The Reality and the Idea: Thoreauvian Science and Transcendentalism in Walden

Johnny Mendoza

Professor Garrett

English 560- Romantic Natures

June 8, 2013

The Reality and the Idea: Thoreauvian Science and Transcendentalism in Walden

            Towards the end of “Economy” in Walden, Thoreau writes of the “customs of savage nations” who once a year burn their excess amounts of clothes, “having previously provided themselves with new clothes” (62). The clothes, along with furniture, pots, pans, and other household utensils that have accumulated, are gathered together in one great heap and set on fire. Thoreau learns of this practice through William Bartram, an American botanist, who upon his travels through South Carolina documents the Mucclasse Indians engaging in what they considered to be a purification act. As Thoreau in this chapter is considered with living economically and not going beyond an inordinate amount of provisions, he wonders whether this practice might be profitable to adopt or not. Nevertheless, he credits this ritual, similarly practiced by Mexicans “at the end of every fifty two-years,” as the truest manifestation of an inward spirituality he has ever heard (W 63). These customs, Thoreau says, reveal “they have the idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or not” (62). The idea refers to the inspiration received “directly from Heaven,” and the reality consists of some form of documented record to show evidence of such a revelation (W 63).

            In a similar way, Walden reveals Thoreau ambivalently embracing the ideas of transcendentalism alongside his interest of carefully observing and recording natural facts. Transcendentalism privileges intuition and the belief of direct revelation from God, over the use of one’s five senses or the powers of reasoning. It began, as Lawrence Buell notes in New England Literary Culture, as a counter movement away from the Unitarian belief that “truths are arrived at by a process of empirical study and by rational inference from natural evidence” (46). On the other hand, Thoreau constantly refers to his observations in nature as experiments done by the “analytic process,” or, when confronted with the sublime aspects of the woods, he wishes “to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it” (57, 83). He is pulled from both ends: wanting to experience the idea, the spiritual aspect of his philosophy, and faithfully record the material, concrete parts of the natural world perceptible to the senses.

            Thoreau considered himself a transcendentalist all his life; however, he was keenly aware of the scientific theories of his day, as well as the emergence of science as a separate discourse from natural philosophy. When the Association for the American Advancement of Science (AAAS) asked him what kind of scientist he was, Thoreau answered, “I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher” (Buell, “Thoreau and Natural Environment” 172). His answer reveals his belief in the inclusiveness of several discourses to help one experience and think about the world. But as Laura Dassow Walls observes in Seeing New Worlds, “By 1862, the year of Thoreau’s death, natural philosophy was rapidly becoming obsolete on both sides of the Atlantic” (6). Natural philosophy included “acoustics, optics, astronomy, geology, crystallography, mineralogy, chemistry, zoology, botany, et al” (Walls, Seeing New Worlds 7). But as advances in scientific instruments—such as more powerful telescopes and microscopes—allowed more accurate observations and experiments to be conducted, specialization in certain disciplinary categories inevitably divided multitudes of scholars, and natural philosophy was reduced to amateur status. The composition of Walden lies at the center of this transition in the sciences. Moreover, botany and Walden Pond in particular, as both natural and transcendental objects and symbols, reveal Thoreau’s peculiar natural philosophy that is continually conscious that the thing observed by analysis and abstraction reveals both reality and a spiritual idea, thus allowing Thoreau to participate in, as well as challenge, these emerging epistemic fields of knowing the world.

            Natural philosophy, as a body of knowledge, has a long history. In her essay “Believing in Nature: Wilderness and Wildness in Thoreauvian Science” Laura Dassow Walls notes how in the nineteenth century the culmination of this history presented several ways of conceiving nature, and consequently natural philosophy, to Thoreau. To adhere to the principles of Baconian nature, meant that natural philosophers “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” (Walls, “Believing in Nature” 16). To believe in a more orthodox view of nature, after the fashion of William Paley as outlined in his  Natural Theology, would lead one to think of nature as “God’s book, the symbolic key to the Book of Revelation: one would believe in [nature] less for [itself] than for the divine message [it] carried” (Walls, “Believing in Nature” 16). A more secular view of nature was provided by Romantic notions which, according to Walls, “enforced [a] hierarchical social organization, naturalizing it in often bitter reaction to the radical threat posed by subversive materialists, who by taking God out of nature reduced man to the level of the beasts” (“Believing in Nature”16).

