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Show 8. still deeper, and becomes a religion, a faith in Man, and insists that human problems are soluble by people, through technological or social means. If so, then Muir was becoming a humanist, as he argued with his father and made his machines. He wasn't just making things, he was making himself into a maker of things, and integrating himself into the machinery he helped create, the machinery of technology, and the machinery of society. And he was using a God given gift to help other people. Indeed, he scarcely thought that he had any personal choice in the matter. He wrote to his brother from Indianapolis, . . . I have about made up my mind that it is impossible for me to escape from mechanics, I begin to see and feel that I really have some talent for invention, and I just think that I will turn all my attention that way at once. Yet his feelings were mixed about the course his life was taking. Perhaps he was ridden by his mechanical abilities. If he had no choice in his fate, he also knew that he was sacrificing other desires which he had nourished through his youth. And he wrote to his brother several months later describing in detail a grisly industrial accident which mangled a sawyer. Life in a machine shop or sawmill was grim and sometimes horrifying. The industrial accident was a common fact of life, and he had to fear the same fate for himself. He didn't wish to waste his life in a machine shop, nor did he wish to lose it to a machine. He was clearly confused about the direction his life had taken when he wrote to Jeanne Carr, |
