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Show 60 Darwin and Huxley and Tyndall." But after Gray's visit, he commented to her, "He is a most cordial lover of purity and truth, but the angular factiness of his pursuits has kept him at too cold a distance from the spirit world." So too, when he read Tyndall that fall, Muir was dissatisfied with the physicist's analysis of "intense mountain enjoyments." Tyndall tried to account for himself by considering his own genetic heritage, or his own evolution. Muir, on the other hand, decided that mountain joy was a primary property of man. "I think that one of the properties of that compound which we call man is that when exposed to the rays of mountain beauty it glows with joy." Mechanistic science could not account for ecstasy. On the other hand, when Muir read Ruskin, he discovered that "Mountain Glory" and "Mountain Gloom" were little more than a restatement of old Christian dualities between heaven and hell, Indeed, Ruskin offered an example of peasant mountaineers, degraded because "familiarized with certain conditions of ugliness and disorder produced by the violence of the elements around them." Ruskin believed that all the universe presented itself to Man "under a stern aspect of warning" with "good and evil set on the right hand and the left." Muir knew there was no sin in the mountains, and no "dead unorganized matter." So Ruskin's idea of "foulness" seemed absurd, and Muir could confidently predict, were he to dwell awhile among the powers of these mountains, he would forget all dictionary differences |