Saving the Appearances Quotes

“Before the scientific revolution, [man] did not feel himself isolated by his skin from the world outside to quite the same extent that we do. He was integrated, or mortised into it, each different part of him being united to a different part of it by some invisible thread. In his relation to his environment, the man of the middle ages was rather less like an island, rather more like an embryo.”
― Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry

“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.”
― Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry

“Take a clever boy, who knows nothing about the principle of internal combustion or the inside of an engine, and leave him inside a motor-car, first telling him to move the various knobs, switches and levers about and see what happens. If no disaster supervenes, he will end by finding himself able to drive the car. It will then be true to say that he knows how to drive the car; but untrue to say that he knows the car. As to that, the most we could say would be that he has an 'operative' knowledge of it - because for operation all that is required is a good empirical acquaintance with the dashboard and the pedals. Whatever we say, it is obvious that what he has is very different from the knowledge of someone else, who has studied mechanics, though he has perhaps never driven a car in his life, and is perhaps too nervous to try. Now whether or no there is another kind of knowledge of nature, which corresponds to 'engine-knowledge' in the analogy, it seems that, if the first view of the nature of scientific theory is accepted, the kind of knowledge aimed at by science must be, in effect, what I will call 'dashboard-knowledge.”
― Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry

“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.”
― Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry

“When we are disputing about the proper meaning to be attached to a particular word in a sentence, etymology is of little use. Only children run to the dictionary to settle an argument. But if we would consider the nature of meaning, and the relation between thought and things, we cannot profitably dispense with etymology. It is long since men gave up the notion that the variety of natural species and the secrets of their relation to each other can be understood apart from their history; but many thinkers still seek to confine the science of language, as the Linnaeans once confined botany, within a sort of network of timeless abstractions. Method, for them, is another name for classification; but that is a blind alley.”
― Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry

“If we are present at a church service, where a censer is swinging, we may either attend to the whole representation or we may select for attention the actual movement to and fro of the censer. in the latter case, if we are a Galileo, we may discover the law of the pendulum. It is a good thing to discover the law of the pendulum. It is not such a good thing to lose, for that reason, all interest in, and ultimately even perception of, the incense whose savour it was the whole purpose of the pendulum to release. Participation ceases to be conscious precisely because we cease to attend to it. But, as already pointed out, participation does not cease to be a fact because it ceases to be conscious. It merely ceases to be what I have called 'original' participation.”
― Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry

“The record of rocks is a script containing stored memories of earth's past.”
― Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry

“Matter and force were enough. There was as yet no thought of an unrepresented base; for if the particles kept growing smaller there would always be bigger and better glasses to see them through. The collapse of the mechanical model was not yet in sight, nor had any of those other factors which have since contributed to the passing of the dead-centre of literalness - idealist philosophies, genetic psychology, psycho-analysis - as yet begun to take effect. Consequently there was as yet no dawning apprehension that the phenomena of the familiar world may be representations in the final sense of being the mental construct of the observer.”
― Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry

“For inconsistent and slovenly thought can abide indefinitely in error without any feeling of discomfort.”
― Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry

“I would recommend that the reader picture the final participation as a direction in which we had all better be moving, rather than as a beatific consummation at which we might in some remote future arrive.”
― Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry

“Anyone who finds it difficult to form any conception of participation, that is, of self and no-self identified in the same moment of experience, should reflect on that while peculiar realm of semi-subjectivity which still leads a precarious existence under the name of 'instinct' - or on those 'irresistible' impulses, on which psychiatrists are inclined to dwell. Many of us know what panic feels like, and ordinary men are proud of their sexual vigour or ashamed of the lack of it, although the act is readily acknowledged in retrospect to be at least as much something that is done to, or with, them by an invisible force of nature, as something they themselves veritably do.”
― Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry

“Predication may be unconventionally, but not really inaccurately, defined as, 'Whatever is done by the word is in such a sentence as: a horse is an animal; the earth is a planet.' If I say a horse is an animal; then a) if by the word animal I mean something more, or less, or other than horse, I have told a lie; but b) if I do not mean by the word animal something more, or less, or other than horse, I have said almost nothing. For I might was well have said a horse is a horse. Hence the attempts we are now witnessing to replace the traditional logic based on predication by a new logic, in which symbols of algebraic precision refer to 'atomic' facts and events having no vestige of connection with the symbols and no hierarchical relation to each other.”
― Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry

“La idolatría ha embrutecido el verdadero sentido de «otredad» ─la forma precisa en que lo «otro» y lo «mismo» pueden pensarse─.”
― Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry

“Ser capaz de experimentar las representaciones como ídolos, y además ser capaz de ejecutar conscientemente el acto de figuración y de experimentarlas como participadas: eso es la imaginación.”
― Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry