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Show 29. This clearly contradicted the perspective that Muir had gathered at Bonaventure. Imagine how Muir might have responded in 1867 to this seminal passage from Man and Nature: The fact that, of all organic beings, man alone is to be regarded as essentially a destructive power, and that he weilds energies to resist which, nature - that nature whom all material life and all inorganic substance obey - is wholly impotent, tends to prove that, though living in physical nature, he is not of her, that he is of more exalted parentage, and belongs to a higher order of existences than those born of her womb and so submissive to her dictates. Muir would have immediately recognized the central paradox in Marsh's torturous argument. How could Man's destructiveness be a sign of his "exalted parentage?" Further, Marsh's argument was really only another version of God's Providence toward His spiritual creation, Man. Though it was more enlightened than the version of Providence Muir had heard in Tennessee, though Marsh insisted that the earth had been given to Man "for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste," still this doctrine insisted that the world was given to Man. Muir labelled this prideful conception of Man's place in the Universe with the epithet "Lord Man." And if Muir had been familiar with Marsh's essay "The Study of Nature," which was printed in the Christian Examiner in the year he entered the university at Madison, then he would have learned that the |