the discoveries of physics have no relation to the subject matters of other sciences such as botany, zoology, and geology. Or finally we may adopt the view of radical idealism; that the representations which we call phenomena "are sustained by God in the absence of human beings." This last alternative involves believing that God has chosen our own particular set of collective representations out of all the possible others of ancient and medieval consciousness.

Barfield then resumes the discussion of the real evolution (of consciousness) as distinct from the false (as it is assumed in Wells). Evolution as we ordinarily understand the term, says, Barfield, is an evolution of idols of the study. The theory reaches its peak of popularity in the nineteenth century because the original participation of man in his perception was not sufficiently realized, though Kant and Steiner had taught it. Thus phenomena were held to have an independent and objective existence which they do not really have: Darwinian evolutionists were alpha-thinkers. "But a representation, which is collectively mistaken for an ultimate, ought not to be called a representation. It is an idol. Thus the phenomena themselves are idols, when they are imagined as enjoying that independence of human perception which can in fact only pertain to the unrepresented" (62). (Here the subtitle of the book may be mentioned: "A Study in Idolatry.") And the Darwinian evolution of idols is not only wrong itself but begets wrong in other fields--in etymology, mythology, anthropology. The doctrine of animism is a direct result of the failure to perceive that the only meaningful evolution can be the evolution of phenomena following on the evolution of consciousness. The early anthropologists accepted Darwinian evolution as a framework within which all their results must fit. Thus they postulated a Primitive man who was simply a modern man "with his mind tabula rasa, faced with phenomena (collective representations) the same as our own.

When we understand the true evolution, however, as distinct from the evolution of idols, then history takes for us a different and a truer shape. The evolution of consciousness is correlative with the rise of conceptual reasoning (as we saw earlier) and with the decline of original participation. We have seen, from the philological evidence presented in History in English Words, that participation lasted into the late Middle Ages. Indeed, says Barfield, the "whole basis of epistemology from Aristotle to Aquinas assumed participation, and the problem was merely the precise manner in which the participation operated." As Aristotle is more subjective in his thought than Plato (further along in the process of internalization), so Aquinas is more subjective than Aristotle; yet even in the rise of subjectivity, which goes with increased self-consciousness we can see that for Aquinas, as for Aristotle, the principle of original participation is assumed. "The nous of which Aristotle spoke and thought was clearly less subjective than Aquinas's intelectus; and when he deals with the problem of perception, he polarizes not merely the mind, but the world itself, without explanation or apology, into the two verbs . . . poiein and paschein: 'to do' and 'to suffer'. . . these two words alone are as untranslatable as the mentality which they reveal is remote from our own" (100). And the whole of Aquinas's work is shot through with the same assumption; for Aquinas the assumption is so obvious that only once does he bother to explain it, and then by analogy: "Suppose we say that air participates the light of the sun, because it does not receive it in that clarity in which it is in the sun" (quoted from De Hebdomadibus, cap. 2). Aquinas assumed participation as much in logic as in the ladder of being itself:

We should read the history of western consciousness, then, as the gradual decline of original participation, the gradual increase of self-consciousness and awareness of self as distinct from phenomena which has (unfortunately, Barfield thinks) culminated in idolatry--the granting of objective existence to our collective representations. The glaring and wonderful exception to this historical trend is the case of Israel, which must be noted because Israel's religion is in many ways analogous to Barfield's final religious conclusion.

The Israelites in Egypt received from Moses "the unheard of injunction" "not to make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." They were enjoined not to make images when the people of every nation around them practiced the prevailing original participation. And "participation and the experience of phenomena as representations go hand in hand; . . . the experience of representations, as such, is closely linked with the making of images." For in original participation the link between self and phenomena is experienced, not arrived at (as in our case) by beta-thinking. "Original participation is . . . the sense that there stands behind the phenomena, and on the other side of them from man, a represented, which is of the same nature as man. It was against this that Israel's face was set" (109).

Participation thus began to die for Israel as the result of a moral injunction, while for western man in general it dies only as a natural process. This Jewish progress away from participation Barfield traces by the Jewish reference to the name of God Himself. The Old Testament tells us that the Jews, before they left Egypt, were told by Moses the real name of their God. The name, says Barfield, was thought to be "too holy to be communicable." It may be found written in the Psalms, for instance, but by the third century B.C. it was never read aloud; other words such as "Adonai" or "Elohim" were substituted. "The Name itself was pronounced only by the priests in the Temple when blessing the people or by the High Priest on the Day of Atonement. Other precautions and uses emphasized and preserved its ineffable quality. The Name is written in four consonants and is taken from a verb which means both "to be" and "to breathe."

This Jewish "ingathering withdrawal from participation" (114) Barfield sees illustrated in two encounters with God recorded in the Old Testament. The first shows God as still thought to be "outer" and somehow in or behind the phenomena; the second shows Him to be considered "within." The Lord appeared to Moses from the phenomenon of a burning bush; but "by the time of Elijah the withdrawal . . . was already far advanced. . . ." Barfield then quotes the famous verses which catalogue the natural beauties which do not contain God: He was not in the wind, nor in the earthquake, nor in the fire--"and after the fire a still small voice."

And Rabbi Maimonides, about 1190, repeated "the mystery of the Divine Name. It was 'that name in which there is no participation between the creator and any thing else.'"

Now if the rise of self-consciousness and the decline of original participation (aided by God, in the case of the Jews) have led to the state of things that Barfield calls idolatry, what hope is there for the future? Idolatry is clearly wrong: aside from being forbidden to the chosen people, it does not square with the nature of things. But what is to be done about it? The answer to this question is the crux of the argument.

There have occurred, according to Barfield, certain "symptoms of iconoclasm," the major one of which (as we saw in History in English Words) was the romantic movement. The romantic movement was possible because, as consciousness evolved toward self-consciousness and thus gave rise to "phenomena on the one side and consciousness on the other," the thing that we call memory came into being.

The process of internalization has taken the meanings of the phenomena inside man, and meaning has now become available for his own "creative 'speech'--using 'speech' now in the wide sense of Aquinas's' word.'" The decline of participation in the west has had as its complement a "growing awareness . . . of this capacity of man for creative speech." The more man comes to believe that phenomena are wholly distinct from himself and have no immanent life, the more he comes to see that he can manipulate his memory images of them in any way he chooses. For the artist, so long as Nature contained immanent life akin to that of the artist himself, it was enough to imitate Nature because "the life or spirit in the object leved on in his imitation, if it was a faithful one." The artifact was more than imitation because the artist and the object imitated shared the same immanent life of theuniverse. But with the declne of participation, imitation of Nature became purely mechanical, to be replaced ultimately by photography. Thus men, sensing the loss of life in phenomena, egan to formulate doctrines of "creative art, in which the artist (in whom there was still life) infused life into the objects which he imitated from dead Nature. Barfield traces the beginnings of these doctrines of creative art back as far as Chrysostom in the first century, and through Philostratus in the second and Plotinus in the third. The doctrines continued up through Scaliger and Sidney in the sixteenth century, and reached their climax in Coleridge in the nineteenth.

But the romantic theory of the imagination went a step beyond its forebears. Properly speaking, the theory as it is stated by Sidney means little more than that the artist manipulates the images of things for his own moral ends. Literature can teach where Nature cannot because literature uses the images of Nature purposefully. It is in this sense that, as Sidney says, "the truest poetry is the most feigning." And it is in this sense only that the Renaissance neo-Platonists spoke of man as a creator. But Coleridge's doctrine of the primary and secondary imagination radically changed the older view. For Coleridge affirmed that the artist does not manipulate images of dead things outside of himself, but images of live things, which he himself has partly created by means of the primary imagination. Thus the artist was doubly a creator, both in the making of his objects and in the manipulating of images of them for his own purposes. Now all of this Coleridge knew as doctrine; but it was Wordsworth who experienced the truth of the doctrine. Coleridge knew that Nature is alive because his philosophy told him that he himself put life into it. But Wordsworth felt the life in Nature, felt somehow that the life immanent in himself was also immanent in Nature. He tried to explain it by theories verging on pantheism, and pantheism, Barfield says, is a "nostalgic hankering after original participation."

As Barfield points out, the distinction between the creativity of the primary imagination and the manipulation of the secondary may be seen in the division of labor between Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Lyrical Ballads.22 In the well known section from Chapter xiv of the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge describes the two kinds of poetry to be included in the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth was to write poetry that would have "the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature," while Coleridge was to write poetry that had "the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination." Coleridge's poetry would be the work primarily of the secondary imagination; though he knew of the immanent life in Nature, he did not feel it, and thus he would be reduced to manipulating the images of what he felt to be things merely dead and objective. Thus he would "make up" the "incidents and agents" and feign that they were "supernatural"; his aim was, like Sidney's, no more than to show his readers "the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, proposing them real." But Wordsworth, who felt common life in himself and Nature, would minimize the inventiveness of the secondary imagination, because it would be sufficient for him merely to "imitate Nature." He would write of subjects from "ordinary life," for something of the life of Nature would linger on in his poems. Wordsworth would not have to concern himself with the workings of the secondary imagination so long as he experienced the workings of the primary imagination, in which sounding cataract haunted him like a passion. He would be practicing original participation.

