“One of the most valuable lessons I learned from Coleridge was to detect that terribly obsessive, and terribly contemporary, fallacy which supposes that we must only distinguish things that we are also able to divide. It is closely aligned to an obsession with space as the criterion of reality. When we divide things, we set them, either in fact or in imagination, side-by-side in space. But space is not the be-all and end-all, and there are many things that, by reason of their interpenetration - I repeat, because of their interpenetration - cannot be divided, though they are easily distinguished: acquaintance and friendship, for example, or envy and hatred. We shall see, I hope, that for human consciousness as it is today, thinking and perceiving, within that class.” - Barfield, O., 1979. History of Ideas: Evolution of Consciousness. In History, Guilt, and Habit. Wesleyan University Press, pp. 3–25.
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