As an example of where society has gone terribly wrong, Barfield considers the issue of race, racism, and racialism. Because we have lost the humane, we see not the person (essence) but the color (the accidents) and, because we have lost the notion of sin, redemption, and forgiveness, we—as a society—feel varying degrees of guilt. Indeed, Barfield notes, “People seem almost to go out of their way to find things to feel guilty about, or to encourage others to feel guilty about.”

Despite having built up a North American following in the 1960s and 1970s, Owen Barfield (1898-1997) could find almost no publication, periodical, or serial to review his 1979 book, History, Guilt, and Habit. Only one academic journal, the Virginia Quarterly Review, even deigned to acknowledge it, and, in one swift paragraph, the journal dismissed the book’s author as “cranky” and the book as meaningful only to right-wing Hegelians.

Based on a set of three lectures delivered in British Columbia in October 1978, History, Guilt, and Habit does the difficult work of attempting to understand the deepest meanings of history and its relation to the human person. Throughout the lectures, Barfield very capably—indeed, with uncanny precision and a seemingly never-ending bulwark of contexts—defines terms such as history, evolution, consciousness, perception, thinking, and, most importantly, imagination. History, Barfield contends, is something quite different from evolution as it is a “consciously directed process,” as opposed to the mere passive accumulation of change and events. Through his definitions, Barfield is especially interested in identifying those things that allow us to make free decisions and act rather than being merely acted upon. “Perception,” for example, “is essentially a passive experience, something that happens to us; thinking is an active one, something we do.” Yet, Barfield cautions, one should never fall into the Manichaean habit of dividing all things into opposites. Some of the most interesting aspects in humanity and in human society come from the overlapping—or interpenetration—of opposites.

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 allied 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.

As an obvious example in the natural world, there is night and there is day, but there is also dusk and twilight.

A second problem with the modern world, Barfield laments, is what he calls the “atomic obsession,” our scientific desire not only to find the smallest thing possible within nature, but to compartmentalize all such small things. There is “the whole direction taken by natural science since the Scientific Revolution; I mean the concentration of attention always on smaller and smaller units—molecules, atoms, neurons, genes, hormones, etc.—as the only direction in which advancing knowledge can proceed.” Clearly, Barfield understood, this runs counter to the entire humanist project to find integration and bring the universal and the particular into a fine relationship. Such integration can never happen without that active and rational employment and exercise of the imagination.

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