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Show 259. would change the basic issue: men who abstracted themselves from Nature could not reason about her or enjoy her beauty. He told his interviewer, "You say that what I write may bring this beauty to the hearts of those who do not go out to see it. They have no right to it." Only a man in Nature had the right to meditate on her spiritual blessings, Muir thought. A man like LeConte, who saw immanence without pantheism, could treat Nature as if she were only material. In that case, ecological consciousness had not advanced beyond the theories of George Perkins Marsh. Marsh thought that Man realized himself by rebelling against Nature • s commands and so finally did LeConte. That was the thesis of LeConte's last chapter, which related evolution to the problem of evil: Man also is surrounded on every side with what at first seems to him an evil environment, against which he must struggle or perish. Heat and cold, tempest and flood, volcanoes and earthquakes, savage beasts and still more savage men. What is the remedy - the only conceivable remedy? Knowledge of the laws of Nature, and thereby acquisition of power over Nature. If this was the evolutionary scientist's answer to the Nature which Muir had celebrated in his Stormy Sermons, then things had changed very little since Darwin. All the phenomena which Proved to Muir that Nature was alive became, in the eyes of LeConte, only more evidence for Man's need to ascend above Nature into an abstract and empty realm of power. |
