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Show 247. future? Was he now evolving as an organism, or as a society, or both? These are questions which still bring hot debate from scientists who are supposedly masters of this realm. Muir could not hope to answer all of them, yet he found himself worrying about these issues because they challenged a faith which he did not wish to abandon. Darwinism seemed to explain the laws within Nature. Muir was certain that such laws did exist, but he suspected that they went deeper than the visible mechanism a scientist might discover or isolate. Muir was sure that the subtle interblending of life and death in the mountains was a "mystery of harmony." Each cause was an effect, because everything had its own inner life and was hitched to everything else. He came to Darwinism already convinced of the wholeness of Nature. FAITH There have always been spirits in the American air, and our hidden faith may be pantheism. In the back of our minds, though we have never liked to admit it, in the back of our landscape we have always suspected immanent gods or at least spirits. At the same time, we have always felt an impulse to "unify and thereby sanctify the total natural world, of which we are," as Gregory Bateson puts it. Lately, several writers have been trying to follow mystical American pantheism back to its roots, hoping that this faith may save us, if |