Nevertheless, the difficulty in bringing practical inarticulate
convictions to expression is very great, and the genteel tradition has
subsisted in the academic mind for want of anything equally academic
to take its place.
The academic mind, however, has had its flanks turned. On the one side
came the revolt of the Bohemian temperament, with its poetry of crude
naturalism; on the other side came an impassioned empiricism,
welcoming popular religious witnesses to the unseen, reducing science
to an instrument of success in action, and declaring the universe to
be wild and young, and not to be harnessed by the logic of any school.
This revolution, I should think, might well find an echo among you,
who live in a thriving society, and in the presence of a virgin and
prodigious world. When you transform nature to your uses, when you
experiment with her forces, and reduce them to industrial agents, you
cannot feel that nature was made by you or for you, for then these
adjustments would have been pre-established. Much less can you feel it
when she destroys your labour of years in a momentary spasm. You must
feel, rather, that you are an offshoot of her life; one brave little
force among her immense forces. When you escape, as you love to do, to
your forests and your sierras, I am sure again that you do not feel
you made them, or that they were made for you.
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