Master of imagination …

The Gentle Genius of Thomas Howard ~ The Imaginative Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Thomas Howard’s genius does not reside … in his ability to grapple with philosophical definitions but in his ability to incarnate or concretize abstractions into living analogies. He shows us that the human imagination manifests itself in every aspect of our daily lives in ways that transcend and supersede the limitations of the scientific method. We have “festooned everything” with symbolic actions and gestures. “We shake hands,” he says, which is “pure ceremony.” Such commonplace rituals, done unthinkingly, nonetheless “bespeak much more than can be discerned in the functional demands of the situation itself.” They signify “our awareness that things are worth something—that they are significant.”