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Show 82 he might have called Nature. No wonder he wrote to Asa Gray that he had never liked "Darwin's mean ungodly word, 'struggle'!" Man was like a river; he could flow through the creation as Muir had been doing, assimilating those rich nourishing soils through his dynamic immersion in the flux of Nature. He was clothed in the dust of creation. This was what Muir meant by baptism. When man immersed himself in the terrestrial, he was in fact immersing himself in the divine. But this view of man's relationship to the creation did not come to America with Darwin's Origin. It was there all along. Humility, "to lie low before God, as in the dust; that I might be nothing but God might be ALL." This had been the method of study or meditative posture of Jonathan Edwards, the greatest American Calvinist. And humility before Nature was the cornerstone of Muir's own method of study, indeed of his whole life's work. A twentieth century naturalist like Aldo Leopold might argue that "The two major advances of the past century were the Darwinian theory and the development of geology," because they tore down the wall Christian thought had erected between man and other forms of life, because they dramatized that man was a member of the community of things, not lord over it. But Muir could have inherited that posture toward Nature before he began to study geology or evolution. In many ways, Muir in Yosemite was like Edwards precisely because he rejected notions of time and efficiency, rejected the anthropocentric attitudes of the Enlightenment, which might be typified by the philosophy of Ben Franklin. For Edwards, |