Barfield Scholarship
Essays, Book Chapters, and Monographs
on Owen Barfield and His Work

Howard Fulweiler
The Other Missing Link:
Owen Barfield and the Scientific Imagination
 
In John Neihardt's presentation of the wisdom of an Indian holy man, Black Elk Speaks, Black Elk, an old man, instructs his disciple Neihardt in the unity of the world, all of which is living: "the story of all life that is holy and is good to tell, and of us two-leggeds sharing in it with the four-leggeds and the wings of the air and all green things; for these are children of one mother and their father is one spirit. . . . Is not the sky a father and the earth a mother and are not all living things with feet or wings or roots their children?" (1-3). Similarly, in Thomas Berger's novel, Little Big Man, the old Indian, Lodge Skins, makes an unusual speech to his adopted grandson. He says that the Indians believe everything in the world is alive, while the white men think everything is dead (227-228).

For those who have followed the writing of Owen Barfield over the last fifty years, it will be apparent that one of Barfield's most pervasive themes is that white men have not always thought the world was dead either. They only came to think so as a result of a gradual evolution in human consciousness. They have not always thought that the only important life and intelligence in the universe was in themselves, while the rest of creation was composed of objects to be manipulated or exploited by them. For Shakespeare and for Chaucer, for St. Augustine and for Plato, the whole world was living and vibrant, sustained by the one Spirit which animated all things. In fact mind itself was not conceived to be the property of individual human beings, the sum of a certain number of human brains, enclosed and limited by a certain number of human skulls. Instead, as St. Augustine saw it, for instance, mind was beyond individuals; it was like the light of the sun which shone down on individuals and in which they saw things and knew things. When Evodius in On Free Choice of the Will expresses doubt about the universality of wisdom, Augustine answers: "If you think this, you may also doubt that the light of the sun is one, because we see many different things in it" (59).

The fact is that these "dead white men," as contemporary advocates of "multiculturalism" might call them, inhabited a very different world from our own, a world which had something in common with the world of nineteenth-century American Plains Indians. Oddly enough, thinking imaginatively about the past of western civilization--without the customary biases of twentieth-century assumptions and intellectual habits--reveals two somewhat opposite truths. On the one hand, we see how fundamentally different from our own was the world assumed by Graeco-Roman and early medieval observers. On the other hand we see arresting similarities between their world and the world assumed by other cultures more contemporary with our own. Charlene Spretnak's recent study, States of Grace, offers interesting accounts of various "wisdom traditions," such as those found in both Asian and native American religion as a revealing contrast to the conventional modern and post-modern mind-set. She observes that "the sense that the natural world is alive and that we are inherently connected with that life force is a core perception of most native peoples' worldview, from the cultures of the Upper Paleolithic era to those of the contemporary Fourth World" (18).

The question still remains. Is it true? Is the whole world, including human beings, alive with spirit and meaning--as Black Elk and Plato thought? Or are human beings alone in a world of dead objects to be manipulated--as Jeremy Bentham and George Armstrong Custer thought? The second view has made possible the great benefits of modern technology, but has drained meaning and value from the world, leaving humanity isolated and alienated. This sense of alienation has been a sad consequence of the evolution of consciousness convincingly described by Barfield which I will outline a bit further on.

This conflict between the two kinds of experience has been central to a good deal of imaginative writing in the last two hundred years. The Romantic poets, of course, were obsessed by the issue. Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is about a man who is isolated on a ship of dead men because he and his fellows regard an albatross only as something to be used. Wordsworth attempted consciously to revive an earlier awareness of a living nature in "Tintern Abbey" by recording his

A few years later Carlyle formulated the classic pattern of the modern alienated man wandering alone in a dead world, whose only movement is that of a machine. In Sartor Resartus Diogenes Teufelsdrükh gives us his consciousness of a world in which everything is dead but himself.

