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Evolution Versus Revolution: Grove's Perception of History Stanley McMullin UNIVERSITY OF WA TERLOO Phil Brandon, the hero of A Searchfor America, is one of the finest studies in Canadian literature of how an old world man achieves assimilation into a new world environment. Near the end of the novel, Brandon sums up in a concise way, the transformation which he underwent in the process of discovering his own soul. The passage is worth quoting at some length since it gives a number of insights into Grove's perceptions of man as a questing figure: When I came from Europe, I came as an individual; When I settleddown in America, at the end of my wanderings, I was a social man. My view of life ... had been, in Europe,historical; it had become in America,ethical. We come indeed from Hell and climb to Heaven; the Golden Age stands at the never-attainable end of history, not at man's origins. Every step forward is bound to be a compromise; right and wrong are inescapably mixed; the best we can hope for is to make right prevail more and more; to reduce wrong to a smallerand smallerfraction of the whole till it reaches the vanishingpoint. Europe regards the past; America the future. America is an ideal and as such has to be realizedin partial victories.1 The shift from alien to social being becomes the most basic requirement for Grove's heroes in their search for significance in the human condition. Central to this shift is the necessity of replacing historical perceptions of the world with ethical responses to life. Having made this shift they are then able to construct meaningful goals which give their livessignificance in the face of an essentially hostile universe. Inability to make this adjustment results in isolation, frustration and death. Basically, this realignment of perception is a shift from seeing worldas -fact to viewing it as world-as-truth. While the accidentals of birth within a particular historical time and place impose differing cultural pressures upon his heroes, the ultimate moral vision achieved by them comes about through the realization that man's history is opposed to, and separate from, his essential human spirit. Man's nature, his primeval human self or soul, is today what it was in the time of Moses: the essentials of life never change. Compared to this essential human spirit, man's historical activity is merely the fleeting accident of the moment lacking universal significance. 78 History is viewed by Grove as something unique and alien to nature, which is timeless. In many ways his thought parallels that of the German philosopher, Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), who was one of the early proponents of the theory of cyclic history. The works of man, Spengler pointed out, are artificial and unnatural. What man strives to build, Nature tries to destroy. This attempt to impose man's own personality upon Nature, to shape it in his own image, promotes the basic conflict between man and nature. Nature produces her works through evolution. Man, by creating the machine, has attempted to create his own evolutionary principle, separate from, and in opposition to, nature. With the idea of the machine, man has created "a small cosmos obeying the will of man alone."2 Spengler, like Grove, saw man's situation in the universe in essentially tragic terms. In a small book called Man and Technics Spengler defined the essence of man's tragedy: Every work of man is artificial, unnatural, from the lighting of a fire to the achievements that are specifically designated as "artistic" in the high cultures. The privilege of creation has been wrested from Nature. "Free Will" itself is an act of rebellion and nothing less. Creative man has stepped outside the bonds of Nature and with every fresh creation he departs further and further from her, becomes more and more her enemy. That is his "world history", the history of a steady increasing, fateful rift between man's world and the universe—the history of a rebel that grows up to raise his hand against his mother. This is the beginning of man's tragedy—for Nature is the stronger of the two. Man remains dependent on her, for in spite of everything she embraces him like all else, within herself. All the great Cultures are defeats. . . . The fight against nature is hopeless and yet it will be fought.3 In spite of the fact that the rebellion of man...

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