| OCR Text |
Show 167. scientific classification systems were inherent in God's Plan, not products of the ingenious human mind. Each division in a classification system was a chapter in the Book of Nature. The Book itself was not a narrative, but a structured, static, whole conception in the mind of God. This way of conceiving the world should have been inadequate for Muir. It described the Cosmos as an abstraction, not as an organic whole. A book structured as a classification system did not describe the interrelatedness of living Nature, but rather an abstract hierarchy which we do not see anywhere, which had no correlative structure in Nature. Worse, such a notion of creation, where the making of the world was only a mechanical process which was entirely preordained, such a notion of creation could not describe the harmonious interaction between snow and rock, bird and plant, and so on. On a lower level, however, Muir knew that he was writing a book, a linear argument which could not do complete justice to the wholeness of Nature. Even if Nature was not a Book, the faith that it was complete and whole, that it made no mistakes, seemed to require that one accept Agassiz's conception. Indeed Muir's method of study indicated that he had accepted the faith which underlies Agassiz's theory- This faith in close observation and comparison, which leads to classification, is summarized in an apparently different context by Ezra Pound in the ABC of Reading. The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful |
