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Believing in Nature Wilderness and Wildness in Thoreauvian Science l au r a d a s s o w wa l l s  ‘‘In Wildness is the preservation of the World’’ — so runs the oft misquoted line from Thoreau’s essay ‘‘Walking.’’1 Why ‘‘Wildness’’ and not ‘‘Wilderness,’’ as the line so often appears? What does the difference signify ? In context, Thoreau clearly identifies ‘‘wildness’’ not as a distant place but as a quality, something ineffable and strange and raw at the heart of the most common experience: ‘‘Life consists with wildness.’’2 It need not, then, be housed in a ‘‘wilderness’’ — yet it is hard to dissociate the two concepts, to accept one without the other. The history of their entanglements leads us into nineteenth-century natural science, the domain that by asserting control over all things sought to transform the wild into the tame. Science, it is commonly assumed , can perpetrate such conceptual violence because it doesn’t ‘‘believe ’’ in nature — has reduced the world of nature into objects and forces, on which science acts with impunity and without conscience. In ‘‘Walking,’’ Thoreau counters such assumptions with an avowal: ‘‘I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.’’3 In an age of science, is it still possible to ‘‘believe’’ in forest and meadow and corn-growing night? — in a nature that grounds moral values , lifts us into spiritual transcendence, promises personal and social redemption? Only, it is often implied, to the extent that one repudiates science, which is said to be at war with belief, with faith. This assumption makes Thoreau’s involvement with science difficult to accept as integral to his poetic and spiritual self. Yet in the nineteenth century, it was entirely possible and even necessary to ‘‘believe’’ in ‘‘Nature,’’ an affirmation inseparable from Nature’s source in a Christian God and from science as 15 the appointed interpreter of God’s meaning. This answer, though, raises further and more difficult questions: In which nature shall Thoreau believe ? For he had a number of choices. In Baconian nature, so crucial to nineteenth-century America and romantic science, the forest and meadow and corn-growing night were agents of God, intended to contribute to the use and improvement of humanity so long as humanity should in turn serve as nature’s servant and interpreter. In an even older trope of natural theology, forest and meadow and corn-growing night would be hieroglyphs, words in God’s ‘‘Book of Nature,’’ the symbolic key to the Book of Revelation: one would believe in them less for themselves than for the divine message they carried. However, a newer romantic natural theology, finding this system too static, sought to animate it such that forest and meadow and night would be thoughts of God, billowing through the evanescent material world; to believe in them was to believe in God’s power and in the stark fullness of the Law that surged and sorted the particles of matter. In various ways, all these modes presumed that forest and meadow were to be believed in not for themselves alone but for something higher, something they served or translated or embodied. Yet it was also possible in nineteenth-century America to claim nature was its own reason for being — that the dark forest and the dank meadow and the mysterious forces of the night were the powers and presences of a self-generating and self-directing material nature not immediately responsible to God and perhaps, therefore, not immediately responsive to human will — a willed nature, a wild nature, a nature unpredictable and even a little frightening. None of these choices was innocent. Belief in Bacon’s nature allied one with imperialist nation-building, and reading the traditional book of nature meant reading the world as theological doctrine. Romantic nature updated the theology but enforced the hierarchical social organization, naturalizing it in often bitter or anguished reaction to the radical threat posed by subversive Continental materialists, who by taking God out of nature apparently reduced man to the level of the beasts. Thus, to ‘‘believe in nature’’ was not to escape from the domain of society and politics but to declare one’s own political allegiances, one’s ideology. The romantics were right: there is no way to see nature apart from the idea by which nature is made visible to the mind — there is no innocent eye. And in modern Western...

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