Thus the romantics were symbols of iconoclasm in the sense that Coleridge knew and Wordsworth felt that Nature was not an "idol," not something fixed and dead, but alive. Wordsworth, the pantheist, supposed what primitive man supposed, that God is immanent in all things, and thus Wordsworth misinterpreted his experience. Coleridge, saved from pantheism by his knowledge of Kantian philosophy, knew that the life in Nature is the life that we give it through the primary imagination. Coleridge knew that man stands in what Barfield calls "a directionally creator" relationship to Nature; man half creates what he sees and then manipulates images of phenomena. But what Coleridge did not know is the true nature of man the creator. Thus "the true . . . impulse underlying the Romantic movement has never grown to maturity; and, after adolescence, the alternative to maturity is puerility." The romantic movement might well have borne great fruit if Coleridge had known the kind of being he was as well as he knew the way that his mind operated. For what stands in this "directionally creator" relationship to Nature is not my poor temporal personality, but the Divine Name in the unfathomable depths behind it." What stands in this relationship is the Logos, the World-Process, working its way through and out of man's unconscious mind.

And here, having reminded ourselves of the nature of man (in Barfield's view), we may also remind ourselves of the nature of Nature. In speaking of Wordsworth as one who experienced the immanent life in Nature, we may have allowed ourselves to slip back into the position of naive realism. But such a position, we recall, is radically wrong. The Nature that we have been talking about exists in a world of thought. Barfield finds it ironic that modern man, prone to see the phenomenal world as objective and "out there," should have become so fond of Jung's theory of the collective unconscious. Our "literal minded generation," he says, "began to accept the actuality of a 'collective unconscious' before it could even admit the possibility of a 'collective conscious'--in the shape of the phenomenal world." For the phenomena are "collective representations," as has been already established. Thus of the hypothetical evolution that we are so fond of positing of the phenomenal world --our talk of "pre-historic" phenomena--the most that we can accurately say is that the phenomena which we posit for those times are "potential phenomena." But we must keep in mind that "the phenomenal world arises from the relation between a conscious and an unconscious and that evolution is the story of the changes that relation has undergone and is undergoing." So it follows that it is at the least "highly fanciful . . . to think of any unperceived process in terms of potential phenomena, unless we also assume an unconscious, ready to light up into actual phenomena at any moment of the process." The concept of the potentially phenomenal as existing in the unconscious is the answer to the difficulty, now that the old act-potency relationship of Aristotle and Aquinas (arrived at through original participation) has faded away. As was the case with participation itself for Aristotle and Aquinas, so "potential" meant something much more for Aristotle than possibilis did for Aquinas, though Aquinas still meant much more than our mere "possible." We have difficulty in "grasping process as such" because we are "hamstrung by the lack of just such a concept of the potentially phenomenal and the actually phenomenal. For us, "to ask whether a thing 'is' or 'is not' is . . . to ask whether it is or is not a phenomenon. . . ." And this is to be expected so long as we remain idolaters. But once we admit the possibility of the unconscious we have a basis for reaffirming the actus-potentia distinction; it need no longer be for us, as it was for Bacon (who did so much to help turn the representations into idols), a frigida distinctio (135-136).

Now in so far as we realize conceptually (by beta-thinking) that we participate in our phenomena "with the unconscious part of ourselves," we perceive as a fact what may be called "final" participation as distinct from original participation. That is, we apprehend by conceptual thinking what primitive, ancient, and (to some extent) medieval man felt as an actual experience. But this mere intellectual awareness has no epistemological significance; our representations are no different for our being aware that we in effect create them. There can only be epistemological significance "to the extent that final participation is consciously experienced. Perhaps . . . we may say that final participation must itself be raised from potentiality to act." But we can raise our final participation only by sustained effort: "it is a matter, not of theorizing, but of the imagination in the genial or creative sense. A systematic approach towards final participation may therefore be expected to be an attempt to use imagination systematically" (137).·

I said much earlier in this discussion that when Barfield's argument reaches the stage where he muse presume some sort of systematic use or training of the imagination he usually refers the reader to Steiner. So he does at this point--to Steiner and to Goethe. Steiner both practiced this systematic use of the imagination and described the process in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity:

Steiner showed that imagination, and the final participation that it leads to, involve, unlike hypothetical thinking, the whole man--thought, feeling, will, and character--and his own revelations were clearly drawn from those further stages of participation--Inspiration and Intuition--to which the systematic use of imagination may lead. (41)

At this point we might turn to Steiner's discussion, which is certainly full, if not as lucid as Barfield asserts. Unfortunately, that is like turning to Aquinas on angelology or Jonathan Edwards on the freedom of the will. Steiner's discussion presupposes a good deal more knowledge of Anthroposophy as a whole than I have so far supplied. The reader will be aware, in fact, that throughout the preceding pages I have tried to deal primarily with Barfield, with as little direct reference to Anthroposophy as is possible. In a way this is of course unfair and bears out Barfield's earlier complaint about Steiner's obscurity. But, whether for good or ill, Barfield's analysis of his relationship to Steiner is true, at least for the present: it is Barfield that people want to read, not Steiner. In any case, though I am sure Barfield would deny this, so far as notions like inspiration and intuition can be rationally discussed at all, Barfield discusses them far more clearly than Steiner does, and with far more relevance to the contemporary situation. I shall deal more closely with these ideas a little further on in connection with Barfield's essay "Imagination and Inspiration" and with his book Unancestral Voice, in which these ideas are dramatized, given a life of their own. Here I shall try to stay in touch with the argument of Saving the Appearances by presenting Barfield's main example of the trained imagination in the person of Goethe, though a few remarks that Barfield has made elsewhere about Coleridge and his relation to Goethe's thought will perhaps also serve to clarify the issue.

Let us return for a moment to the letter "U" analogy cited earlier. Man, on his ascent of the right-hand limb, will "pass stages of his previous descent; he will in effect relive them. But because the ascent is toward Spirit, toward ever fuller consciousness, he will relive them consciously. Thus early man's unconscious participation in his phenomenal world will be re-lived not only as a conceptual notion but as a conscious experience. The very concept of the unconscious mind is one of the "premonitory signs" of this next level of consciousness. Goethe's scientific work was an attempt to perceive from this next level of consciousness, to participate consciously in the phenomenal world as early man had participated unconsciously in it. And since Barfield's whole epistemological argument supposes that as the mind participates in the phenomena, it "makes" the phenomena, gives meaning to the "represented," it follows that a conscious experiencing of the phenomena will reveal more meaning than an unconscious experiencing will. By analogy, the adult sees more meaning in phenomena than the child does. Goethe worked--in the phrase quoted earlier--in the no-man's-land, or every-man's-land "which lies between the net Given and the specious Given, in the realm of Susanne Langer's "formulation."23 What he tried in a half-comprehending way to do is what future man will do easily and naturally. To use Coleridge's term, what Goethe did was to transfer "the esemplastic imagination from literature and art to science" (34). What Goethe called the Urphänomen, or the prime phenomenon, the thing in itself, corresponds to Coleridge's term "Idea" when Coleridge speaks of a science "'which in the Ideas that are present to the mind recognizes the laws that govern in Nature if we may not say the laws that are nature'' (148). Barfield describes Goethe's study of natural phenomena in terms that recall not only Coleridge but other romantics such as Hazlitt and Keats and Shelley who talked of the power of the "sympathetic" imagination by which the poet could identify himself with objects.

His method differs from the ordinary method of induction in that the observer, when he reaches a certain point (the "prime phenomenon"), stops there and endeavors rather to sink himself in contemplation in that phenomenon than to form further thoughts about it. It implies a certain--if one may use the word--chastity of thought, a willingness not to go beyond a certain point. The blue of the sky, said Goethe, is the theory. To go further and weave a web of abstract ideas remote from anything we can perceive with out senses in order to "explain" this blue--that is to darken counsel.

If we accept the premise that the phenomenal world is unconscious meaning, then Goethe's attempt makes some sense, since what it involved was "an actual participation in the Thinking that is present and active in the world of nature" (235)

He could make these discoveries because "as imagination reaches the point of enhancing figuration itself, hitherto unperceived parts of the whole field of the phenomenon become perceptible."24 Or, to say it differently, certain unconscious meanings of the phenomenon become conscious. Goethe's views were not accepted in his own time and are not now, because empirical science insists on treating the phenomena as "idols" in which the human mind has no part. But there is an attempt being made to study the phenomenon of cancer by a Steinerite group, the society for Cancer Research in Arlseheim, Switzerland. Their method--the Goethean method--"involves investigation of a part of the field of the whole phenomenon named blood which, for a non-participating consciousness, is excluded from it, not by empirical proof but rather . . . by definition" (140). Goethe's method is described by a modern scientist, Sir Charles Sherrington (who rejects it completely), as follows:

Barfield might add to this, it allows insight into Nature for the participating consciousness only.