Invisible yet impenetrable walls, as of Enchantment, divided me from all living. . . . It was a strange isolation I then lived in. The men and women around me, even speaking with me, were but Figures; I had, practically, forgotten that they were alive and that they were not merely automatic. In the midst of their crowded streets and assemblages, I walked solitary. . . . To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O, the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! (239)

In our own century Eliot's "The Hollow Men" is occasioned by the memory of Guy Fawkes and a more living, if more violent past. Its motto, "Mistah Kurtz--he dead," is drawn from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, itself almost a diagram of the distress. "The Hollow Men," originally part of The Waste Land--Eliot's dirge for the death of western cvilization--presents the increasingly familiar picture of a dead world perceived by a furtive, narrowly limited, even hollow, consciousness.

The sharp contrast between the states of consciousness represented by Coleridge's mariner or the inhabitants of Eliot's twentieth-century "dead land" and that represented by Black Elk is a central problem of modern times. Here indeed is a subject that begs for investigation and meditation--for an understanding which is truly multicultural. This contrast is an especially striking illustration of Barfield's account of an "evolution of consciousness." What is meant by so grand a term?

Barfield's theory of the evolution of human consciousness underlies almost all of his writing, but the best overall exposition of it is to be found in Saving the Appearances (1957). The word "appearances" in the title of the book refers to an epistemological truism which--certainly since Kant--is readily admitted by most educated people, although it is forgotten almost as quickly as it is accepted. The truism is that the phenomenal world, the world of "appearances," that which appears to our senses, cannot be the same as ultimate reality or what is "actually there," the ding an sich. The French impressionists ratified this Kantian insight in the latter part of the nineteenth century by creating a world "as seen," and even by attempting to paint in some sense the "seeing" itself. Twentieth-century physics, of course, finally has demonstrated this fact of a "real" world, separate from our sense perception of it. The work of such physicists as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and David Bohm have very much altered the fixed certainties of the Newtonian world. It is a commonplace that the activity of the observer involves the observed. Developments in sub-atomic physics have devastated the positivist assumption of nineteenth-century science, reformulated early in the twentieth century by such thinkers as A. J. Ayer, that the "real world" is actually what we conceive it to be by our sense observations. Barfield quotes Bertrand Russell on this subject as follows:

Contemporary thinkers accept by and large the notion that behind the phenomenon of a chair lies--not Plato's Ideal Chair--but a pattern of moving particles to be understood only by "certain equations of which the interpretation is obscure." Barfield offers an analogue to this epistemological situation by pointing to a rainbow. We in fact know that if we walk to the end of a rainbow, it will not "be there." We know, however, that this beautiful object is the outcome of particles of water, the sun, and human vision. That is, the rainbow, just like the chair, is a representation. Representations are differentiated from hallucinations when other people see them as well. Thus what we see in the world about us and indeed all the phenomena of the physical world are a system of collective representations (SA 18).

At this point it might be well to reconsider our use of terms such as "particles" or "real world" in distinction from the phenomenal world. Both of these terms beg obvious questions. Not only does the difficult word "real" involve us in possible confusion, but "particles" are themselves a kind of representation, and, as Barfield points out, "the atoms, protons and electrons of modern physics are now perhaps more generally regarded, not as particles, but as notional models or symbols of an unknown supersensible or subsensible base" (SA 17). A more accurate and neutral term for whatever is behind phenomena is "the unrepresented." Whatever, then, "may be thought about the 'unrepresented' background of our perceptions, the familiar world which we see and know around us," as well as that phenomenal world which is the object of scientific investigation, is composed of collective representations (SA 17-20). Although reflective thinkers generally agree to this epistemological state of affairs--what I termed a truism--there is an unfortunate parallel circumstance: they forget it almost immediately and almost totally.

Collective representations do not exist separately from the individuals who make up a particular social group, but their existence also does not depend on any particular individual. Collective representations are like language, shared by members of a particular social group and passed on from generation to generation, evolving only gradually during the centuries. This evolution is what Barfield terms the "evolution of consciousness," as opposed to the history of ideas. It must, of course, follow that the familiar world experienced by one culture will be somewhat different from that experienced by another (SA 17-20; 33).

