We move from a language of metaphors “with phantom longings and endeavors” to a “universe with phantom police-courts and traffic regulations,” or, in other words, a world of desire and intelligence to a world of mechanical “laws.”26 The results of the mechanization of the world picture is that spiritual longing has come to feel out of place. And, as we will see in a later chapter, this longing is a theme that haunted the medieval scholar’s essays, fiction, and even his autobiography.