However we regard Goethe's attempts, the fact is that he tried to practice final participation as a means of finding pattern and order in the universe. As we have seen, at the present time we are engaged in scouring all meaning from the universe by our insistence on the empirical method. We acknowledge our unconscious participation in our phenomena but insist nevertheless on treating the phenomena as if they have independent existence. But our consciousness is evolving, changing, expanding; and it follows from this that we shall be bringing new meanings to our phenomena--"seeing" them differently--as the conscious mind reveals more and more of the potential meaning latent in the unconscious mind. If evolution has become conscious of itself in the mind of man, if man stands in a "directionally creator" relation to the phenomenal world, then it is possible for man to "direct" evolution, to choose which way the phenomenal world of the future will be seen, and thus be. (If it is objected here that it is meaningless to speak of "directing evolution, that by definition evolution simply goes on by itself, then I think the reader must determine whether he is thinking of Darwinian evolution or Barfield's evolution of consciousness, or Steiner's mystical ascent to the One. If he is thinking of Darwin's or Barfield's evolution, then an answer to the objection is that in both cases the evolutionary process has no directing bearing on morality; expanded consciousness, in either version of the evolutionary process, implies merely an expanded field for moral choice; it does not imply moral goodness. Even a belief that mankind is evolving toward a more spiritual stage of being does not imply this, unless we assume some sort of Manichaen point of view and argue that man's capacity for evil resides in his body. If the reader is thinking of Steiner's evolution, an automatic ascent of man toward God, then even that belief does not imply immediate moral goodness, only ultimate moral goodness. Barfield is talking about the moral future of mankind.

But though man may direct the evolution of consciousness, he cannot stop it: that is where the note of inevitability comes in. We may choose a further evolution toward an even greater idolatry, choosing to cut ourselves off even more from the world outside us. If we do eliminate even the vestigial sense we have of original participation and do not substitute any other for it, we "will have done nothing less than to eliminate all meaning and all coherence from the cosmos," because "all the unity and coherence of nature depends on participation of one kind or the other." Such schools of philosophy as logical positivism, for example, have already tried to eliminate meaning from language, and meaning is "a valid relation to nature." And science in general shows the same signs of coming chaos:

Or we may choose to direct evolution in the path suggested by Steiner and Goethe, the path toward final, conscious participation in our phenomena. But even this course involves dangers. "Imagination is not, as some Poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil." Barfield cites the example of surrealistic painting: "so long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature." But when the fact of the directionally creator relationship of man to his phenomena--and to his memory images of phenomena--becomes apparent to the artist, there is the possibility of "aberrations."

Such aberrations suggest the possibility that we "could very well move forward into . . . a fantastically hideous world," just as the choice to move in the direction of a further idolizing of the phenomena could move us into a world that is "chaotically empty."

The choice, then, is portentous. We must choose the way of the imagination, but we must use the imagination religiously. That involves our understanding that the imagination is a religious capacity, and in fact a divine one.

Thus we must understand the nature of man and the nature of the world before the magnitude of our choice can be comprehended. Original participation began as "the unconscious identity of man with his Creator." But that this state of things was not to remain is clear from God's commandment to the Jews to forsake idolatry, the characteristic sign of original participation. We must understand that Christ (if we accept His own claims) "came to make possible in the course of time the transition of all men from original to final participation. . . ." The physical participation in the Eucharist may be regarded as preparation for and adumbration of this final end. We have been uttered by the Word and feel "the seed of the Word stirring within us, as imagination." The Incarnation has not been turned off like a tap; it continues, "for Christ is the cosmic wisdom on its way from original to final participation. And final participation, as the Jews learned, but forgot, is the state whereby man's Creator speaks from within man himself. . . ." Thus is the Word continually made flesh. And thus men are not hollow idols, any more than their phenomena are; they are "the theatre on which participation has died to rise again . . ." (85)


For the reader acquainted with Barfield's earlier work, Worlds Apart (1963) is a delightful and surprising book, because all of Barfield's forty-year-old argument is repeated but in a form that the reader never expected to find Barfield using. Within a slight fictional framework, the book is really a symposium, a grouping together of characters who represent various intellectual points of view. (Perhaps the form suggested itself to Barfield as a result of the various seminars and symposia that he himself began to take part in from about 1960 on.) The characters include the narrator, Burgeon, "a solicitor with philological interests"; Hunter, "a professor of historical theology and ethics"; Ranger, "a young man employed at a rocket research station"; Brodie, a professor of physical science"; Sanderson, a "retired schoolmaster" who taught for several years in a Rudolf Steiner school; Upwater, a "biologist engaged on research work"; Dunn, a "linguistic philosopher"; and Burrows, "a psychiatrist."26 The narrator, who describes himself as a friend of Barfield's, is bothered by the fact that, as Barfield said in Saving the Appearances, there seems to be no unity in modern science, no science of sciences, that the various sciences work within "watertight compartments, with almost no communication among them. Accordingly, he arranges for the above-named people to meet over a week end, and the book consists of a series of arguments--including a full-dress Socratic dialogue between Burgeon and Brodie--that lasts from Friday night till Sunday afternoon. Ostensibly the book is an attempt to give every dog his day, but this is merely an illusion on Barfield's part. What he has done is to spread his own point of view around among several characters-primarily Burgeon and Sanderson--and set up his old enemies (Darwinian evolution, false theories of language, the crudities of some depth psychology) among some of the others, especially Dunn, Upwater, and Ranger. Thus the book is really a monologue--dizzying in its brilliance--but not essentially unlike the method to be found in Aquinas, for example, where an idea is advanced, argued for, controverted, finally proved false, and so on. There are some interesting sidelights to the book. Hunter, for example, will likely remind the reader a good deal of Lewis. And there is some humor. Some of the names obviously suggest their characters professions: Ranger the rocket man, Burrows the psychiatrist, Upwater the evolutionist. Probably the best joke concerns Dunn, who takes the worst beating of all Barfield's opponents. A linguistic philosopher, and thus concerned only with the way that words "work" and not at all with "unverifiable" speculations in philosophy and theology, he drives a car with a "shabby body and perfectly tuned engine."

The form of the book prevents any summary which would give the real flavor of the symposium--the brilliant give and take of the arguments themselves, the occasional misunderstandings and quibblings, the way that one argument leads to another, and so on. Perhaps the best way to deal with the book in anything briefer than another book is to indicate where the real emphasis falls and to show why, out of the welter of argument to be found on the first day and most of the second, and especially on the third, Sanderson's point of view, or a combination of Sanderson's and Burgeon's, emerges as the victor--if not for all the characters in the book, certainly for the reader. In short, Burgeon and Anthroposophy carry the day, as a dream by Hunter at the end of the book indicates.

Briefly, the major disputed questions in the first two parts of the book are as follows: (1) Darwinian evolution--whether or not it is true, and if it is, whether or not it is still continuing beyond the biological sphere, in the social and intellectual spheres as well; whether or not mind produced by this assumed evolutionary process can ever arrive as objective truth, or whether what Hunter calls Reason must exist outside this process, since arguments basedon material and thus irrational grounds are always suspect. (Lewis is surely echoed here.) Sanderson's comment on this dilemma is that thinking may be a part of nature but not be produced by nature. (2) Modern science, whether it is justified in dealing with phenomena as things wholly distinct from the human mind (as idols); particularly, whether science is justified in dealing with phenomena as things wholly distinct from the human mind (as idols); particularly, whether science is justified in treating the human psyche as such a "thing" when it is other "things" that are analyzing it; whether, in fact, there really is such a thing as a duality of matter and mind. In the course of discussing these questions Burgeon brings up the whole problem of epistemology and resolves it generally as Barfield resolved it in Saving the Appearances: the mind participates in the phenomenal world. There is no absolute distinction between phenomena and observer; as Whitehead said, though he found it impossible to believe it, "'nature is man's configuration."' Barfield's earlier "collective representations" and "specious Given" become now "familiar nature," while his "unrepresented" and "net Given" (the Kantian noumenal become "inferred nature." (3) The relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind--whether there is such a thing as unconscious thought (Burrows claims that seven-eighths of thought is unconscious); whether the symbolic forms in which the unconscious expresses itself can be said to be latent discursive thought. If it is the unconscious mind which is at work in perception of the phenomenal world, then the question is whether the unconscious mind not only "fills out" the percept by adding a concept but also constructs whole systems of percept-concept combinations. In any case, if the phenomenal world is at least in part a construct of the human mind, then there is no need to put Reason outside of Nature, as Hunter did, because Nature itself is not merely a material and irrational thing, but a thing at least partly mental. Finally, if the phenomenal world is the result of a combination ot: "inferred nature" and the human mind, then the whole Darwinian argument for a long pre-historic age in which there was a solid earth on which man later appeared is simply a hypothesis unsupported by evidence. For the solidity of the phenomenal world is impossible without the presence of the perceiving and thinking human entity.

