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Show 291, or Christian? Elsewhere "tame" was an epithet he used to describe dull and disoriented animals. But his language became tangled when he spoke of hunting because he did not examine closely the anthropomorphic assumptions about predator and prey which he had inherited. He was never aware of the significant bond forged between hunter and hunted, where a man became a part of the flow of energy in Nature. When it came to Man's hunting, he could not see that the predator was not savage or ferocious, and the prey was not sweet or docile. He did not recognize the alertness, the sharpening of the senses which someone like Ortega y Gasset found admirable in primitive hunters. For Muir, hunting simply had "no religion in it." Just as he never talked about sexual reproduction, so he chose to ignore the meaning of this essential and perhaps mystical activity of Man. His alertness was redirected. Where the primitive man focused much of his consciousness into the process of keeping body and soul together, Muir hoped to be free of social and economic duties, so that he could seek purely spiritual truth. He was a geologist, botanist, mountaineer, and to the extent that he pursued those activities in a single-minded way, he became a specialist. Thus he was less part and parcel of Nature than the primitive who nourished soul and body from Nature. Because he was no hunter, he could not see fully his kinship with bear, wolf, or coyote. He became an example of the split between primitive and spiritual approaches toward Nature which Roderick Nash |