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Show 83 as for Muir, the world was not given to men. For Edwards, "there is some impropriety in saying that a disposition in God to communicate himself to the creature, moved him to create the world." A man could only suppose "a disposition in God, as an original property of his nature, to an emination of his own infinite fulness, was what excited him to create the world; and so that the emination itself was aimed at as a last end in creation." There was an old message, whispering to Muir, out of his earliest religious training: "Suspect thyself much, Man." Thus was Muir's Transcendental faith tempered. He could never think of man as a God, even as a god in ruins, as Emerson argued. He would have to pay serious attention to his own method of study, and would have to suspect that as a man, he could always be wrong. If he were to trust himself at all, it would be a result of his mystical, not scientific, insights. Those, he would insist, were the result of Nature's voice, not his own. What has all this to do with Muir's role as an explorer? Historians of the American West have labeled the period between 1860 and 1900 as the period of the Great Surveys, devoted to "more intensive scientific reconnaisances and inventories" which would lead to "sober second thoughts as to the proper nature, purpose, and future direction of western settlement." This was the period when Americans began to question their motives, and their previously assumed Manifest Destiny to "conquer" the West. And this was the period when John Muir |