            However, as Walls goes on to show in her essay, believing in any of these worldviews aligned its participants to a certain ideology. 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” (“Believing in Nature” 16). Similarly, to adhere to the principles of Paley’s view of nature subscribed one to orthodox ideals. Thus, natural philosophers worked well within their prescribed domains of political allegiances and ideologies.

            While a student at Harvard in the 1830s, Thoreau studied natural philosophy, which included courses in mechanics, astronomy, optics, electricity, botany, and zoology. The principle text for Harvard students to read at the time—that included an array of such subjects—was William Smellie’s The Philosophy of Natural History. And although William Whewell, a philosopher and historian of science, had used the term “scientist” to describe students who study the material world in 1834, the term would not be firmly established until 1840, when Whewell used it again in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (Snow xii). Harvard became the medium from which Thoreau would find his worldview, for besides being well versed in natural philosophy, Thoreau became acquainted and inspired by Emerson’s transcendentalism after hearing his oration of “The American Scholar” at his graduation from Harvard in 1837. In short, “The American Scholar,” as Robert Sattelmeyer notes, “was a call to the youth of America to devote themselves to the life of mind through nature, books, and action—an injunction that clearly spoke to Thoreau, the bent of whose genius already lay in those directions” (27).

            Thoreau welcomed the opportunity to study nature more aptly than he had in his first natural history essay “Natural History of Massachusetts” in 1842, by moving to Walden Pond. But moving there also provided him, as Richard J. Schneider suggests, with the quite and the solitude he needed to write “a book about the boating trip that he and his brother John had taken up the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in 1839” (93). The book would be written in memory of his brother, who died young in 1842 of lockjaw. Schneider also suggests that Thoreau had another purpose for moving to Walden Pond, “to conduct an experiment in economic independence,” which would provide an alternative mode of living to capitalistic emphasis on continually increasing production (93).

            Prior to, and during the years at Walden Pond, debates over what constituted science and natural philosophy continued to blur disciplinary boundaries and divide scholars into separate categories. As Walls notes in “Believing in Nature”, the construction of modern science posed the challenge, among other questions, whether “science was to be democratic and participatory, or a specialized province restricted to the virtuous few?” (17). This split between natural philosophy and science as a rational and empirical field of study, began to weed out any conception of nature as symbolically or spiritually describable. The emerging scientific worldview “sought to elevate the field of knowledge to the level of a true science by discovering the necessary self-evident and self-constitutional principles according to which all objects in nature were formed” (Walls, “Believing in Nature” 17). In other words, transcendentalists like Thoreau observing nature under the rubric of natural philosophy, would no longer be able to read nature as a moral or spiritual guide, as empirical science demystified the mysterious and symbolic codes in nature.

But Thoreau’s peculiar transcendentalism and interest in science shows how he came to demonstrate in Walden a converging of the two worldviews, as an equally warranted epistemology of the natural world compared to the specialization of the emerging sciences. Robert Sattelmeyer notes how until about 1849 Thoreau “began to systematically study biology, especially botany,” which he found to be interestingly compatible with his transcendentalism (37). Why botany in particular? In his essay “Thoreau’s Transcendental Ecocentrism” William Rossi notes how Harvard botanist Asa Gray’s Manuel of the Botany of the Northern United States, published in May of 1851, captured Thoreau’s imagination and intellect with an image of plant development that Thoreau saw as “a perfect analogy between the life of the human being and that of the vegetable—both of the body and the mind” (30). The botanist, Gray, explains that plants develop in two ways: First, “By vegetation, which takes in the aerial and earthly matters on which it lives, and elaborates them into the materials of its own organized substance,” and secondly, “by Fructification,” which concerns itself with propagating its species (Rossi 30-31). Thoreau appreciated Gray’s analysis of plant development for its polarity, the manner in which it grows from both opposite directions, aerial and earthly. Likewise, Thoreau interpreted this botanical study metaphorically to be applied to the mind. “So,” Thoreau says, “the mind develops upwards to expand in the light and air,” yet, “’[o]ne half of [its] development must still be root—in the embryonic state—in the womb of nature’” (qtd. in Rossi 31). By comparing the mind to plants in this manner, Thoreau finds a way to study the particulars in nature empirically, without sacrificing an analogous and even moral perspective to the life and mind of humans.

