" The Gospel of Nature" from Time
and Change by John Burroughs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912)
pp.273-279.
John Burroughs
" The Gospel of Nature" (1900)
[1]
The other day a clergyman who described himself as a preacher of the gospel
of Christ wrote, asking me to come and talk to his people on the gospel of
Nature. The request set me to thinking whether or not Nature has any gospel in
the sense the clergyman had in mind, any message that is likely to be especially
comforting to the average orthodox religious person. I suppose the parson wished
me to tell his flock what I had found in Nature that was a strength or a solace
to myself.
[2]
What had all my many years of journeyings to Nature yielded me that would
supplement or reinforce the gospel he was preaching? Had the birds taught me any
valuable lessons? Had the four-footed beasts? Had the insects? Had the flowers,
the trees, the soil, the coming and the going of the seasons? Had I really found
sermons in stones, books in running brooks and good in everything? Had the lilies
of the field, that neither toil nor spin, and yet are more royally clad than
Solomon in all his glory, helped me in any way to clothe myself with humility,
with justice, with truthfulness?
[3]
it is not easy for one to say just what he owes to all these things. Natural
influences work indirectly as well as directly, they work upon the subconscious,
as well as upon the conscious, self. That I am a saner, healthier, more contented
man, with true standards of life for all my loiterings in the fields and woods, I
am fully convinced.
[4]
That I am less social, less interested in my neighbors and in the body
politic, more inclined to shirk civic and social responsibilities and to stop my
ears against the brawling of the reformers, is perhaps equally true.
[5]
One thing is certain, in a hygienic way I owe much to my excursions to
Nature. They have helped to clothe me with health, if not with humility; they
have helped sharpen and attune all my senses; they have my eyes in such good trim
that they have not failed me for one moment during all the seventy-five years I
have had them; they have made my sense of smell so keen that I have much pleasure
in the wild, open--air perfumes, especially in the spring--the delicate breath of
the blooming elms and maples and willows, the breath of the woods pasture, of the
shore. This keen, healthy sense of smell has made me abhor tobacco and flee from
close rooms, and put the stench of cities behind me. I fancy that this whole
world of wild, natural perfumes is lost to the tobacco-user and to the
city-dweller. Senses trained in the open air are in tune with open-air objects;
they are quick, delicate, and discriminating. When I go to town, my ear suffers
as well as my nose: the impact of the city upon my senses is hard and dissonant;
the ear is stunned, the nose is outraged, and the eye is confused. When I come
back, I go to Nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my sense put in tune
once more. I know that, as a rule, country or farming folk are not remarkable for
the delicacy of their senses, but this is owing mainly to the benumbing and
brutalizing effect of continued hard labor. It is their minds more than their
bodies that suffer.
[6]
When I have dwelt in cities the country was always nearby, and I used to get
a bite of country soil at least once a week to keep my system normal.
[7]
Emerson says that "The day does not seem wholly profane in which we have
given heed to some natural object." If Emerson had stopped to qualify his remark,
he would have added, if we give heed to it in the right spirit, if we give heed
to it as a nature-lover and truth-seeker. Nature-love as Emerson knew it, and as
Wordsworth knew it, and as any of the choicer spirits of our time have known it,
has distinctly a religious value. It does not come to a man or a woman who is
wholly absorbed in selfish or worldly or material ends. Except ye become in a
measure as little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of Nature--as Audubon
entered it, as Thoreau entered it, as Bryant and Amiel entered it, and as all
those enter it who make it a resource in their lives and an instrument of their
culture. The forms and creeds of religion change, but the sentiment of
religion--the wonder and reverence and love we feel in the presence of the
inscrutable universe--persist. Indeed, these seem to be renewing their life today
in this growing love for all natural objects and in this increasing tenderness
toward all forms of life. If we do not go to church as much as did our fathers,
we go to the woods much more, and are much more inclined to make a temple of them
than they were.
[8]
The lesson in running brooks is that motion is a great purifier and health
producer. When the brook ceases to run, it soon stagnates. It keeps in touch with
the great vital currents when it is in motion, and unites with other brooks to
help make the river. In motion it soon leaves all mud and sediment behind. Do not
proper work and the exercise of will power have the same effect upon our lives?
[9]
The other day in my walk I came upon a sap bucket that had been left
standing by the maple tree all the spring and summer. What a bucketful of
corruption was that, a mixture of sap and rain-water that had rotted, and smelled
to heaven. Mice and birds and insects had been drowned in it, and added to its
unsavory character. It was a bit of Nature cut off from the vitalizing and
purifying chemistry of the whole. With what satisfaction I emptied it upon the
ground while I held my nose and saw it filter into the turf, where I knew it was
dying to go and where I knew every particle of the reeking, fetid fluid would
soon be made sweet and whole-some again by the chemistry of the soil.
