Last week, I traveled to Vermont for a Hawthorne conference, and I’ve been thinking about the following excerpt from Augustine’s Confessions, which I quoted in my presentation:

[T]here can also be in the mind itself, through those same bodily senses, a certain vain desire and curiosity, not of taking delight in the body, but of making experiments with the body’s aid, and cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge.