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Show 248. only we will accept and live by its dictates. One might begin this search with the romantic Wordsworth, with "a sense sublime/ of something far more deeply interfused," or with the words of Emerson, "The first in time and the first in importance of the influences on the mind . . . the inexplicable continuity of the web of God." Both of these writers saw the spirit of God as a "circular power, returning to itself," as it "rolls through all things." As I have tried to show, this was the view Muir had come to when he finished the Studies, though he went deeper into a kind of animism which ascribed consciousness to the rocks themselves. But it would be a terrible oversimplification to assert that we Americans have always been mystics when we approached the whole and cyclical creation. From the outset, we have never fully accepted our own insights. It has frequently seemed to us that we have to choose this faith against the evidence which scientists offer. We do not want to appear willful and perverse, or unrealistic. After all, we are Americans. This has been particularly a plight of what we call "nature writers." Loren Eisley dramatized his personal crisis in "The Star Thrower." As he admitted in a whisper to an empty room, "But I do love the world," he knew that he thereby renounced his scientific heritage. Why would a man fear to love the world? Because he might receive nothing in return, or because it was not worthy of him? Muir wondered in the journal of his Thousand Mile Walk: "How little we know as yet |