I was S.T. Coleridge, and had begun to write the missing chapter of the Biographia Literaria . That these discharges will be proved to be an expense to the organism, which it must justify to itself by some perceived advantage. That the organism will be shown to have a tendency to conserve its electrical potential, that is, will not think , and this unthinking state will be known to science as habituation , and to the rest of us as prejudice . Any response to a disturbance calculated to upset the equilibrium of the habituated shall be called dishabituation . That a theory of Art, the first such to be found compatible with Science, shall then arise, by which Art shall be discovered to be nothing more nor less than intentional prompting of dishabituation through the simulation of events that theoretically would, had they occurred without such intervention, have produced this dishabituation.
Art is a device for the prevention of the disaster brought on by prejudice.
This is, incidentally, the proper function of myth, that is, the shamanistic function. Failure to attend to the shamanistic role is at the root of poor writing in our time. Karl Dallenbach was fond of pointing out, when introducing the concept of habituation to psychology students, that until he drew it to their attention, they were probably not aware that their shoes were full of feet. When it was mentioned, however, they became aware of the slight pressure of their shoes, which they had ceased to notice. Closely related to dishabituation is sensitization .