You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Nearly three decades ago Owen Barfield (n.d.), in a seminal volume entitled Saving the Appearances, suggested that we revive and revitalize the faculty of imagination in an effort to combat the deadly materialism of modern scientific thinking. Barfield declared that all human perception contains an element of the “presuppositional” (or the “subjective,” to use the commonplace expression). In significant measure, the world is our creation: The perceiver meets the sense impression halfway. And, according to Barfield, because we actively participate in the universe around us, we are free to shape it, to “punctuate” it, in a variety of ways that accord with our nature as a higher form of life.
Passing from the rich texture of the medieval man's participatory experience of the world, to the appearance of Cartesian and Newtonian mathematics and physics, to the advent of “pure,” scientific thought and Romanticism's answer to it, Barfield zeroes in on what he calls (following Wordsworth as we will see) the idolatry of the modern belief in the objective cosmos of matter and motion, and most of all, on the fallaciousness of taking literally the scientific view of the universe. Far from being objective in some special, private sense, scientific descriptions are loaded with human elements, human presuppositions. No matter how hard he tries, the scientist will never be able to entirely skirt the subjective tendencies of his or her own mind. However, the picture of creation that modern science offers is not only misleading in a philosophical sense; it is also pernicious to the extent that it fosters a mechanical view of people and things. This opens the way to all sorts of abuses that can be justified