| OCR Text |
Show 30 life of a man was "a perpetual struggle with external Nature," fought for economic comfort. In an argument which seemed almost a response to Thoreau's Walden, Marsh argued that Man rose not by his ability to do without, but "in proportion to the magnitude of the physical inconveniences and wants he successfully combats and finally vanquishes." It was in this sense that Man became the "rightful lord" of Nature by rebelling against her forces and commands. Muir would have found himself, too, described in Marsh's essay: . . . when he sinks to be her minister, to make those laws the rule of his life, to mold his action to her bidding, he descends from the sphere of true humanity, abdicates the sceptre and the purple with which the God of nature has invested him, and becomes a grovelling sensualist or a debased idolator. Whenever he fails to make himself her master, he can but be her slave. Clearly Muir had become a "debased idolator" when he had chosen to learn from Nature rather than subdue her. And so the flow of his ecological thought was far more radical than that of Marsh, or than that he had heard from Ezra Carr. Later, when he would ally himself to the conservationist heirs of Marsh's thought, he would do so not because he agreed philosophically, but because he needed political help. In 1867, the flow of American ecological thought divided, and Muir took the deeper, more dangerous way. How could Man take dominion over Nature when he was, |
