Culture and the Idea of Nature

1956of Pacific Coast Geographers23 CULTURE AND THE IDEA OF NATURE Clarence J. Glacken University of California, Berkeley Generations of modern scientists have tried to understand the processes of nature as revealed—not in the whole creation—but in the living and inert matter appearing in the countless variety of landscapes on earth. Students of man have made equally great efforts to understand human society by observing the evidence of historical records or of archeological discovery. The most puzzling questions have arisen when attempts have been made to discover relationships existing between human cultures and the natural environment. In modern times, conceptions of these relationships have been influenced by the idea of nature which has been widely accepted by the scientific thinking of an age. Since the seventeenth century ideas of nature and of man's relationship to it have changed greatly, although a continuity of thought from that time to the present is clearly discernible. The dominant theme among the seventeenth and eighteenth century thinkers was that nature, of which man and his works were a part, was an all-embracing harmony. In the nineteenth century this unity of thought was lost and various interpretations of nature replaced it; some thinkers emphasized the struggle for existence, others the complex interrelationships in nature, still others the modifications of nature made by human activities. In our own times, the idea of conscious control of nature through science and the idea of nature as a delicately poised balance which is easily disturbed by human interferences have been widely used in general discussions of cultural and environmental change. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Thought Toward the end of the seventeenth century the dominant conception of nature^and the one which has been emphasized in histories of science—was the mechanistic view which owed its widespread acceptance to the prestige of mathematics and to the scientific and philosophical works of men like Galileo, Descartes, and Newton: the universe of which the earth was a part was like a great machine. Nature owed its orderliness to an underlying mechanical order far removed from the bright and colorful beauties of external nature. A. N. Whitehead in a famous passage in Science and the Modern World thought this conception of nature to be characteristic of seventeenth century thought.1 Whitehead's characterization applies however to only one segment of seventeenth century thought, for it neglects the scientists in natural history who, far from accepting the dismal implications of the mechanical view, emphasized —with the inspiration and prestige of an idea probably as old as Western civilization itself—that the earth was a divinely designed environment, fit for the living together of the countless variety of beings, from the simplest to the most complex organisms, which were widely distributed among the different environments of the earth. This idea, with its roots strong in Greek philosophy, 24Yearbook of the AssociationVol. 18 in the elaborations of the Stoic philosophers, and in Christian theology, and with an emphasis on anthropomorphism and teleology which later science was to find so distasteful, at least called forth (what the abstract mechanical view did not) an appreciation of the beauties of nature, and stimulated study of the interrelationships existing in it, for by so doing one not only learned more about nature but found in these discoveries further evidences of the wisdom of God. The works of the famous botanist John Ray are excellent examples of this point of view because they discuss in much greater detail than do other contemporary works the biological nature of the earth; they also bring out clearly conflicts in contemporary beliefs concerning the nature of the earth. Ray not only dismissed the mechanistic view which I have already described, but also the notion, revived from classical antiquity, that the earth was subject to decay and that the force and vigor of nature had declined from previous ages. In criticizing this notion, Ray and other contemporaries of like mind revealed the optimistic tone of their thinking: God would not create a world whose vigor declined with age; there was a constancy in nature, the result of the divine plan, upon which mankind could rely. To these men, the areas occupied by human...