Noting the common anthropological observation that primitive people seem not to perceive in the same way that we do, Barfield suggests that they are not "detached" from the representations as moderns are. "For us the only connection of which we are conscious is the external one through the senses. Not so for them" (SA 11). A key term in Barfield's vocabulary and in that of some of his anthropological tutors is participation. Although Barfield shares the term with the anthropological theories of Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl, he chooses it especially as a broad description to refer in all periods of history to that necessary epistemological link between human beings and the phenomenal world. This link is virtually identical to Coleridge's "primary imagination": "the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and . . . the repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM" (304). Participation, then, may be defined as the "extra-sensory relation between mind and the phenomena," the non-material, imaginative connection between human beings and the nature which surrounds them. Although it is a commonplace in anthropology to recognize that primitives participate in their environments in a way quite different from modern men and women, it is far less commonly recognized that moderns must also of necessity "participate" in their environment since it, too, is composed of collective representations. What is most characteristic, however, of the phenomenal world in the twentieth century and what especially distinguishes it from that of the past is that our participation in it, and thus its representational nature, is excluded from our immediate awareness (SA 40).

The evolution of consciousness in the West then, is understood by Barfield as the gradual development away from "original participation," the immediately experienced sense of spiritual belonging observed in primitive people. In arriving at the more logical thought patterns upon which civilization is based, modern men and women have suppressed their awareness of the representational reality of the universe. As an increasingly convenient fiction they have come to regard phenomena as facts, totally independent of their own consciousness. Participation, which is admitted on all sides as a logical necessity, has simply been elbowed out of modern consciousness, much in the same way that Freud held that certain sexual materials are pushed out of the conscious mind into the unconscious.

This collective amnesia about the fact that the phenomenal world is a system of collective representations leads us to the second half of Barfield's title, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. Idolatry is the practice of taking one's own creation and endowing it with a separate reality and life of its own--as though a representation of Dagon were actually a living fish god. The Psalmist insisted that the idols of Israel's pagan neighbors were "hollow pretences of life" (SA 111).

If one were to make a less indignant description of idolatry, one might imagine a simple worshipper kneeling before a crucifix. Of course, the worshipper has been told that the figure on the cross is not actually the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, but sometimes--even often--he or she forgets. The results of this forgetting have serious consequences--not only in the theory and practice of religion--but in the entire human perception of the world--including the part of that perception conducted by the physical sciences.

The revolutionary implications of Barfield's theory of the history of consciousness is that the nineteenth and twentieth-century understanding of the world in its repression of the awareness of participation has become as idolatrous as the simple worshipper's. This understanding of the world has created a system of phenomena which have become unchanging idols. The problem is thus a fundamental intellectual problem about perception.

Barfield's theory of consciousness immediately sheds light on the conflict between Black Elk and Custer. The authority of Barfield's writing on earlier periods--his insights into Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Galileo, the Romantics, and others--"draws," according to Richard Hocks, "not merely on the ideas of a given period or author from that period, but is really a history of a given period's 'figuration.' In fact, one of the truly seismic implications of Barfield's view is that the phenomena--i.e., the appearances--undergo change in response to the evolution of consciousness itself. And what this means is that participation evolves as well" (33). Recognizing the evolution of consciousness is thus crucial in any attempt to understand the contemporary world or to think about the past.

Although his insights have illuminated many fields: literature, theology, philosophy, and philology, Barfield's penetrating account of the growth and conduct of the physical sciences will be my subject here. If the issue is one involving intellectual integrity and the accuracy of human perception, as Barfield suggests, science in the modern world obviously requires his kind of analysis.

Within the broad topic of science I will focus on what Barfield has pointed to as the most influential, most damaging, and most intellectually suspect assumptions of the sciences in modern times. I refer to the model of nature and its origin riveted to the consciousness of the West by Charles Darwin and his colleague, Sir Charles Lyell: natural selection as the sole cause of organic evolution and uniformitarianism as the exclusive mode of accounting for the genesis of phenomena, of "saving the appearances." This Victorian picture of nature is the origin, but not, as I shall explain, the entire meaning of my title, "The Other Missing Link."

