Reading book by Owen Barfield 2

         
                                           
                                          
See bl00343 May 22, 2009.                     
                                               
From chapter VIII  The Making of Meaning (II)        
p. 138  [6]                                         
    When we start explaining the language of
  famous scientists as examples of 'poetic   
  diction', it may well seem that the ordinary
  meaning of that literary phrase has been     
  inflated beyond the bounds of reason.  Never-       
  theless such an extension was necessary, in   
  order to make clear its real nature.  Nor    
  has it been waste of time, if it has convinced    
  a single person who needed convincing,
  how essentially parochial is the fashionable  
  distinction between Poetry and Science as    
  modes of experience.                          
    . . . the rational principle must be         
  strongly developed in the great poet.         
-                                              
p. 139  [6]                                    
  If the poetic is unduly ascendant, behold  
  the mystic or the madman, unable to grasp   
  the reality of percepts at all--being still   
  resting, as it were, in the bosom of gods   
  or demons--not yet man, man in the fullness
  of his stature, at all.  But if the passive,  
  logistic, prosaic principle predominates,   
  then the man becomes--what? the collector,
  the man who cannot grasp the reality of      
  anything but percepts.  And here at last a   
  real distinction between poet and scientist,
  or rather between poetaster and pedant,           
  does arise.                                     
-                                                    
pp. 140-141  [7]                               
    Provided, then, that we do not look too    
  far back into the past (i.e. beyond the    
  point at which the 'given' meaning of a   
  word first began to yield place to the    
  'created' meaning) language does indeed    
  appear historically as an endless process 
  of metaphor transforming itself into meaning.   
  Seeking for material in which to incarnate   
  its last inspiration, imagination seizes   
  on a suitable word or phrase, uses it as a   
  metaphor, and so creates a meaning.  The   
  progress is from Meaning, through inspiration  
  to imagination, and from imagination, through   
  metaphor, to meaning; inspiration grasping   
  the hitherto unapprehended, and imagination  
  relating it to the already known.               
                                                     
                                                   
                                                        
                                                 
                                              
                                               

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