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Show 257. rest . . • until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists - and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before - in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sandhills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. Melville was only one of the doubters. In the 1890's, Stephen Crane satirized a young soldier who "conceived Nature to be a woman with a deep aversion to tragedy." How could a modern enlightened man continue to place his trust in Nature when he could no longer justify that trust? Joseph LeConte, Muir's companion at Tenaya Lake, influenced the thinking of his age more than might first be imagined. He taught evolutionary theory to Frank Norris, and see what came of that. He also wrote a book called Evolution and its Relation to Religious Thought. He wanted to answer the widespread belief that evolution was "synonymous with blank materialism, " by proposing that in reality God was operating in Nature "in a more direct way than we have recently been accustomed to think." Yet he did not mean to preach pantheism, that God was "only the soul or animating principle of Nature." He was afraid to give up the belief in a personal, providential God, and was more afraid of the possibility that "God is naught else than an abstraction, created like other abstractions or general ideas wholly by the human mind, and having no objective |