Barfield introduced an essay on science in a way which seems to sum up his fundamental criticism of its conventional theory and practice. "Modern science," he wrote, "is inseparable from the voluntary decision out of which it arose three or four centuries ago; namely, the decision to exclude what were called 'occult qualities' from its purview. Modern scientific method remains based on that rule, and technology owes all its strength to a rigid observance of it" ("Science and Quality" 176). The word "occult" for Barfield simply means hidden, not magical or esoteric. Thus "occult qualities" include qualities or forces which, although experienced as realities in the natural world, are not--even in theory--observable by the senses; that is, they are non-phenomenal. Insofar as these unseen forces, such as the power to reproduce or the force of gravity, are conceived as immaterial and thus not in themselves observable by the senses, they are excluded from scientific hypotheses, though their quantifiable effects, of course, are not. Following logically this arbitrary exclusion of the unseen--though obviously real--aspects of nature from the domain of science, there have come about three crucial developments in scientific thinking which, according to Barfield, have established the characteristic mindset of modern western civilization. These have grown out of the rigid separation of phenomena from human observers, the exclusion of any awareness of participation in the creation of the phenomenal world.

First is the "formulation by Descartes of the principle of an absolute dichotomy between matter and mind and of the mechanical constitution of the former" ("Evolution Complex" 9). Barfield argues that behind this dogma there was, and has continued to be since its formulation, a fundamental intellectual failure to keep distinct the two necessary functions of scientific investigation: the speculative and the empirical, or to use slightly different terms, hypothesis as opposed to actual observation. Instead the two functions are often confused. Unfortunately, all conventional science--with the possible exception of certain developments in advanced physics--is based on Descartes's assumption that mind and matter are absolutely separate as are also the observer and the phenomenon observed. Barfield's position is that "this is itself a speculative and not an empirical principle. It is a maxim of interpretation, not a truth of fact. It is an extremely useful . . . 'fiction of science,' which Descartes, 'in contempt of common sense' propounded as a truth of fact" (What Coleridge Thought 133-134).

The second crucial development, which arose naturally out of the first, is the adoption by the geologist Sir Charles Lyell as a scientific axiom "of the hypothesis that what we today ascertain as the laws of nature have always existed, have never changed and will never change" ("Evolution Complex" 9). Uniformitarianism, as it was then called, is a second glaring instance of confusion between the empirical and the speculative. Conventional science in practice has all but forgotten that the maxim, "the past is only to be interpreted by what can be seen in the present order of nature," is a reasonable and useful speculation--but a speculation not amenable to proof (9).

The third great dogma is of course Darwin's theory of natural selection "as not only a cause, but the whole cause of biological development through the ages. Again, this third dogma arose naturally out of the second, since Darwin's drama of natural selection requires as a stage for its performance the solid, extra-mental, extra-spiritual earth, stretching millions of years back into the past" (9). That is, one must assume the proposition that the phenomena (or appearances) of the world behaved in precisely the same way millions of years ago as they do now. Further, it must be assumed that these appearances are exactly the "same thing" as external physical reality itself since there were no human observers through whom phenomena could be mediated a billion years ago. Such a proposition, of course, is not only speculative but seriously flawed, as we have seen, both in the light of ordinary epistemology and that of modern physics.

The chain of dogmas begins, then, with Descartes' hypothesis of a strict division of mind and matter, making possible Lyell's uniformitarian hypothesis about the behavior of the phenomenal world in history, leading ultimately to Darwin's natural selection. Barfield's criticism of this fundamental scientific understanding of the world is not so much that it is "wrong," although epistemological reflection indicates that Descartes' initial premise cannot be altogether correct, but that all three dogmas are speculations which have been confused with factual observations. Descartes, thus, produced an interesting fiction, useful in considering nature in certain contexts, but not a truth of fact, much in the same way that Newton's model of the physical world is useful in some contexts and Einstein's in others.

Thus in Barfield's view natural selection as the sole cause of organic evolution is another example of the confusion of the speculative and the empirical. Furthermore, a hypothesis based upon chance must be blind to the common-sense truth that "the concept of chance is precisely what a hypothesis is devised to save us from. Chance, in fact,= no hypothesis" (SA 64) So powerful had the new world picture of modern Europe become that few "were troubled by the fact that the impressive vocabulary of technological investigation was actually being used to denote its breakdown; as though, because it is something we can do with ourselves in the water, drowning should be included as one of the different ways of swimming" (SA 64).

