Is this the sense I get of a lack of "feeling" in our times? An inability to feel? A constriction of the range of emotions? Are we protecting ourselves, keeping life at arm's length? Is this what it means to grow up, historically and emotionally?

The tendency is from tacitly sense, felt, relatively immediately experienced, visceral, corporeal, concrete images toward that age-old ideal of hyperconsciously logicized, properly reasoned, cogitated, cognized, and abstracted intellection. The transformation is from sensed and experienced sign-events largely 'out there' to experienced and cognized thought-signs largely 'in here.'

--Floyd Merrell