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.

Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else.

Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.

We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first.

The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.

If we would understand the Scientific Revolution correctly, we should always remember that its most powerful impetus was the unremitting search for hidden divinity. As such, it is a direct descendant of the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.