[10]
I am not always in sympathy with nature-study as pursued in the schools, as
if this kingdom could be carried by assault. Such study is too cold, too special,
too mechanical; it is likely to rub the bloom off Nature. It lacks soul and
emotion; it misses the accessories of the open air and its rations, the sky, the
clouds, the landscape, and the currents of life that pulse everywhere.
[11]
I myself have never made a dead set at studying Nature with notebook and
fieldglass in hand. I have rather visited with her. We have walked together or
sat down together, and our intimacy grows with the seasons. I have learned about
her ways I have learned easily, almost unconsciously, while fishing or camping or
idling about. My desultory habits have their disadvantages, no doubt, but they
have their advantages also. A too-strenuous pursuit defeats itself. In the
fields and woods more than anywhere else all things come to those who wait,
because all things are on the move, and are sure sooner or later to come your
way.
[12]
To absorb a thing is better than to learn it, and we absorb what we enjoy.
We can learn things at school, we absorb them in the fields and woods and on the
farm. When we look upon Nature with fondness and appreciation she meets us
halfway and takes a deeper hold upon us than when studiously conned. Hence I say
the way of knowledge of Nature is the way of love and enjoyment, and is more
surely found in the open air than in the schoolroom or the laboratory. The other
day I saw a lot of college girls dissecting cats and making diagrams of the
circulation and muscle attachments, and I thought it pretty poor business unless
the girls were taking a course in comparative anatomy with a view to some
occupation in life. What is the moral and intellectual value of this kind of
knowledge to those girls? Biology is, no doubt, a great science in the hands of
great men, but it is not for all. I myself have got along very well without it. I
am sure I can learn more of what I want to know from a kitten on my knee the from
the carcass of a cat in the laboratory. Darwin spent eight years dissecting
barnacles; but he was Darwin, and did not stop at barnacles, as those college
girls are pretty sure to stop at cats. He dissected and put together again in his
mental laboratory the whole system of animal life, and the upshot of his work was
a tremendous gain to our understanding of the universe.
[13]
I would rather see the girls in the fields and woods studying enjoying
living nature, training their eyes to see correctly and their hearts to respond
intelligently. What is knowledge without enjoyment, without love? It is sympathy,
appreciation, emotional experience, which refine and elevate and breathe into
exact knowledge the breath of life. My own interest is in living nature as it
moves and flourishes about winter and summer.
[14]
I know it is one thing to go forth as a nature-lover, and quite another to
go forth in a spirit of cold, calculating, exact science. I call myself a
nature-lover and not a scientific naturalist. All that science has to tell me is
welcome, is, indeed, eagerly sought for. I must know as well as fell. I am not
merely contented, like Wordsworth's poet, to enjoy what others understand. I must
understand also; but above all things, I must enjoy. How much of my enjoyment
springs from my knowledge I do not know. The joy of knowing is very great; the
delight of picking up the threads of meaning here and there, and following them
through the maze of confusing facts, I know well. When I hear the woodpecker
drumming on a dry limb in spring or the grouse drumming in the woods, and know
what it is all for, why, that knowledge, I suppose, is part of my enjoyment. The
other part is the associations that those sounds call up as voicing the arrival
of spring; they are the drums that lead the joyous procession.
[15]
To enjoy understandingly, that, I fancy, is the great thing to be desired.
When I see the large ichneumon fly, Thalessa, making a loop over her back
with her long ovipositor and drilling a hole in the trunk of a tree, I do not
fully appreciate the spectacle till I know she is feeling for the burrow of a
tree borer, Tremex, upon the larvae of which her own young feed. She must
survey her territory like an oil-digger and calculate where she is likely to
strike oil, which in her case is the burrow of her host Tremex. There is a
vast series of facts in natural history like this that are of little interest
until we understand them. They are like the outside of a book which may attract
us, but which can mean little to us until we have opened and perused its pages.
[16]
I certainly have found "good in everything"--in all natural processes and
products--not the "good" of the Sunday-school books, but the good of natural law
and order, the good of that system of things out of which we came and which is
the source of our health and strength. It is good that fire should burn, even if
it consumes your house; it is good that force should crush, even if it crushes
you; it is good that rain should fall, even if it destroys your crops or floods
your land. Plagues and pestilences attest the constancy of natural law. They set
us to cleaning our streets and houses and to readjusting our relations to outward
nature. Only in a live universe could disease and death prevail. Death is a phase
of life, a redistributing of the type. Decay is another kind of growth.
[17]
Yes, good in everything, because law in everything, truth in everything, the
sequence of cause and effect in everything, and it may all be good to me if on
the right principles I relate my life to it. I can make the heat and the cold
serve me, the winds and the floods, gravity and all the chemical and dynamical
forces, serve me, if I take hold of them by the right handle. The bad in things
arises from our abuse or misuse of them or from our wrong relations to them. A
thing is good or bad according as ends related to my constitution. We say the
order of nature is rational; but is it not because our reason is the outcome of
that order? Our well-being consists in learning it and in adjusting our lives to
it. When we cross it or seek to contravene it, we are destroyed. But Nature in
her universal procedures is not rational as I am rational when I weed my garden,
prune my trees, select my seed or my stock, or arm myself with tools or weapons.