Ranger, younger and more naive than the others, serves as a foil at this point, as at many others. He asks if the whole first day's dispute can be repeated the next day. All agree, and the repetition takes the form of the Socratic dialogue already mentioned, with Burgeon as Socrates and Brodie as his pupil. The whole epistemological argument is re-fashioned, with additional reference to earlier scientific views. The classical analysis of phenomena into primary and secondary qualities--as in Galileo and later in Locke--is brought up and disposed of. All the primary qualities which were once presumed to inhere in the phenomena themselves--such as solidity and extension--are now known to be secondary qualities which inhere in the observer, with the sole exception of number.

As Brodie is forced to admit to Burgeon's Socratic question, "We now know, beyond any doubt, that all the attributes of the earth which we call qualitative are subjective." In the course of the argument that follows the dialogue, Dunn remarks that he feels as if he has been "assisting at a veritable orgy of subjectivism." He follows this remark with a disquisition on linguistic analysis which implies very strongly that most of what has been said at the symposium is quite literally nonsense, because the speakers have been using "a type of language which is appropriate to one set of circumstances, when we are talking about another set." They have all confused particulars with universals, he asserts, and have talked about abstract nouns as if they were "things," whereas they are only words which take on their meaning from their usage. About the whole epistemological argument that has taken place, he comments :

Burgeon in reply mounts a blistering attack on logical positivism and linguistic analysis. It assumes the viewpoint of positivism in general--of the whole complex of scientific attitudes from Galileo on--but it denies what positivism takes for granted, that the acts of perception and cognition can be analyzed into their component elements. It assumes, as Darwinian evolution assumes, that "man is a tool-using animal and language is one of his tools." But then it argues in a circle. Dunn implies "that language is no more than one of the tools of a tool-using animal; and if I or anyone else tries to prove the contrary, he objects that we are not using language as a tool-using animal uses tools, and therefore cannot be listened to." Such an abridgement of knowledge is "an outbreak of linguicidal mania" (106). Dunn has some things to say after this point, but it is significant that at the end of the symposium, when the participants discuss whether they should meet again, he is the only one to say categorically that he will not join them.

It is at about this point that the Burgeon-Sanderson-Barfield-Steiner argument begins to take over the symposium. It begins with Burgeon's objections to the rather crude Freudianism which Burrows advocates. Burrows, in a minor tour de force, reduces Burgeon's whole intellectual position to an infantile craving for a return to the security of the womb, and argues further that not only all intellectual positions but the great myths and great works of art in general can be so reduced:

Burgeon's retort to this is much like his rebuttal of Max Müller's linguistic thesis that there once existed a time when every word had a literal meaning and no more. In reducing all symbolism to infantile or early sexual experiences, Burrows is assuming the Darwinian notion that matter precedes mind, and that the child's earliest memories will necessarily be memories of his physical being. But as all words had at one time an old unindividuated meaning, so do the great symbols of myth and art. They will evoke early physical memories but others as well:

And after citing Eliade approvingly, he goes on:

And Sanderson add immediately, "And which for the same reason could never have been fully realized on earth."

A little later on, when Sanderson is joshed about his debt to Steiner, he replies quite seriously for both himself and Barfield when he says that "Steiner is more like a natural phenomenon than an ordinary writer or lecturer" and that he himself divides Steiner's work into two categories: (1) the things Steiner has said that Sanderson has both understood and in some way tested, such as Steiner's "theory of knowledge, and a good deal of what he has said about the etheric world and about the eteric bodies of living organisms"; (2) the things which Sanderson at least partly understands but has never been able to test or experience, such as Steiner's "account of telluric and planetary evolution"; and (3) the things Steiner has said that Sanderson does not understand at all (132). Sanderson makes it clear that he speaks only of things taken from the first two groups--particularly the first--and makes no claims to originality, though he finds it increasingly hard to distinguish his own thought from Steiner's.

The argument turns back at this point to space and space travel. Sanderson, having said earlier that "the 'contradiction' between spirit and matter is of the same kind as that between conscious and unconscious," suggests now that "it is not true to say that the human mind, and particularly its less conscious processes are cut off from the processes of nature because the former go on inside our skins and the latter outside them." When Hunter asserts that this can only be speculation, Sanderson replies that "the actual relation between human thinking and the processes of nature can be investigated scientifically." The capacity for pure thought, "the geometrizing faculty," appears in children, according to Sanderson, at about the time they change their teeth; before that it was latent in the unconscious mind. This latency, or potential thought, can be studied, and when it is studied one finds that this potential thought has given the human entity its "whole shape and quality." Even T. H. Huxley, watching a newt's egg hatch, remarked that it was like watching the work of a "'hidden artist,'" not simply a natural process. "The form," Sanderson says, "is built from without inwards," as if by an invisible artist. One may watch this hidden artist at work as Goethe did if one rids himself of the preconception that "thinking is an activity that stops short at the skin." If one sinks himself in the phenomenon one discovers that it is a case of mind meeting mind, not of mind observing matter. Further, the "homology" between ontogenesis and phylogenesis gives us a primary way of examining the evolutionary process, for the development of the individual at least roughly recapitulates the evolution of the race. Both processes are instances of the way in which a physical organism emerges from a spiritual background and becomes in its turn capable of spiritual activity. Psychoanalysis has shown that there is a way of bringing the workings of the unconscious into the light of consciousness, but there is another way as well, and if we utilize it we can look back, or bring to consciousness, the early development of the individual human being and, by implication, the early development of the race. For the development is a qualitative and spiritual process, not simply an organic one. We can watch the "inside" of organic evolution, as Goethe did. This involves bringing one's "willing" systematically into his thinking. But this willing is not mere subjective feeling; it is "objective feeling, which can be used as a means to clearer thinking and deeper perception." Here Burgeon adds, "Any competent poet or painter knows that." By means of this willful thinking, "he begins to petetrate. with consciousness, into those other parts of his organism where the older relation between man and nature still persists"; he is able to gain "direct access to the past" (127-53).

And when one sees into the dim past, he does not see Darwinian evolution but a descent from an immaterial origin, like Barfield's (and Burgeon's) view of meaning as incarnating itself progressively in language. As to the question of when man as man first appeared in the world, Sanderson says,

On the third day, after a few preliminaries, Sanderson, pushed by the others to elaborate on the basis of his and Steiner's views, does so in what amounts to practically lecture form. By strengthening one's thinking, that is, by turning one's attention to the thinking process itself instead of theorizing about phenomena, one may become aware "of a conceptual area which was previously unconscious." And since thinking participates in the act of perception, one may begin to "perceive parts of the world of which you were previously unaware." It is a kind of "controlled clairvoyance." He cites Steiner's analogy of the eye and light which we have already seen: "How much of the light I make my own, depends on how much looking I do. I do not create the thoughts I think any more than I create light. Thinking becomes conscious in me to the extent that I make it my act." This kind of thought, which Upwater calls "mystical," is thought that "expands from inside the brain to outside it." When Hunter asks incredulously, "Do you mean to imply that you yourself can exist outside your body?"--a notion loathsome to Hunter--Sanderson replies: "I did not say I could. I said it could be done." As Burgeon points out, the whole idea of privacy or solitude which we prize so highly is really fallacious, for their whole epistemological argument has been that the individual mind is literally in touch with the phenomenal world, that it forms it and is thus a part of it. In addition, the literature of "anguish"--Nietzsche, Kafka, Existentialism--has discovered that absolute subjectivity is a horror: man's terrible freedom comes only when God is dead (173-76).

But, as Upwater objects, if we suppose that there is such a thing as potential consciousness outside the individual body, and if we assume that part of this consciousness has localized itself in men as self-consciousness, then how can we talk of an evolution of self-consciousness? For self-consciousness implies individuality, and it dies with each individual human. Sanderson's answer is simple: reincarnation, "repeated earth-lives" (184). The Oriental view of reincarnation--that it is a catastrophe--is wrong, but the fact is right. It may even be--as Upwater agrees--that evolution is on the verge of a new stage, something like Chardin's notion that man "converging" toward an Omega point. If, by strengthened thinking, more and more men lose their sense of solitude, go out of themselves in thought into the thought outside them (doing this by repeated incarnations), then we may even say that men are evolving into Man. Sanderson sums it up by referring to what Burgeon has earlier said about "taking in" nature as we take in a symbol, not by theorizing about it but by letting it work on us:

The symposium ends, and a week later Burgeon receives a letter from Hunter, who had expressed some doubt about coming back to the next one. He has had a dream, he tells Burgeon. He was in front of two great closed doors made of some metal that seemed to be bronze. Music began, the doors opened, and three men-like figures came successively out. He paid no attention to their bodies, only to their heads. The first "had on his shoulders a kind of round box with two holes in it, rather like one of those turnips they say boys used to pierce and put a candle in, to make a bogy." And he thinks there may have been a candle in it, "for light was blazing out of its eye-holes in all directions. In some way or other he knows this figure to be Subjective Idealism. The second figure wears a lion's head--"an emblematic sort of lion with a very emphatic mane--spread out in rays--you know, the kind that suggests those old woodcuts of the sun." This figure is The Key of the Kingdom. The third figure is "a man with no head at all!" He is The Kingdom. The whole dream, he adds in Greek, was "Like a breeze blowing from excellent places, bearing health" (210-211). One need not be an analyst to see the progression Barfield intends: from the solitude of private thought, to the strengthened thought that rays out into the thought of the universe, to the absolute dissolution of private thought in the universe, or the Kingdom --or from subjective idealism to Anthroposophy to heaven. Sanderson and Burgeon have had their argument verified in Hunter's dream.