The first mention of plants in Walden occurs in the beginning of “Economy” when Thoreau begins to set up his argument for what he believes to be the problem with New Englanders. In order to explain why people degenerate quickly without having gotten the best that life could offer, Thoreau asks rhetorically, “Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion in the heavens above?—for the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear” (16). Here, Thoreau condescendingly separates those people who seem to be rooted to the earth—that is people who understand that they need only be in tune with nature in order to figure out what necessities they really need to live—from those who also know but simultaneously aspire towards transcendental truths, which are in the heavens above. In other words, a person should be rooted in nature, like plants, but also realize that the atmosphere provides essentials to life, and both the earth and the heavens serve to cultivate the mind, as they do plants.

            The imagery of plants comparable to the life and mind of humans is perhaps the most recurring analogy in Walden. In other instances, Thoreau compares snakes, birds, tortoises, and insects to humans (38, 42, 43, 295)- each one a single time, but the imagery of plants is preponderant throughout, totaling a number of eight times. As he nears the end of “Economy,” Thoreau says he does not value “chiefly a man’s uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves” (70). He goes on and asks that a man produce a flower, or fruit, besides these qualities of goodness and righteousness. As Gray’s physiology proposes that plants produce offspring in order that certain species remain alive, Thoreau refashions this growth to include intellectual, moral, and spiritual fruit that can be observable and testable by the senses. While the stem and leaves, literally and figuratively, are necessary for fruitful development, there remains something else to be brought forth, namely the flower or fruit in this instance, which becomes the proof of true life, a life well lived by hard physical, intellectual, and moral work.

            The importance that Gray’s botanical studies have on Thoreau becomes most evident in a passage where he applies Gray’s vegetation and fructification qualities to not only the life of an individual, but nature and Concord as well. At the end of “Solitude,” Thoreau, again rhetorically, asks, “Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” (126). By deliberately describing himself as such, in a chapter dealing with separation from the community of others, for the most part, the image of leaves counters the assumption that by retreat into Walden Pond Thoreau would be utterly lonely. He uses the plural of “leaf” to suggest his interconnectedness with an ecological system greater than himself, namely nature. But it does not stop there. Nature’s “universal, vegetable, and botanic medicines” have a medicinal as well as intellectual purpose (W 126). Thoreau says botany keeps him serene and content when he should mistakenly consider himself to be alone.

            In “Spring” Thoreau describes a peculiar sense he feels when standing on one side of the river bank, as if he “stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world” (273). It is important to note his use of the words “laboratory” and “artist,” as they each carry a figurative as well as literate meaning. Laboratory, in its root sense, refers to a workshop, but the word can also be taken to suggest Thoreau, the natural philosopher, observing nature as a scientist would a particular part behind closed doors in a lab. The word “Artist,” denotes a supernatural spirit, familiar to transcendentalists who believed ordered and operated within nature. But it also brings to mind William Whewell’s term “scientist,” which he coined by comparing it to artists. Thus, in one sense, this line in Walden could be read as Thoreau, the scientist, working in the laboratory of nature, observing the “vitals of the globe” (273). More important, is the subsequent attention he gives to leafs. He mentions the “earth express[ing] itself outwardly in leaves,” for “it so labors with the idea inwardly” (W 273). This recalls Thoreau’s interest in both the idea of the thing (the spiritual aspect) and the reality (the outward manifestation) of the thing observed. He continues, “the atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it” (W 273). If the emerging science was to emphasize the particulars in nature, Thoreau shows that he can be in conversation with the scientist who talks at the atomic level, the most particular level of understanding the material world.

