The language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of the gods.

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.

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

The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space.

No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the _Iliad_. Good and evil do not exist.

Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts. Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things. Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke, there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first.

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