Though Barfield's "Imagination and Inspiration" was published two years after his Unancestral Voice (1965), it serves as a useful introduction to that book. The essay traces the decline of the belief in literal inspiration (a being outside the poet speaking to him or through him) to its modem sense of imagination. The concept has always implied the crossing of a threshold or boundary, the coming to be in the writer's mind of something which he has not consciously made. The evolution of self-consciousness has made it necessary to transfer that boundary from outside to inside the writer's subjective existence, from a "wholly other" outer being to the unconscious mind--whether that unconscious mind be regarded as personal or in some sense collective. The older notion implied some sort of possession or mania or ecstasy, so that (as Plato said) the poet did not know what he was saying; he merely repeated what was "told" him. The more modern concept still implies a kind of mystery, in the sense that the language of the imagination is the language of the unconscious; it is not a conceptual message which the poet finds in the unconscious but a message or meaning clothed in metaphor and symbol. And (as we recall from the discussion of the paradise-image in Worlds Apart), it is the nature of the true symbol to be ambiguous, to carry many meanings. Thus the critic or philosopher seriously concerned with myth, symbol, and imagination finds himself in a dilemma:

For Barfield, the dilemma can only be resolved by moving away from the notion of the imagination as an end in itself, for this connection of imagination with poetic creation is "a vein that has been, or very soon will be, worked out."

In place of this Barfield turns to what Coleridge called the "philosophic imagination," which is a means to knowledge, a perception (as we have already seen) of Goethe's prime phenomena or the Ideas inherent in the universe itself. "'Ideas,' as Coleridge said, 'correspond to substantial being, to objects the actual subsistence of which is implied in their idea. . . . they are spiritual realities that can only be spiritually discovered.'" It is the reason that intuits these Ideas, not the understanding, for (in Barfield's paraphrase) the understanding "is the isolated intellect of each one of us, but the reason that irradiates it is superindividual." Coleridge identified "the unconscious self with superindividual reason," and we know that matter, or the material world, is largely a construct of our unconscious minds in the act of perception. Thus to see Ideas in nature is to explore the unconscious mind, for the boundary between mind and matter is now within us, not without. The Ideas exist in both "nature" (outside) and the "unconscious" (inside) and are thus neither subjective nor objective. "What in its subjective aspect is idea, in the objective aspect may, for instance, be a law of nature."28

This philosophic imagination, Barfield believes, might better be termed inspiration, because though it does not imply possession or ecstasy, it still does imply "some communication with individual entities, individual beings beyond the threshold." Not Ideas, but "entitities"--these will be the discoveries that inspiration will make. Using I. A. Richards' terminology for metaphor--the vehicle (image) and tenor (meaning), or, really, meaning--Barfield asserts that the future of this kind of imagination will involve the discovery of clearer meanings than are to be found in metaphor or myth. The tenor will no longer be "polysemous" as in metaphor but "monosemous" as in allegory. He concludes:

Unancestral Voice is the chronicle of one man s encounter with an "entity" from beyond the threshold, an entity which (or who) reveals knowledge that is both monosemous and personified. The knowledge revealed is, more precisely than in any of the other major books, Anthroposophical "wisdom"--though, interestingly, Steiner's name is not mentioned. Burgeon is once again the central figure in a very slight fictional framework, and the "story" of the book is soon told. It begins with Burgeon and two friends arguing about the recent trial at which Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was declared not obscene. In Burgeon's view, Lawrence's arguments for "blood consciousness" and unintellectualized sexuality are hopelessly muddled because Lawrence knew nothing of the evolution of human consciousness. The next morning something happens to Burgeon as he is lying in bed. Something like a voice begins to speak within him, though he does not actually hear the voice. "And yet a train of thought began presenting itself to him in the same mode in which thoughts present themselves when we hear them from the lips of another. They included thoughts which he himself was not aware of having previously entertained."30 (The reader will recall here Sanderson's description of objective thinking, of allowing Thought to manifest itself in the mind, and also Steiner's analogy between the eye and light and the mind and thought.) This is the first of many such "visits" by what Burgeon begins to refer to as "the Meggid," after he has read an account of a sixteenth century Jewish lawyer who claimed to have been visited by a being whom he called a Maggid--a being whom the author of the account variously describes as "'identical with the divine Logos," or an angel, or a being capable of inducing "unreflecting intuitions" (21). In the course of the story, Burgeon comes into contact with the phenomenon of teen-age destructiveness and hatred of authority when he tries, first, to talk to the teen-aged son of a client and, second, when he has to deal with another client who is closing up his club for teen-agers because they periodically destroy his property. He comes up against the problem of penal reform when he attends a lawyers' debate on the subject. He meets two men on a cruise who argue with him from the viewpoints of Roman Catholicism and Buddhism. And finally he encounters the "crisis" in modern physics when a young physicist friend of his gives a lecture on the subject to a group of fellow scientists. On all these subjects and many more, the Meggid has much to say within Burgeon and, on one occasion, within the consciousness of the young physicist, Flume.

In the begining the Meggid's revelations are simply cryptic phrases--"interior is anterior" and "the transforming agent"-which Burgeon is left to meditate on. Later the Meggid's messages become much fuller, and he occasionally even answers direct questions but at all times he stresses the necessity of Burgeon's thinking for himself, using in his own way the knowledge imparted to him. The most important revelation--given and on several diffrerent occasions--is the truth about evolution. It is the view we have already seen: that evolution is a descent from unindividualized spirit into individualized spirit and matter--man and phenomena--and then a continuing upward movement back toward spirit--a return to the One, but not a submerging of the individual spirits in the One, rather a convergence of the fully individuated and fully conscious Many in the One. The Meggid emphasizes that true evolution is a process of the continuing metamorphoses of a single "thing"--the transforming agent--not a process of substitution, not a sequence of many disparate things following each other in time. The single thing underlying all transformation is spirit. The turning point in the process--the point at which descent of spirit into matter stops and ascent of matter (and consciousness) into spirit begins--is the Incarnation. The Meggid speaks of two Jesuses, not one. The birth and genealogy of one is described by Matthew, those of the other by Luke. Jesus of Bethlehem--or his soul--was the product of many reincarnations, as all men's souls are. But the soul of Jesus of Nazareth had never known any previous earthly life; it was "an Eden-soul, unfallen, and given intact from the Father Spirit to be the persisting link between the old state of the human spirit and the new." The two Jesuses became one--but not physically, the Meggid says. Those two souls united

Christ is "the transforming agent in nature" and also "the ultimate energy that stirs in the dark depths" of men's wills. He is the energeia of which St. Paul spoke--not me but God within me. And it is He, not men themselves, who thus confronts the "adversaries" (114).

These adversaries are "personified entities," forces which are also beings. They are the enemies of true evolution, or transformation. Burgeon has seen them at work in the debate over penal reform. He has seen them even more clearly in the case of a young friend who turned to Communism from motives of compassion for the poor and oppressed. But, as a fellow-traveler whose function was to create discontent by any means, including lying and fraud, he has become completely cynical. The original compassion has disappeared; he has become "energized principally by hate." His experience seems to Burgeon to be "a sort of psychological progress from warm feeling, through thought, into bitterness and cold. And so it was, as in the penal reform debate, where those who argued for compassion for criminals at once turned vindictive as soon as their plan was challenged." What Burgeon has seen at work are the processes set in motion by the two beings whom the Meggid names Lucifer and Ahriman. Lucifer works in the realm of warmth and light, Ahriman in the realm of cold and darkness. Together, it is their aim to thwart true evolution. Ahriman works "principally in the field of mind, leaving the feelings for Lucifer to exploit." They attack evolution from opposite directions.

Opposite to Lucifer and Ahriman are two other beings who also manifest themselves as forces in the world, and they are the shapers of true evolution. The first is Gabriel, whose work is Incarnation: "the course of his impulse and activity" is the turning of spirit into matter; he alternates with Michael, whose "field is the thinking that has been set free from the flesh. He is in the light, but not the physical light. He seeks to descend on the wings of that light into the nest which Gabriel has built for him in the minds of individual men." The Meggid himself is "one of the least of Michael's servants." The Gabriel age has extended from about the time of the scientific revolution to the end of the nineteenth century; and since Gabriel's province is matter and the world of the senses, he has directed men's gaze to the physical world and to their own sense perceptions. At this point--which is the present--the combined work of Lucifer and Ahriman has interfered with evolution, has delayed what should be the start of the Michael age in which man will develop a higher kind of thinking, a thinking independent of their own bodies (Coleridge's "philosophic imagination" in short, the Reason which takes part in the superindividual Reason of the Logos).

