I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.

We invent mind-space inside our own heads as well as the heads of others ... we assume these 'spaces' without question. They are a part of what it is to be conscious. Moreover, things that in the physical-behavioural world that do not have a spatial quality are made to have such in consciousness. Otherwise we cannot be conscious of them.

For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of much more recent origin than has been heretofore supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.

The changes in the Catholic Church since Vatican II can certainly be scanned in terms of this long retreat from the sacred which has followed the inception of consciousness into the human species.

Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.

Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of the theory of natural selection. Following their twin announcements of the theory in 1858, both Darwin and Wallace struggled like Laocoöns with the serpentine problem of human evolution and its encoiling difficulty of consciousness. But where Darwin clouded the problem with his own naivete, seeing only continuity in evolution, Wallace could not do so.

Reading in the third millennium B.C. may therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.