OCR Text |
Show 38. reading Shakespeare. The very Shakespeare he read was likely to provide heavy doses of Christian humanism, and contained the implicit doctrine that the laws of Nature were intimately connected to the laws of human history, as a sort of mirror. But even in Florida Muir could see that a God "who believes in the literature and language of England" is "purely a manufactured article." He would have to live by that discovery. Just as he realized that "in the free unplanted fields there is no rectilinear sectioning of times and seasons," so he had to accept the fact that in the "invisible, measureless currents" of Nature, no doctrinal signpost from his past would do him any good. In this sense, Muir's tense and excited state of mind during this period reflects not just a personal crisis, but a crisis in world view experienced particularly by scientists and philosophers during historical epochs when, suddenly, nobody is sure exactly what the world is like. Though Muir saw his dilemma as a personal one, he was participating in a crisis of values which plagued many of his clear-thinking contemporaries. His choices represented radical responses to the deterioration of the Christian faith, and to a seemingly chaotic situation in an academic world during the years which preceded and followed the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species. Muir would begin to think in Darwinian terms in California during the seventies, but from early in the sixties he realized that the root of all his confusion began because he had been taught the false doctrine that Man was the Lord |