2] ] the mystique of the desert 



People nowadays are less interested in theology than 

 they were in times gone by. They are not interested l)c- 

 cause they do not believe that they have any facts about 

 God upon which, or just beyond which, metaphysical con- 

 victions about Him could be based. Perhaps most people 

 are, whether they know it or not, simple positivists in the 

 sense that they believe that even man is a machine wholly 

 explainable in physical terms. But there is an increasing 

 number who feel that the attempt to account for life in 

 purely physical terms has failed. They may continue to 

 insist that no available evidence suggests the existence of 

 any God. But they also insist that life is not demonstrably 

 "merely chemical" and that biology must recognize real- 

 ities not either physical or chemical. 



For them, therefore, philosophy lies "beyond" biology, 

 not beyond physics. For them the place to start that philos- 

 ophy is not with physics or with chemistry but with life 

 itself as a fact no less primary than the facts of physics and 

 chemistry. Because I myself make that assumption, many 

 of the speculations in which I have permitted myself to in- 

 dulge in this book are heretical from the conventional bi- 

 ologist's point of view. But the heresy seems to me to have 

 a desirable consequence — it redeems the universe from 

 that deadness which mechanistic science has increasingly 

 attributed to it. 



Let us suppose that you are "interested in nature" — at 

 least to the extent that anyone who has willingly read thus 

 far in this book must be. If that means only that it some- 

 how pleases you to know that road runners eat snakes, 

 that Gila monsters are our sole poisonous lizards, or that 

 the cacti are native to the New World only, then your in- 

 terest is "scientific" in the most limited possible sense of 



