OCR Text |
Show 193. their work attested to the powerful ongoing way of Nature. Here is the real breakthrough Muir had achieved in writing the Studies, a finally cosmic perspective which freed him from the limiting and belittling views suggested by such tame metaphors as the Book of Nature, the Tree of Life, and the Plow of God. My buddy George has been badgering me to call Muir the Taoist of the West, and there is much to support George's point of view, besides the pleasing vowel sounds. The very writing of the Studies suggests Muir's final emergence from a mechanistic to an organic conception of the cosmos. He did not give up his mechanistic way of speaking fully - the cycle of Nature is still compared to a grindstone - but neither did he find this way of speaking superior to the wordless insights which he had arrived at by essentially mystical means. Thus he seemed able to balance tenuously - even without resolving them - contrary ways of seeing the Sierra. Maybe Fritjof Capra is right when he says in The Tao of Physics that Mystics understand the roots of the Tao but not its branches; scientists understand its branches but not its roots. Science does not need mysticism, and mysticism does not need science; but man needs both. This argument is essentially analogous to Emerson's in the "American Scholar;" there is One Man, and One World, and only a Whole Man is capable of perceiving a Whole Nature. So if Capra is right, then Muir's own struggle with the Studies can |