xx: “The fundamental codes of a culture…. establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home.”

If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility - without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises - were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea" (p. 387)