Thus man stands at the moment between two phases of evolution, almost, in Arnold's phrase, between a dead world and one powerless to be born. The world of solid matter, of the distinction between the perceiver and the perceived, of the warm sense of subjectivity--in brief, the Gabriel world--is past, or at least is passing, though Lucifer seeks to retain it beyond its time. Ahriman, for his part, seeks to substitute something essentially different from what has gone before--as Darwinian evolution sought to make mind simply follow matter, not really proceed from it. His purpose is "to destroy everything in human thinking which depends on a certain warmth, to replace wonder by sophistication, courtesy by vulgarity, understanding by calculation, imagination by statistics" (59)· And as the race itself stands between these two phases of evolution, so do the teen-age Mods and Rockers, for, as the Meggid says, the phylogenesis-ontogenesis relation is a faint mirroring of the true interior process in the universe. The teenagers have just emerged, as the race has, from the relative security of instinct and sense impression, but, like the race, do not know where to go. They sense what is true: that their elders are as aimless as they themselves are but will not admit it--thus their hatred of authority and tradition, which are hypocritical.

The Meggid also reveals much to Burgeon about the traditional world views of East and West as they relate to true evolution. On a trip to South Africa Burgeon meets and argues with Grimwade, a Buddhist, and Chevalier, a Roman Catholic. They discuss Toynbee's theory of history, which Burgeon finds tainted by assumed notions of positivistic evolution. When Burgeon speaks of evolution as necessarily being transformation, and therefore requiring an "immaterial agent" of transformation, Grimwade agrees. The doctrine of "Mind-Only," he says, is good Buddhist doctrine. But they diverge on the question of time. For the Buddhist Grimwade, time is cyclic; for Burgeon, and for Western man in general, time is linear. In this matter of time, the Meggid says, the forces of Lucifer and Ahriman can again be seen at work. Lucifer is the particular enemy of the East, retaining the notion of the perpetually recurring past and thus preventing evolution, which involves a movement forward in time. Ahriman is the enemy from the West, allowing men to see time as linear and non-repetitive but attempting to distort their views of the past (Darwinian evolution) in order to prevent the next evolutionary stage. Man's view of his past is supremely important, for without an accurate view of the past man's notion of what he is is distorted; he cannot understand that the immaterial transforming agent of history works within himself so long as he sees himself as simply the product of organic or even inorganic causality. His understanding of true evolution is necessary in order to "fertilize" his future (68). In the same way the Eastern notion of time and reincarnation prevents evolution, for though it implies repetition of individual life, it also implies that these individual lives are static--except for the few who "awaken" mystically to the fact that they are in or with Brahma. But, as Burgeon argues, if awakening is possible for the individual, why is it not possible for the race as a whole?

With Chevalier (who reminds the reader of Hunter in Worlds Apart) Burgeon's argument concerns the place of the Roman church in the evolutionary process. In general, it has ignored history, in the sense that it has never officially "studied" history in order to try to find a pattern. It has been content to remain at rest with its deposit of faith, with Revelation, and to assume that Revelation contains the only essential meaning of the world. It has been content to regard the Incarnation as what Charles Williams called "'The flash and the prolongation'" (93), rather than as an ongoing process in history. That is why, Burgeon says--speaking much like a Death of God theologian--the Church and Revelation are largely unintelligible and thus irrelevant to most of the world today. It has been so sure that history is a meaningless sequence of events that when someone like Chardin argues to the contrary, he cannot even be published until after he is dead. And many of today's most depressing social phenomena--the destructive teen-agers, the plays of Pinter, indeed the whole notion of the Absurd--are directly traceable to the assumption that history has no meaning.

But the Church has more than this to answer for. The Meggid, speaking through Burgeon, asserts that it was precisely at the time of the Council of Constantinople in 869 that the Church destroyed the belief that man participates in the divine Spirit, the Logos. It claimed it was dealing with what it called the heresy of the two souls in man, but what it really did was to obliterate man's sense of the Spirit being somehow within him. It retained the word "spirit" itself, but it turned it into an empty abstraction. In so doing, it destroyed any possibility of man's recognizing that this Spirit is the immaterial agent present in the world-process of transformation. "The real point at issue was the Dionysian teaching of the Divine Hierarchies--whether it should continue to be studied and meditated, or should be lost sight of for four or five centuries." The Church thus proclaimed that the human soul did not participate in the Divine Spirit; it proclaimed that the human soul was simply something like "the ghost of a Roman citizen owing allegiance to the ghost of a Roman Caesar." In this way the Church "gradually scribbled over the sublime image of God the Father all those insipidities of God the Paterfamilias" (102). In short, the Church interfered with the process of transformation by substituting something unconnected with the past, succumbed to the force of Ahriman.

The Meggid goes on to speak of the necessity of reincarnation in true evolution. Life and death are part of the "rhythmic alternation" of the process itself, and are echoed throughout nature itself and even in man in his movement from waking to sleeping, in "his breathing and even in the pulsation of his heart and blood" (107)· Death and rebirth are necessary, and this necessity is evident once man has abandoned his incomplete distinction between soul and body fostered by the Church. He will see, not only the necessity but the desirability of death, to be followed by rebirth. "But this can come about only as the crude duality of soul and body, or mind and body, comes to be superseded by a growing understanding of threefold human nature in body, soul and spirit" (108). Every death is an embosoming in Divine Spirit (like Emerson's soul "embosomed for a season in Nature"), and every reincarnation is a step toward the final and endless life in that Spirit. But the step forward can only be possible by continuing deaths: death is the gradual movement of soul into Spirit. As men advance further into the Michael Age, they will begin to investigate that gestation period--that "period purgatorial and celestial" (108) between death and birth. They will discover more about the transforming agent underlying all evolution--spirit--and will see further into the significance of the fact that this Spirit is emerging more and more into the individual soul with every reincarnation. The Meggid concludes:

The most difficult part of the book is that dealing with the "crisis" in modern physics. Burgeon's young friend, Flume, describes the crisis to a group of his peers, offers some suggestions about the direction future physics must take, is challenged by several members of the audience, and anwers them--or rather the Meggid answers through him. (In the essay "Imagination and Inspiration" Barfield describes a similar situation from real life. He refers to a lecture by a professor from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Brandeis University in which the professor suggested many of the same dimculties that Flume discusses.) The crisis has occurred since research in sub-atomic physics began. The behavior of sub-microscopic particles in many cases does not accord with the laws of classical physics--Newton's laws of motion and Maxwell's laws of electro-magnetic radiation. The system of quantum mechanics was devised to overcome these difficulties, and it is a "brilliant achievement" (120). But it has cost physicists the notion of causality and replaced it with the notion of probability. Moreover, a new version of an old problem has arisen, and quantum mechanics seems unlikely to be able to solve it. Flume describes this crisis:

Experimentally, there is nowhere to go, for quantum mechanics is simply mathematics, dealing only with "pure abstractions" (121). Whether radiation is best described as "waves" or corpuscles," they are describable only mathematically. Once the statements of quantum mechanics have been formulated, it is Impossible to reinter·gret them in any way that could render them descriptive of actual "sub-quantum' events" (122). Quantum mechanics has so limited our perception that it has made it impossible for us to give "any meaning--in terms of physical observations-to statements about these supposed sub-quantum events" (122). Quantum mechanics works by assuming that the "elementary particles" (122) are purely mathematical points that do not occupy space. Then how can we speak of the structure of anything, when the very word seems to imply that the phenomenon being examined occupies space? Historically, physics has always advanced by suggesting a new hypothesis, a kind of model, and then attempting to verify it by experiment. There was advance even when the hypothesis or model was proved wrong. Now the problem is, "How could any new theory ever swim into our ken if we continued to have simply no way whatever of representing to our minds what actually goes on at the sub-microscopic level?" (125).

Flume suggests one possibility. What is needed is a realm of mind that exists somewhere between absolute mathematics on the one end and the "picture" or "model" type of thinking on the other. Very tentatively, he advances the imagination as this realm. He has been told, he says, by those who have worked with the imagination, that it is "especially adapted for apprehending a relation between a whole and its parts different from that of aggregation. . . . It has been said that imagination directly apprehends the whole as 'contained' in the part, or as in some mode identical with it." Further, he has been told, the imagination "apprehends spatial form, and relations in space, as "expressive" expressive of non-spatial form and non-spatial relations." (That is, the imagination apprehends spatial forms as "symbolic.") Finally, it has been claimed that the imagination is anterior to normal perception and thought, that "it functions at a level where observed and observer, mind and object, are no longer--or are not yet--spatially divided from one another; so that the mind, as it were, becomes the object or the object becomes the mind" (127). What, in fact, Flume has been told about the imagination--by Burgeon--is what Barfield has said about Coleridge's "philosophic imagination": that it is Reason working in the superindividual realm of the Logos. Flume, of course, does not say this to his fellow physicists. What he does say is that he believes they may have to abandon the concept of an "inner structure" which implies the existence of Newtonian space. They may have to conceive of an "external structure," some kind of "negative, or perhaps a potential, space, for which they had no model and therefore, as yet, no equations" (130). One of the things that the Meggid has earlier revealed to Burgeon is that "Space is both interior and exterior" (45)· Sanderson, we recall, said the same thing. Flume concludes his lecture by suggesting that

His conclusion, in Coleridge's and Barfield's terms, then, is that the ultimate elementary particle, the ultimate stable element in a universe of perpetual flux, may be actualized by the interaction of the Idea in the mind with the corresponding Idea in the universe--for we recall that the same Idea has subjective existence in the mind and objective existence as a law of nature, or perhaps as an ultimate elementary particle. "External structure" will be applied by the human imagination.