Darwinism, then, depends on uniformitarianism, and both Darwinism and uniformitarianism depend on the speculation of Descartes that mind and matter are totally separate. "Darwinism, inculcated from childhood as fact, intertwines with, deepens, and spreads the subliminal roots of Cartesianism. It is the combination of the two which has been decisive for the Western mindscape and is now almost synonymous with it" ("Coming Trauma of Materialism" 191). This state of affairs, in Barfield's analysis, amounts to an unconscious and therefore unexamined materialism. This sort of materialism is not a formally materialist philosophy, such as that of Haeckel or Lenin which might be confronted and tested, but is "the mental habit of taking for granted, for all practical purposes and most theoretical ones, that the human psyche is intrinsically 'alienated' from nature in the manner indicated, a habit so inveterate as . . . to have become accepted as common sense itself. Materialism in this sense is not, for instance, incompatible with deep religious conviction" (190).

In Saving the Appearances, as we have seen, Barfield described the assumption that the phenomenal world was totally separate from the human psyche as a form of idolatry. It is a sad irony that this unconscious epistemological idolatry has received so little challenge from western religion. On the one hand, Christians in the eighteenth century often found solace in the watchmaker God of Deism, Blake's Old Nobodaddy, an external idol. This Newtonian Being, who had his birth during the Enlightenment, developed into the God of liberal twentieth-century Christianity who now presides--in an extraordinary intellectual paradox--over a mechanical chaos governed by chance, in which evolution only means one thing after another. On the other hand, many Christians turned to the severe Rulemaker of nineteenth-century orthodoxy, suitably seated on a sapphire throne--also outside his creation. This is the God of Protestant Fundamentalism and of the Roman Catholic theological rigidity of the late nineteenth century. Although these two historical directions are recognizable, they are extremes. Nonetheless, in fear of being considered uneducated obscurantists, ordinary twentieth-century Christians, for instance, have most often allowed an implicit and unexamined materialist faith to go unchallenged in the intellectual arena. The modern mind, therefore, suffers from a deep, unconscious, and unresolved intellectual schizophrenia, resulting not from "too much science," but from too little.

* * * Philosophical subjects require illustration. I shall try both to sum up and to illustrate Barfield's critique of the modern mental landscape, especially its fixation on Darwinian evolution, by means of a philosophical dialogue. I apologize at the outset for what may seem inappropriate levity on what is a serious matter. Yet the incongruities which follow are nearly insurmountable obstacles to rational communication. Although they are invented in the present case, they are only too common in ordinary twentieth-century academic life.

As most people know, Darwinism has once again come in for considerable criticism, some from ordinary scientific and philosophical quarters and a great deal from fundamentalist Christians, who call themselves "creationists." There have been a number of public debates across the country, often on university campuses. Sometimes a visiting creationist who holds a Ph.D. degree in biological science debates a local scientist who defends Darwin. On the basis of having witnessed a four-hour debate of this kind and having read newpaper and magazine accounts of others, I should like to offer an imaginary version of such an occasion.

In this debate the hall has been packed: not only are there large numbers of curious university students, but busloads of Baptists have come to witness a holy war. The Darwinian has made a lengthy defense of the methods and goals of science itself, as opposed to the "mysticism" and "obscurantism" of his opponent. William Jennings Bryan and the legislature of the state of Tennessee have taken their licks once again. The creationist, on the other hand, has raised the question of "the missing link" and indeed the question of the many missing links in the fossil record with impressive detail. He has presented handsome slides of Archaeopteryx; he has shown slides of the giant Texas pterodactyl with no antecedents; he has displayed a chart illustrating the Piltdown Man hoax. Some members of the audience feel, however, that he has been more facile than probing in his arguments. Let us listen to the final summations.

DARWINIAN: Finally, I must insist once again that the evolution of organic life by the process of natural selection is a scientific hypothesis. It is based upon facts, not fictions, no matter how well intentioned; it is based upon observable phenomena, not fantasies, no matter how pious. I freely admit that Darwin's theories have been somewhat altered by modern research, but on the whole modern research supports his conclusions. This fact is evidenced by the unanimous agreement of the greatest scientists in the field--Dobzhansky, Müller, Simpson, Huxley, Gould, Leakey, and countless others.