            But Thoreau develops this analogy further. He goes on to suggest that even ice has a kind of leaf, a crystal leaf, and that in fact, “the whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils” (W 273). Thoreau elaborates:

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth. (275)

The references to the tree and rivers being similar to one leaf that is kept alive by the pulp of the earth could be understood in the context of another botanist who equally caught Thoreau’s attention, Alexander von Humboldt. Walls explains that the central tenet to Humboldtian science is best identified as “the study of the interaction between animals, plants, and their physical environment” (“Believing in Nature” 18). One of the major inhibitions for this kind of science to receive mainstream attention was the belief that nature was self-generating, and not the product of divine design or order. Thoreau incorporated both Gray’s and Humboldt’s ideas whenever needed in order to fit in with his philosophy. When Thoreau says that the earth’s pulp keeps the rivers flowing and that insects produce towns and cities, he is incorporating Humboldtian principles. Nature is a unified whole which begins at the bottom, the earth, and metaphorically speaking, towns and communities are generated by nature cooperatively working from below, at the level of insects. Yet, Thoreau says that communities yield upon the plant’s branch and stem to reiterate how vital he thinks the analogy of plants and humans is to him.

            When Thoreau says the earth is like the leaves of poetry (he puns on leaves) better understood as a living thing, and producing fruit and flowers, he switches back to Gray’s physiology. But also, notice if the earth were to be thought of as leaves from a textbook, only specialists would be able to study it. By comparing the earth to pages of poetry, Thoreau gives access to anyone with a poetic mind to read nature as well, thus democratizing science as he realizes it is becoming a matter of specialization. More importantly, Thoreau says the earth produces fruit and flowers. Gray’s botany emphasizes both an aerial and subterranean quality to plants, which Thoreau makes sure to transfer into his philosophy. Moreover, Thoreau appreciates Gray’s analysis that plants reproduce by fructification, because as he says, “so it is with the human being—I [Thoreau] am concerned first to come to my Growth intellectually & morally;…and, then to bear my Fruit—do my Work—Propagate my kind, not only physically but morally—not only in body but in mind” (qtd. in Rossi 31). Thus the leaves, which are alive, are buried in the earth, stratum upon stratum, and the earth is not dead as some geologists would consider. Like the atoms that are pregnant with the idea of being alive and move at the molecular level, so too, the earth produces fruit, the evidence of work and life. This association—of the latest scientific endeavors to understand the world to Thoreau’s transcendental philosophy—shows his twin commitment to empirical knowledge of nature as well as him maintaining a moral and spiritual aspect intact with his observations.

            William Rossi argues that what fuels Thoreau’s transcendentalism to observe the natural world is in fact Emerson’s correspondence theory. Moreover, Rossi states that correspondence theory was not peculiar to transcendentalist circles, but rather “integral to a broad heterogeneous discourse of natural theology that pervaded nineteenth-century Anglo-American science and culture” (30). Thus, several academic discourses believed that natural phenomena had spiritual as well as material significance. As a natural philosopher, Thoreau embraced Emersonian correspondence theory, according to Rossi, which stated that nature had spiritual codes which served to provide moral guidance. Perhaps the most cited example of Emerson’s philosophy which attests to this theory is the image of the transparent eye-ball. In Nature (1836), Emerson says, “There [in the woods] standing on bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing” (3). In order to arrive at spiritual truths, one must, according to Emerson, look beyond surfaces; beyond first principles; beyond concrete facts. This perspective, Rossi argues, is what fostered Thoreau’s investigations and articulations of the natural world, as it helped him arrive at moral and empirical conclusions.