In the question period that follows the lecture Flume is sharply attacked for his unscientific views, is asked where his equations are. He defends himself well, even pointing out that it is not absurd to say that the imagination may see the whole in the part, for it is an accepted principle of physics that "a single sharply defined wave must occupy the whole of space" (143). In these later stages of his defense he is aided by the Meggid--as Burgeon realizes, though Flume does not. Thus it is really the Meggid who draws Flume's final conclusion:

In the days that follow the lecture, Burgeon and Flume discuss the question of chance in physics. Flume does his best to make the law of probability clear to Burgeon, but Burgeon does not really understand it. Later, the Meggid speaks to him on the same subject. The earth, he tells Burgeon, is "the living body of mankind" (nature is man's unconscious being) and it includes "the new life that looks forward to the future" (154). This new, or potential, life includes the future wills of men, now unconscious; and though the wills of the future are not capricious, as the wills of waking and living men are, neither are they regular, in the sense of being individually predictable. Burgeon immediately draws an inference from this about the law of probability:

Chance in nature, then . . . irreducible chance, is the one token we have so far detected of that sleeping life of will--or rather lives? Technology must seek to calculate even the incalculable--and it can do so only by averaging out the effects of all those unconscious, incalculable wills. (154)

To this the Meggid's reply is a rather cryptic comment that true transformation "can come only from a transforming agent that transforms itself, implying that the self-transforming agent will make its own "laws" by choice. This is indeed Existentialism, as Burgeon says, for it is clear that the Meggid means that man is being made one with the transforming agent. The Christian man of the western world, says the Meggid, has always looked backward to the Father for law in the sense of regularity. "The law of the Father is regular, but the law of the Son becomes only inevitable." To this hard saying he adds that when the Son does the will of the Father, "he will do it voluntarily" (155)· The problem of chance will only be solved when the will of the Son has been investigated. (If this last statement also seems cryptic, perhaps it may be paraphrased to read, "when, by successive reincarnations, we have been drawn further into the Divine Spirit and have in this way made our wills accord with that of the Son.")

In the final, apocalyptic chapter Burgeon and the Meggid have their last "conversation." The Meggid reminds Burgeon of the implications of all Burgeon has learned. The further man penetrates into both his own unconscious mind and nature, the more aware he becomes of the vast destructive powers latent in both--but not not "both," for space is both exterior and interior, the mind and the object are one. Earlier, the Meggid, speaking of what Lawrence called "potency," has revealed that this sense of power has also been subject to an evolutionary process. In ancient days it was thought to reside in the head, in the courtly love of the Middle Ages it was held to reside in the heart, and in the present it is felt to reside in the loins. Man's present choice is either to take this potency "down into animalism or back into the 'logos" (33). The peculiar greatness of Lawrence was that he guessed a part of this great truth and was bewildered by it. Early in the book Burgeon has mused over two passages from Lawrence's Apocalypse dealing with man's physical being, the other with his mind. Of the physical Lawrence wrote: "'Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent." And of the mind he wrote: "There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself; it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the water" (15). Somehow Lawrence divined that man's sense of potency was no longer mental, had descended to the loins, and he could see no other option than following the descent further into animalism. But in his comment on the mind he also showed that he had divined the truth that man's reason is not Personal but superindividual. Thus he had a partial and a puzzling view of the true nature of man. What he did not perceive was that this potency, which Lawrence (somewhat like Freud) often described as a kind of repressed explosiveness that warped man until it was set free, is capable of a kind of creativity in a sense beyond the obvious sexual one. Now, the Meggid tells Burgeon, man must "begin to inform nature, to inform the earth itself. This he can only do by pouring his morality into the heart and centre of destruction that he carries within himself. Lawrence's vision is a part of a great truth: "the truth that nature on the one hand and human morality on the other are not . . . divided by an impassable gulf, but, in the depths from which all transformation springs, are one" (160--61).

There remains for Burgeon one burning question: who is the Meggid? He is answered. Because the Meggid is a spirit he is all those who contain him--"I am all that speaks through me" (163). Long ago he was called by many different names.

To Burgeon's nearly frantic question--when a man has heard that voice what shall he do?--the Meggid replies with the great paradox of the Incarnation: Burgeon can be told what to do only by

Barfield's most recent work, Speaker's Meaning, though published in 1967, perhaps serves best as what might be called a Barfield primer, a useful, introduction to his work that can be read along with the Saturday Evening Post article and a few other essays such as "Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction,"31 "Greek Thought in English Words,"32 "The Meaning of 'Literal.'"33 Based on a series of lectures given while he was a visiting professor at Brandeis University iin 1965, the book is mostly a return to the philological aspects of his larger argument. The reader who has followed this argument from History in English Words through Unancestral Voice will find the larger implications of the argument only in muted form in Speaker's Meaning. There is no explicit argument for poetry as a means to knowledge (as in Poetic Diction), no obvious advancing of the Sanderson-Burgeon-Steiner world view (as in Worlds Apart), no Meggid speaking revealed truths (as in Unancestral Voice). Like Poetic Diction, it is a study in meaning, but a much more sedate and simple one.

Barfield stresses the necessity of the historical approach to meaning. The work of the linguistic analysts must be supplemented by such historical studies as Lewis' Studies in Words. The linguistic analyst argues that words mean what the normal speaker wants them to mean in normal discourse, but without the historical supplement to this position, we can never know why the normal speaker means what he does by his words. Barfield cites Lewis' distinction between the "lexical" or dictionary meaning of the word and the "speaker's meaning"--the way in which an individual speaker uses the word in a new way and thus expands the meaning of the word. This tension between the "settled" meaning of the word and the speaker's attempt to use it in a larger sense (Newton's use of the word "gravity," for example, to mean more than the sublunary force which impels objects to seek the center of the earth) is what brings new meaning into the language. By implication, this capacity of the word for expansion is also what makes scientific advance possible, as in the case of Newton's law of gravity. What Barfield calls (in Poetic Diction) the poetic impulse versus the rational impulse in language, he now calls the "expressive" versus the "communicative." The expressive impulse is toward fullness and sincerity, the communicative impulse toward accuracy; but they are "sweet enemies"--they "conflict, but they also co-operate."34 The individual speaker's battle with settled language and the poet's comparable battle to make metaphor are "virtually identical. "In both cases language is being employed in what I would call, in its widest sense,'the poetic mode'" (60). These "polar contraries"--the Do and Suffer of language and meaning--may be called "the principle of seminal identity" (39).·The concept of polarity itself is not merely a form of thought, like the principles of identity and contradiction; it is also "the form of life" and "the formal principle which underlies meaning itself and the expansion of meaning" (38-39).

Towards the end of the book, Barfield suggests briefly a portion of the argument that we have seen elsewhere on a larger scale. There is something, he says, that "the whole character and history of language" (113) shows us. That is that language and myth arose in a pre-historic time, more precisely, in a pre-human time. Neither language nor myth has its origin in individual human intention but in Nature itself. What the study of language shows is

So Barfield's great argument ends, at least for the moment. He has said that he is working on a full-length book on Coleridge, and when that appears it should be (to echo Johnson) not only worth seeing but worth going to see. In fact, my assumption throughout the preceding pages has been that Barfield's whole argument is worth going to see. But the nature of that argument is such that I have tried to let each work speak for itself, at the risk of tedium and repetition for better trained minds than my own and that of the general reader. I have assumed that Barfield's argument is like Plato's and Coleridge's and Emerson's: to redact them is to distort them. Transcendentalism, as Emerson once said, is Idealism in the nineteenth century. So we might say that Barfield's argument is neo-Platonism in the twentieth, but neither label suggests the plain fact that neither Idealism nor neo-Platonism is ever quite the same from century to century. They are "open-ended": they take on not only the tone and temper of the times but, more importantly, they utilize the newer evidence that the newer times provide. And since we live in the world of common sense which Idealism insists is a world of "idols," in a way we have to keep repeating the Idealistic argument because our common experience refutes it every day. We cannot live idealistically---or at least not yet; we can only think that way, and with some effort.