The creationism of my worthy opponent, on the other hand, is not science; it is religion. Creationism depends upon faith, not facts. I can accord him his right to religious feeling, but we must not confuse religion with knowledge, which is the realm of science alone. We can see that his creation theories are not scientific by the fact that they are not falsifiable. He can always assert that God made the world and we cannot prove him false. That is because such propositions are beyond empirical verification. As far as real knowledge goes they are meaningless.

In conclusion, I should like to offer one last thought in favor of the methods of science. It is certainly true that science can make mistakes, but science has a methodology constructed to rectify mistakes. Whatever its faults in comparison to religion, science could never countenance an Inquisition! (There is polite applause from a group of graduate students in biology.)

CREATIONIST: I must say at the outset that I hope the young Ph.D.'s in biology who believe in creation can have your help in getting jobs. In fact there is a very lively inquisition routinely conducted in modern American universities. It is nearly impossible for a young scientist who is also a creationist to obtain a post in a respectable university in this country. But to return to the issues--which my learned colleague has managed to evade so skillfully--I too believe in facts. If, to use an old analogy, I found a pocket watch lying on the ground, that fact would certainly entitle me to infer that there was a watchmaker who had made it.

As to the Darwinian theory of natural selection, I must insist again that the case is not proved. The actual facts of the case--the fossil record--do not sustain the argument. Where, I ask again, are the links that should join one form to another? I remind you once more of what you so often conveniently forget. Your Piltdown Man was a fake and a phony--not a fact. Your theory is the non-falsifiable one. You base your argument on Piltdown Man, and when shown he is a fraud, you insist he was not necessary to the argument. You insist upon countless small gradations from one species to another, small links; yet these links are missing from the record. Until you can show hard and fast fossil evidence, I will accept the unchanging word of Scripture as to the origins of the world--the rock of ages, rather than your misinterpretations of the ages of rock!

(Widespread cheering from the busloads of Baptists. At this moment Owen Barfield--if we can be allowed a fictional account which I hope is true, even though it did not happen--rises in the back of the hall and addresses each of the debaters in turn.)

BARFIELD: Let me speak first to my Darwinian colleague. You sir, have said a great many important things about the methods and goals of science and about the advancement of human knowledge. I certainly agree with much of what you say, and therefore I am puzzled. The heart of Darwin's theory, as I understand it, is that the occasionally successful interworking of random genetic variations with various possible environments is the source of change and development in organic beings--is the correct explanation of the origin of species. In plain English, Darwin said everything came about by chance. I always thought that the purpose of science was to rescue a confused and ignorant humanity from the tyranny of chance, the random throw of the dice. The Darwinian hypothesis does not seem so much wrong, as it seems a tautology; the reason things change is . . . random change.

There is another source of perplexity for me in your passionate defense of scientific method. You asserted most strongly your commitment to the intellectual life and to the advancement of human knowledge. Yet in your account of the origins and development of organic life on our planet you allow no room for mind. Your picture of creation (if you will allow the term) is that of a gigantic, mindless machine running autonomously--without even a mechanic to add oil. After the machine has run for billions of years, you suggest that mind was somehow generated from the mechanism, but that it still has nothing to do with the workings or origins of the machine. Your vision of a mindless machine outside yourself and your intense commitment to a total intellectuality inside yourself and in the realm of human beings are so far divided as to make me giddy.

I should like now to respond to my creationist colleague. You, sir, have provided us with most interesting evidence concerning the fossil record. And yet your position has puzzled me even more deeply than your opponent's. As I understand it you wish to represent Christianity, which I believe claims to be an historical religion. Christians identify themselves as followers of Jesus of Nazareth, a first-century Jewish inhabitant of Palestine, who was born during the reign of the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus. They also insist, I think, that great changes have taken place on the earth and in human beings during the course of history. In fact the Apostle Paul called for a transformation of mankind; a new sort of human being was to evolve as a result of the birth and death of this historical figure.

I find it very strange indeed that you see no connection whatever between your historical and evolutionary religion and the scientific account of the evolving history of life on this earth. Stranger yet, you seem to see the creation very much in the same way as your opponent--as a mindless machine (a watch was your term, I believe). It is true that you allow for a celestial mechanic to have built the machine, to oil it, and even occasionally to interfere with the mode of its operation. But it is a machine all the same.

