Sources
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

The success a teacher-dialectician has....will be measured not in the number of propositions he has proved, but in the number of illuminations he has provoked, in the horizons he has widened; and the locus of a dialectical experience is not in the spoken or written word but the mind in which the word is working. There the action takes place and there the triumphs or failures are recorded. In fact, the value of a word or proposition in a dialogue is determined less by its truth-content than by its effectiveness in stimulating further inquiry and thereby contributing to the progressive illumination of the aspiring mind. This is what Socrates means when he talks in the Phaedrus of words as "seeds". Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (U of California, 1972), 8.

One should distinguish two stages of literalism, the natural and the reactive. The natural stage of literalism is that in which the mythical and the literal are indistinguishable. The primitive period of individuals and groups consists in the inability to separate the creations of symbolic imagination from the facts which can be verified through observatiobn and experiment. This stage has a full right of its own and should not be disturbed, either in individuals or in groups, up to the moment when man's questioning mind breaks the natural acceptance of the mythological visions as literal. If, however, this moment has come, two ways are possible. The one is to replace the unbroken by the broken myth. It is the objectively demanded way, although it is impossible for many people who prefer the repression of the questions to the uncertainty which appears with the breaking of the myth. They are forced into the second stage, of literalism, the conscious one, which is aware of the questions but represses them, half consciously, half unconsciously. The tool of repression is usually an acknowledged authority with sacred qualities like the Church or the Bible, to which one owes unconditional surrender. . . .[A] mature mind is broken in its personal center by political or psychological methods, split in its unity, and hurt in its integrity. The enemy of a critical theology is not natural literalism but conscious literalism with repression of and aggression toward autonomous thought. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (Harper, 1957), 53.

The style in which the spiritual brethren chose to address the new vernacular public was called plain English not because it was unimaginative or in the larger sense unliterary but because it was designed to be intelligible. William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (U of Pennsylvania 1957), 133.