The Word Made Strange (1997)

• Perhaps the most surprise, the most shock, should arise when what is said is really most orthodox and ancient, since the tradition is so rarely re-performed in practice today.

• I seek, after George Berkeley, especially, to elaborate a notion of the real itself as linguistic, and as divine language, and, after Robert Lowth and Johann Georg Hamann, to develop a theory of human being as linguistic being which participates in the divine linguistic being.

• In focusing in this section on Lowth and Berkeley, I am also deliberately trying to disinter a spirit within British tradition which runs counter to the myth of British identity to which it has nonetheless surrendered: that it is empiricist, philistine and basely pragmatic.