It is puzzling that two theories ostensibly as opposed as creationism and natural selection should present such a similar picture of nature--the picture of a machine. Now the quality all machines have in common is that they are constructed to operate separately from human beings, even if they are able to do so only for a very short time. And that is what is so strikingly similar about these two pictures of nature. Nature is totally separate from human beings in both. Nature is not our living mother, but is a dead conglomerate of alien objects. For the historical biologist nature is only dry bones; for the creationist nature is a dead carcass created by a mind but now totally separate from it.

This debate has concerned itself in a major way with missing links, but to my mind no one seems to have noticed the absence of another missing link, the most important link of all. Why is no one searching for the missing link between external nature as we observe it scientifically, and nature as we are a part of it, psychically and mentally? Where do we look for the lost spiritual and intellectual connection between ourselves and the world which created us and which we ourselves helped to create? Can no one make these dry bones live?

* * * Resuscitating these particular dry bones has been the goal of Barfield's extensive writing on science, a goal pursued not by emotional hostility towards science, but by penetrating imaginative analysis. Far from rejecting the idea of evolution as a necessary prerequisite for understanding the world around us, Barfield demands it--but he calls for a philosophically sound history of the past--not the positivist idolatry of conventional Darwinism, with its blinkered single vision. That history, described by Barfield in a dozen books and many articles, draws its support from philology, anthropology, philosophy, literary theory, and the history of the sciences, especially physics. It posits an evolution of the human relationship to the external world, that is the connection between percipient and phenomena. In Barfield's account of the history of human consciousness, human beings began in a state of "original participation"--they belonged in the universe. "Meaning" was found in the external world rather than in the subjective consciousness of each individual. This belonging consisted not only in the mechanical, physical mode observable by the senses, but also in a non-sensory way--thoroughly real, but unseen. Despite the powerful emotional support of being organic members of a group and an environment, however, they often lacked the bracing powers of rational private judgment and individual responsibility. In a sense they belonged so firmly that they were prisoners.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a development of human consciousness towards the internal, rather than the external world. The scientific revolution, salutary and necessary as it has been for developing individuals towards freedom and maturity, caused the experience of participation to fade. Meaning came to be only internal and private, rather than having external and universal applications. Unfortunately, therefore, as Barfield has written, "the more able man becomes to manipulate the world to his advantage, the less he can perceive any meaning in it" ("The Rediscovery of Meaning" 11). "The white men think everything is dead," as Lodgeskins said.

In the last chapter of Saving the Appearances Barfield foresees the evolution of a "final participation" which involves conscious knowledge of the non-sensory, spiritual relation of human beings to nature and to each other--a transformation in which a human race whose members "were dreamers and unfree," though spiritually alive, after a period of separation and alienation, may enter into a participation not only of spiritual awareness but of "vigilance and freedom" (185).

As the nineteenth and twentieth-century debates over Darwinian evolution have invited a search for a physical "missing link," so Barfield has searched for and has made visible to the eye of imaginative reason an even more important missing link. This link, almost entirely forgotten or repressed from conscious awareness in modern times, is the unseen connection between ourselves and the universe we inhabit. In the development of human consciousness for the future this rediscovered link must come to be the agent of the continuing transformation of original participation, in which we were dreamers and unfree, to a waking world of freedom and knowledge, a participation in the world which is fully conscious. The scientific writing of Owen Barfield stands to remind us all that this link will remain a dead fossil only, until it is brought back to life by human vision and human imagination. It reminds us also that it is only the resurrection of this other missing link which can restore nature to life again--not only for Black Elk but for all of us.

WORKS CITED

Augustine, Saint. On Free Choice of the Will. Trans. Anna S. Benjamin and L. H. Bickerstaff. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964.
Barfield, Owen. "The Coming Trauma of Materialism." The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 1977. 187-200.
___ . "The Evolution Complex." Towards 2 (Spring 1982): 6-16.
___ . "The Rediscovery of Meaning." The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays. 11-21.
___. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957.
___ . "Science and Quality." The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays. 176-186.
___ . What Coleridge Thought. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 1971.
Berger, Thomas. Little Big Man. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett P, 1964.
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