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Show 61. between the clean and the unclean and he would lose all memory and meaning of the diabolical, sin-begotten word foulness. Muir had come to realize that Ruskin's "aesthetic distance" and the scientist's "objectivity" had this in common: neither perspective allowed the human to become a part of his environment. Both perspectives were limited and flawed. Fortunately Muir could find more congenial company in Yosemite on occasion. With Joseph LeConte, he sat one night above Tenaya Lake, embosomed in the mountains. LeConte wrote, The deep stillness of the night; the silvery light and deep shadows of the mountains; the reflection on the water, broken into thousands of glittering points by the ruffled surface; the gentle lapping of the wavelets upon the rocky shore - all these seemed exquisitely harmonized with one another and the grand harmony made answering music in our hearts. Mind you, these are the words of a confirmed evolutionist, a professor at the University of California. Like Muir, he suspected that the life of a scientist was more than science. So Muir could not make the kind of dogmatic judgment that Clarence King expressed. For King, Tundall represented the "liberating power of modern culture which unfetters us from the more than iron bands of self-made myths." King was sure that he had replaced the archaic model of Ruskin's thought with the modern "objectivity" of Tyndall. If he gave up the Ruskin who attempted to invest the mountains with consciousness, |