I have said that Barfield's work may be called Anthroposophy philologically considered. It is a clumsy phrase but an accurate one, and it suggests the main contention of this book: that in Barfield's work (as in that of the men yet to be considered) romanticism is really inseparable from religion, that religious beliefs are inherent in romantic doctrine. Romanticism for Barfield is what he himself calls Esoteric Christianity; it is an attempt to explain the world that St. John described as brought into being by the Word and sustained by the Word. In fact, it is hardly too much to say that Barfield's work is a gloss on St. John's later words--in ipso vita erat, et vita erat lux hominum. As the Cambridge Platonists said, Reason is the candle of the Lord, our participation in the Word; and the Word, as Barfield has said, is the cosmic process on its way from original (unconscious) to final (conscious) participation in God. The religious position, again, is not a new one--in fact, it may well be the oldest Christian one--but the point is that Barfield has arrived at it by romantic means and that he defends it by romantic means, the doctrine of the creative imagination.

What perhaps cannot be stressed too much is that Barfield's thought (as he says of Coleridge's) exists largely in sets of polarities, sweet enemies that both conflict and co-operate: forces that exist by virtue of the tension that they set up between them. In every case, what keeps them from being pure opposites is the imagination of man--"a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM"--or, more prosaically, man's relation with God or (ultimately) man's qualitative link with God which will occur as the last phase of evolution. We have seen all these sets of polarities in the preceding pages: unconscious-conscious; man-phenomena; poetic-rational; Do-Suffer; act-potency; mind-matter; Gabriel-Michael; Lucifer-Ahriman; Speaker's Meaning-lexical meaning; death-birth; finally, man-God. The cosmic process--what the Word is speaking--is a great dialectic, as is suggested by Barfield's equating God with Meaning and aboriginal Meaning with unconscious Nature. Meaning may be "given" in the beginning, but it changes only as a dialectic transformation of the unconscious to the conscious. So God may be "given" in the beginning, but He too transforms Himself --remains Himself but becomes something new in Christ--and is thus not only the paradigm of all earthly transformations but the universal constant that underlies all those earthly transformations. Man participates in God by means of the imagination--more and more consciously since the Incarnation--and it is by means of this participation that he resolves the apparent conflicts that the various polarities suggest. God is the universal transforming agent: but this is another way of saying that all the polarities exist within the Logos, for exterior is interior, as we have seen. Opposites may exist between disparate planes, but polarities can only exist on the same plane. Thus all polarities are echoes of, or reverberations of, the archetypal polarity in the Logos; and that is the polarity of unconscious conscious, or God-man. The seeming disparity of mind and matter, for example, is done away with once the function of the human imagination in perception is discovered. In the same way the seeming disparity of God and man is done away with once the imagination perceives itself as man's link with God. Once the function of the imagination is acknowledged, nowhere in the universe can there be absolute disparity between man and any other thing--only polarity of man and language, man and familiar phenomena, man and inferred phenomena, and man and God.

But the notion of a polar relationship between God and man is open to over-simplification. Polarities exist on the same plane, but they are not necessarily on that account equals. In fact, there is only one instance of a polar relationship existing among equals, and that is the polar relationships among the members of the Trinity. To the extent that man, through the interaction of grace and free will, unites himself with Christ, his relationship to Christ echoes that of Christ the Son's relationship with the Father and the Holy Ghost. But this relationship is not now and never will be a relationship between equals. . . . The involution of God's consciousness of Himself into the unconsciousness of man does not diminish God's consciousness. To say that God is ever more fully revealing Himself in man is not to say that God is becoming increasingly conscious. He has always been ineffably conscious of Himself within man. Man is growing in self-consciousness, being "enlarged" by the consciousness of God. From the purely temporal point of view, then, we may say that God is manifesting Himself in man; but He is not thereby diminishing Himself, nor is He evolving. He exists timelessly; it is rather our relationship to Him that is evolving. At any point in this evolution--that is, so long as man exists in time--the infinite light of God's consciousness must appear to man--of his own unconscious mind. As Milton's Son says to the Father, "Dark with excess of bright Thy skirts appear." And Henry Vaughan echoes the polarity of temporal man and eternal God in "The Night," when he speaks of man's longing for union with God:

There is in God (some say)
A deep, but dazzling darkness; as men here

Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear;

0 for that night! where I in him
Might live invisible and dim.

Thus polarity in time will always involve process; and it is this process in time that Barfield has dealt with. Anthroposophy, as Barfield has said, is "the concept of man's self-consciousness as a Process in time."

But it is important to remember that man's relationship to God, even though a temporal one, really does echo the eternal polarity of the Trinity. Coleridge, says Walter Jackson Bate, speaks

Man's relationship to God, then, to be precise, is one of polarity in time, but it is one of polarity, not one of absolute difference. But such a statement, though a communicative one, is hardly an expressive one. When we are speaking of a qualitative relationship between God and man we seem to need something more: perhaps obvious metaphor, not dead metaphor, perhaps St. John's metaphor of kinship, with all the implications of warmth and intimacy and duty that go with it. Quotquot autem recaperunt eum, dedit eis postestatem filios Dei fieri: sons of God if we choose to be. Yet even St. John's words do not convey the enormity of the fact that God is manifesting Himself in Christ, and thus in man, that His nature and His power are immanent in man's unconsciousness, within partial reach of the human will and imagination. For this fact implies not only that man's nature depends upon what God is, but also that our knowledge of man's increasing consciousness will reveal whatever we can know of God's naure. Thus the ancient oracular message "Know thyself" becomes in effect theology. The Meggid's last revelation to Burgeon puts it precisely: wisdom is no longer only Theosophia but Anthroposophia, not only the wisdom of God but also the wisdom of man.

Notes

1 John J. Mood, "Poetic Language and Primal Thinking: A Study of Barfield, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger," Encounter, XXVI (August 1965), 417-33; Robert W. Funk, Language, Hermeneutic, and Word of God (New York, 1966), esp. 113 ff; Owen Barfield, "The Rediscovery of Meaning," reprinted in Richard Thruelsen and John Kobler, eds., Aventures of the Mind, Second Series (New York, 1961), 311-26; see also G. B. Tennyson, "Owen Barfield and the Rebirth of Meaning," Southern Review, 5 (January 1969), 42-57.
2  C. S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy (London, 1955): 189-90.
3  Owen Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age, New and Augmented Edition (Middletown, CT: Weslyan University Press, 1967): 17-19· The original edition was published in London in 1944 by the Anthroposophical Publishing Co. (now the Rudolf Steiner Press). My references are to the later edition.
4  Lewis, Surprised By Joy, 195.
5  Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (London 1949): 67.
6  Steiner, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, 160.
7  Barfield, Romanticism, 189, 176, 199.
8  Rudolf Steiner, Mystics of the Renaissance (New York 1911), 27-28.
9  Barfield, Romanticism, 228.
10  W. B. Yeats, "Magic," in Essays (London 1924), 33.
11 Barfield, Romanticism, 230-31.
12 Steiner, Spiritual Activity, 17.
13 Barfield, Romanticism, 84-85
14 T. J.· J.· Altizer, Review of Worlds Apart, Journal of Bible and Religion, XXXII (1964), 384.
15 Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction, 2nd ed. (London 1952), 36.
16 Owen Barfield, Speaker's Meaning (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 25.
17 Owen Barfield, History in English Words (London, 1954), 14, 21. Succeeding references to this book are shown in the text.
18 Lewis's discussion of Roman Allegory in The Allegory of Love (New York 1958) is clearly much indebted to Barfield on this point. Lewis cites Poetic Diction at the beginning of his discussion (Chapter II, "Allegory").
19 Barfield, Poetic Diction, 2nd ed., 14.·Succeeding page references to this book are shown in the text.
20 Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances (London, 1957), 51. Succeeding page refeIences to this book are shown in the text.
21 Cf. Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and Its Transformations (Ithaca 1957), esp. Chapter IV, "Primitive World View and Civilization" Redfield quotes D. D. Lee as saying that, for the primitive, man cannot speak properly of man and nature" (85). Cf. Also H. and H. A. Frankfort, et al, Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure Of Ancient Man (Baltimore 1954).
22 Barfield, Romanticism, 14-15.
23 Barfield, Romanticism, 253. The next few page references to this book are shown in the text.
24 Barfield, Appearances, 137. The succeeding page references to this book are shown in the text.
25 Charles S. Sherrington, Goethe on Nature and on Science (Cambridge 1949), 11.
26 Owen Barfield, Worlds Apart (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1963), 7.
27 Owen Barfield, "Imagination and Inspiration," Interpretation: The Poetry of Meaning. Ed. Stanley R. Hopper and David L. Miller (New York 1967), 70.
28 Owen Barfield, "Imagination and Inspiration," 72-73.
29 Owen Barfield, "Imagination and Inspiration," 75.
30 Owen Barfield, Unancestral Voice (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 16. The succeeding page references to this book are shown in the text.
31 In Essays Presented to Charles Williams (London 1947); reprinted in The Importance of Language, ed. Max Black (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1962).
32 In Essays and Studies, n.s., III (1950).
33 In Metaphor and Symbol, eds. L. C. Knights and Basil Cottle (London 1960).
34 Barfield, Speaker's Meaning, 37. The succeeding page references to this book are shown in the text.
35 Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge, Masters of World Literature Series (New York 1968), 218.