In such matters I take a short cut to that which Nature reaches by a slow,
roundabout, and wasteful process. How does she weed garden? By the survival of
the fittest. How does she select her breeding-stock? By the law of battle; the
strongest rules. Hers, I repeat, is a slow and wasteful process. She fertilizes
the soil by plowing in the crop. She cannot take a short cut. She assorts and
arranges her goods by the law of the winds and the tides. She builds up with one
hand and pulls down with the other. Man changes the conditions to suit the
things. Nature changes the things to suit the conditions. She adapts the plant or
animal to its environment. She does not drain her marshes; she fills them up.
Hers is the larger reason--the reason of the All. Man's reason introduces a new
method; it cuts across, modifies, or abridges the order of Nature.
[18]
I do not see design in Nature in the old teleological sense; but I see
everything working to its own proper end, and that end is foretold in the means.
Things are not designed; things are begotten. It is as if the final plan of a
man's house, after he had begun to build it, should be determined by the winds
and the rains and the shape of the ground upon which it stands. The eye is
begotten by those vibrations in the ether called light; the ear by those
vibrations in the air called sound; the sense of smell by those emanations called
odors. There are probably other vibrations and emanations that we have no senses
for because our well-being does not demand them.
[19]
Yet I would not say that the study of Nature did not favor meekness or
sobriety or gentleness or forgiveness or charity, because the great Nature
students and prophets, like Darwin, would rise up and confound me. Certainly it
favors seriousness, truthfulness, and simplicity of life; or, are only the
serious and single-minded drawn to the study of Nature? I doubt very much if it
favors devoutness or holiness, as those qualities are inculcated by the church,
or any form of religious enthusiasm. Devoutness and holiness come of an attitude
toward the universe that is in many ways incompatible with that implied by the
pursuit of natural science. The joy of the Nature student like Darwin or any
great naturalist is to know, to find out the reason of things and the meaning of
things, to trace the footsteps of the creative energy; while the religious
devotee is intent only upon losing himself in infinite being. True, there have
been devout naturalists and men of science; but their devoutness did not date
from their Nature studies, but from their training, or from the times in which
they lived. Theology and science, it must be said, will not mingle much better
than oil and water, and your devout scientist and devout Nature student lives in
two separate compartments of his being at different times. Intercourse with
Nature--I mean intellectual intercourse, not merely the emotional intercourse of
the sailor or explorer or farmer-- tends to beget a habit of mind the farthest
possible removed from the myth-making, the vision-seeing, the voice-hearing habit
and temper. In all matters relating to the visible, concrete universe it
substitutes broad daylight for twilight; it supplants fear with curiosity; it
overthrows superstition with fact; it blights credulity with the frost of
skepticism. I say frost of skepticism advisedly. Skepticism is a much more
healthful and robust habit of mind than the limp, pale-blooded, non-resisting
habit that we call credulity.
[20]
There can be little doubt, I think, but that intercourse with Nature and a
knowledge of her ways tends to simplicity of life. We come more and more to see
through the follies and vanities of the world and to appreciate the real values.
We load ourselves up with so many false burdens, our complex civilization breeds
in us so many false or artificial wants, that we become separated from the real
sources of our strength and health as by a gulf.
[21]
For my part, as I grow older I am more and more inclined to reduce my
baggage, to lop off superfluities. I become more and more in love with simple
things and simple folk--a small house, a hut in the woods, a tent on the shore.
The show and splendor of great houses, elaborate furnishings, stately halls,
oppress me, impose upon me. They fix the attention upon false values, they set up
a false standard of beauty; they stand between me and the real feeders of
character and thought. A man needs a good roof over his head winter and summer,
and a good chimney and a big wood-pile in winter. The more open his four walls
are, the more fresh air he will get, and the longer he will live.
[22]
Nature is not benevolent; Nature is just, gives pound for pound, measure for
measure, makes no exceptions, never tempers her decrees with mercy, or winks at
any infringement of her laws. And in the end is not this best? Could the universe
be run as a charity or a benevolent institution, or as a poorhouse of the most
approved pattern? Without this merciless justice, this irrefragable law, where
should we have brought up long ago? It is a hard gospel; but rocks are hard too,
yet they form the foundations of the hills.
[23]
Man introduces benevolence, mercy, altruism, into the world, and he pays the
price in his added burdens; and he reaps his reward in the vast social and civic
organizations that were impossible without these things.
[24]
Man has been man but a little while comparatively, less than one hour of the
twenty-four of the vast geologic day; a few hours more and he will begone; less
than another geologic day like the past, and no doubt all life from the earth
will be gone. What then? The game will be played over and over again in other
worlds, without approaching any nearer the final than we are now. There is no
final end, as there was no absolute beginning, and can be none with the infinite.
