Quote of the Day (12/15/09) (Thinking Week)

When we think about the word Thinking today, we ordinarily mean by it something which is confined within our skins or, if you like, in a corner of our brains. But I am asking you to imagine it coming to mean something very different. Just as we look back to a time before Kepler and Newton, when Gravity had such a cramped and parochial meaning quite other than the spacious one we now attach to it so, I am persuaded that our descendants will look back, perhaps with amusement, to a time when Thinking and Thought had the strangely cramped and parochial meaning it has today. Because, for them Thinking will be something as to which one simply takes it for granted that it permeates the whole world of nature and indeed the whole universe.
--Owen Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age