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Show 166 kinds of comparisons Muir used to describe the Sierran landscape. Perhaps he first wished to describe the Sierra as a completed book, but as he realized that Nature was flow, he began to describe the flowing landscape as a tree. The glaciers in the Studies are seen alternately as makers of the Book, and sculptors of the Path, but finally become the creators of a vast tree-like system of life in the Sierra. NATURE AS BOOK Despite its prevalence in the Studies, the metaphor of Nature as Book was already an artifact from Muir's pre-Sierran thinking. He would finally have to abandon it as he came to accept the implications of evolution, but it still served a purpose before it died. Rooted in medieval conceptions of Nature, and heavily used by nineteenth century scientists, it was a cliche when Muir inherited it. But its presence in his writing tells much about his debt to Agassiz. Agassiz was the scientist most congenial to Emerson's philosophy because he believed connections between phenomena were not material, but intellectual, or ideal. This had a profound effect on his method of study. When Agassiz described the Natural world as God's Book, he did not mean to speak only a metaphor. Scientists had always been the "unconscious interpreters of a divine conception" when they attempted to "expound nature." They "followed only and reproduced, in our imperfect expressions, the plan, whose foundations were laid in the dawn of creation." Indeed he was arguing that Man's |
