The term ["postmodern"] was first used, apparently, by the historian Toynbee, although Olson—and this is not generally known—may have actually been the first to use it in its current application, and the first to use it repeatedly if not consistently….

As Olson uses it, the designation serves not merely to advance beyond an outmoded modernism, but it seeks an alternative to the entire disposition of mind that has dominated man's intellectual and political life since roughly 500 B.C. As early as Call Me Ishmael, published in 1947, Olson felt that logic and classification betrayed man…. Olson sought to restore man from his egocentric humanism to a proper relationship with the universe…. [In his essay "Human Universe"], he explains how logic and classification intervene between man and the universe, "intermite our participation in our experience." And the only way out is to restore mythological participation in the laws...