HENEY D. THOEEAU 33 



Emerson says Thoreau's determination on natural 

 history was organic, but it was his determination 

 on supernatural history that was organic. Natural 

 history was but one of the doors through which he 

 sought to gain admittance to this inner and finer 

 heaven of things. He hesitated to call himself a 

 naturalist; probably even poet-naturalist would not 

 have suited him. He says in his journal: "The 

 truth is, I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a 

 natural philosopher to boot," and the least of these 

 is the natural philosopher. He says: "Man can- 

 not afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature 

 directly, but only with the side of his eye. He 

 must look through and beyond her. To look at her 

 is as fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It 

 turns the man of science to stone." It is not look- 

 ing at Nature that turns the man of science to stone, 

 but looking at his dried and labeled specimens, and 

 his dried and labeled theories of her. Thoreau 

 always sought to look through and beyond her, and 

 he missed seeing much there was in her; the jealous 

 goddess had her revenge. I do not make this 

 remark as a criticism, but to account for his failure 

 to make any new or valuable contribution to natural 

 history. He did not love Nature for her own sake, 

 or the bird and the flower for their own sakes, or 

 with an unmixed and disinterested love, as Gilbert 

 White did, for instance, but for what he could 

 make out of them. He says: "The ultimate ex- 

 pression or fruit of any created thing is a fine efilu- 

 ence which only the most ingenuous worshiper per- 



