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Owen Barfield

Owen Barfield Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Owen Barfield Quotes

“that [rational] principle alone cannot add one iota to knowledge. It can clear up obscurities, it can measure and enumerate with greater and ever greater precision, it can preserve us in the dignity and responsibility of our individual existences. But in no sense can it be said ... to expand consciousness. Only the poetic can do this: only poesy, pouring into language its creative intuitions, can preserve its living meaning and prevent it from crystalizing into a kind of algebra. (144)”

“Since participation is a way of experiencing the world in immediacy, and not a system of ideas about experience, or about the world, we obviously shall not find any contemporary description of it. When we come to contemporary philosophy and theories of knowledge, we shall indeed find explicit reference to participation, but for the moment we are concerned with the ordinary man's experience and not with what philosophers thought about that experience. Contemporary books were written, and contemporary science was expounded, for people assumed to share the collective representations of the writer, and accordingly our evidence must be sought more often in what is implied or assumed than in what is actually affirmed. We can only reconstruct the collective representations of another age obliquely.”