A Pilgrim's Journal

I encountered chapter 6, where he takes a break from his arguments for Reason and Nature being separate and unsymmetrical to explain some misgivings that may have arisen while reading so far. In the middle of this chapter are two ideas that seemed profound to me.

I'm taking the liberty of quoting this section for others to ponder as well. It is unfair to both C.S. Lewis and to you the reader to drop you into the middle of the book like this, but the topic is isolated enough that it should make sense even without reading the first 5 chapters beforehand.

	... To some people the great trouble about any agument for the
	Supernatural is simply the fact that argument should be needed
	at all.  If so stupendous a thing exists, ought it not to be
	obvious as the sun in the sky?	Is it not intolerable, and indeed
	incredible, that knowledge of the most basic of all Facts should
	be accessible only by wire-drawn reasonings for which the vast
	majority of men have neither leisure nor capacity?  I have great
	sympathy with this point of view.  But we must notice two things.
 
	When you are looking at a garden from a room upstairs it is
	obvious (once you think about it) that you are looking through
	a window.  But if it is the garden that interests you, you
	may look at it for a long time without thinking of the window.
	When you are reading a book it is obvious (once you attend to
	it) that you are using your eyes: but unless your eyes begin to
	hurt you, or the book is a text book on optics, you may read
	all evening without once thinking of eyes.  When we talk we
	are obviously using language and grammar: and when we try to
	talk a foreign language we may be painfully aware of the fact.
	But when we are talking English we don't notice it.  When you
	shout from the top of the stairs, "I'm coming in half a moment,"
	you are not usually conscious that you have made the singular
	am agree with the singular I.  There is indeed a
	story told about a Redskin who, having learned several other
	languages, was asked to write a grammar of the language used
	by his own tribe.  He replied, after some thought, that it had
	no grammar.  The grammar he had used all his life had escaped
	his notice all his life.  He knew it (in one sense) so well that
	(in another sense) he did not know it existed.
 
	All these instances show that the fact which is in one respect the
	most obvious and primary fact, and through which alone you have
	access to all the other facts, may be precisely the one that is
	most easily forgotten -- forgotten not because it is so remote or
	abstruse but because it is so near and so obvious.  And that is
	exactly how the Supernatural has been forgotten.  The Naturalists
	have been engaged in thinking about Nature.  They have not
	attended to the fact that they were thinking.  The moment
	one attends to this it is obvious that one's own thinking cannot
	be merely a natural event, and that therefore something other than
	Nature exists.	The Supernatural is not remote and abstruse: it is
	a matter of daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing.
	Denial of it depends on a certain absent-mindedness.  But this
	absent-mindedness is in no way surprising.  You do not need --
	indeed you do not wish -- to be always thinking about windows
	when you are looking at gardens or always thinking about eyes
	when you are reading.  In the same way the proper procedure for
	all limited and particular inquiries is to ignore the fact of your
	own thinking, and concentrate on the object.  It is only when you
	stand back from particular inquiries and try to form a complete
	philosophy that you must take it into account.	For a complete
	philosophy must get in all the facts.  In it you turn away
	from specialised or truncated thought to total thought: and one
	of the facts total thought must think about is Thinking itself.
	There is thus a tendency in the study of Nature to make us forget
	the most obvious fact of all.  And since the sixteenth century,
	when Science was born, the minds of men have been incresingly
	turned outward, to know Nature and to master her.  They have
	been increasingly engaged on those specialised inquiries for
	which truncated thought is the correct method.	It is therefore
	not in the least astonishing that they should have forgotten the
	evidence for the Supernatural.	The deeply ingrained habit of
	truncated thought -- what we call the 'scientific' habit of mind
	-- was indeed certain to lead to Naturalism, unless this tendency
	were continually corrected from some other source.  But no other
	source was at hand, for during the same period men of science
	were coming to be metaphysically and theologically uneducated.
 
	That brings me to the second consideration.  The state of affairs
	in which ordinary people can discover the Supernatural only
	by abstruse reasoning is recent and, by historical standards,
	abnormal.  All over the world, until quite modern times,
	the direct insight of the mystics and the reasonings of the
	philosophers percolated to the mass of the people by authority
	and tradition; they could be received by those who who were
	no great reasoners themselves in the concrete form of myth and
	ritual and the whole pattern of life.  In the conditions produced
	by a century or so of Naturalism, plain men are being forced to
	bear burdens which plain men were never expected to bear before.
	We must get the truth for ourselves or go without it.  There may
	be two explanations for this.  It might be that humanity, in
	rebelling against tradition and authority, has made a ghastly
	mistake; a mistake which will not be the less fatal because the
	corruptions of those in authority rendered it very excusable.
	On the other hand, it may be that the Power which rules our
	species is at this moment carrying out a daring experiment.
	Could it be intended that the whole mass of the people should now
	move forward and occupy for themselves those heights which were
	once reserved only for the sages?  Is the distinction between
	wise and simple to disappear because all are now expected
	to become wise?  If so, our present blunderings would be but
	growing pains.	But let us make no mistake about our necessities.
	If we are content to go back and become humble plain men obeying
	a tradition, well.  If we are ready to climb and struggle on
	till we become sages ourselves, better still.  But the man who
	will neither obey wisdom in others nor adventure for her/himself
	is fatal.  A society where the simple many obey the few seers can
	live: a society where all were seers could live even more fully.
	But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are
	no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness,
	ugliness, and in the end extinction.  On or back we must go;
	to stay here is death.
 
	- C.S. Lewis, Miracles, chapter 6, page 63 and onward