            A closer look at Walden, however, reveals Thoreau thinking about spiritual ideas and reality in a different manner. In the chapter “Where I Lived, and What I Lived for” he critiques his New England neighbors for having a narrow view of looking at life. He says, “I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things” (W 88). So far, this would seem to agree with Emerson’s correspondence theory, as it suggests the need to look at objects and life internally, where spiritually truths may reside. But Thoreau goes on to say:

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion…till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer…Be it life or death, we crave only reality.” (my emphasis, 89-90)  

This is not the language of Emersonian transcendentalism, for Emerson’s transparent eye-ball claims to enable one to see through all things, which, arguably, means not to be able to see at all; to never arrive at a hard bottom. But in this passage Thoreau repeatedly puts in the reader’s mind that such an impenetrable surface exists, which is described as reality. So hard and concrete is this surface, that it could withhold a lamp-post safely, thus it becomes a foundation, a basis, as the French word suggests. Objects do not become dissolved with one another, as Emerson would have it, but rather spring forth from this deeply layered bedrock.

            Thoreau challenges Emerson’s notion of a transparent eye-ball on another occasion. Walden Pond becomes the central image in Walden, as Thoreau provides two separate chapters to its symbolic and physical meanings, which in turn undermine a strictly Emersonian reading of Walden Pond. Thoreau’s first description of the pond echoes Emerson’s transparent eye-ball. He personifies the pond as being “so transparent,” having “slender eyelashes” around the blue and green colors that are contained in “its iris, and “lying between the earth and the heavens” (161, 168, 160). Schneider recognizes Thoreau, here, representing the pond “symbolically [mediating] between the material and spiritual worlds represented by the earth and the sky” (101). By doing so, Thoreau keeps in line with transcendentalist philosophy which posited that heaven, the spiritual world, is not something distant or unreachable but immediately and immanently present in the natural world. Perhaps Thoreau found the pond so interesting because it demonstrated that Emerson’s idea of a transparent eye-ball could actually be found and imagined to be somewhere in nature. If this is Emerson’s central image, and it is difficult not to think so, than Thoreau did what Emerson could not, namely, attach one of his primary ideas to an actual thing in nature.

Thoreau’s second description of Walden Pond is twofold: it allows him to measure it, thus showing he can participate in the current scientific enterprise, and also, it shows him moving away from Emersonian transcendentalism. Thoreau prefaces his experiment by describing the pond’s eye as having “clos[ed] its eye-lids,” to signal to the reader a pivotal move away from a transcendental reading (252). The pond does not become “science” until Thoreau can measure it, and a prerequisite for that is a solidified, tangible pond. Next, Thoreau confidently and without a doubt, “assure[s] [his] readers that Walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual, depth” (256). Even before he begins to measure the pond, Thoreau, having cast off any transcendental superstitions of a bottomless pond, believes he will locate a hard surface, a reality of sorts. Schneider notes how the pond, in this instance, “becomes a metaphor for humanity’s moral nature, where the map of the pond’s depths becomes a symbol of a person’s character” (102). Schneider is right to observe the connection between the pond and humanity, for Thoreau employs such a link even with his empirical and spiritual interest in botany. Plants are analogous to humans in the way they develop, grow, and work. But what Schneider fails to mention is that at this point Thoreau has also demystified Emerson’s transparent eye-ball by telling his readers the exact measurements, which incidentally correspond accurately to today’s standards of measuring. The pond no longer serves as a spiritual sign-system, for Thoreau has decoded it in a manner worthy of empirical scientific inquiry.

            However, Thoreau doesn’t consider himself a scientist, in the strict sense of the word, as one who only studies the material world. His contemporaries, Charles Darwin and Louis Agassiz—for whom Harvard’s first school of science, the Lawrence Scientific School, was established in 1848—are referred to as naturalists (W 13, 203). Thoreau’s word choice is interesting, as it suggests what he might have thought about their methods. The term “scientist” was already established by 1848, and “natural philosopher” was still in use. In fact, Thoreau uses the phrase all through out Walden (15, 52, 67, 86, 100). In one instance he implicitly seems to use it against Emerson’s “American Scholar,” the term floating around transcendental circles to denote someone who practiced a holistic method of learning. In “Economy,” right before Thoreau switches from prose to poetry, he says he continued building his house and “not having many communicable or scholar-like thoughts” (39). The word choice seems deliberate, as he is building his home upon Emerson’s land, and about to undergo his experiment of living out the principles outlined in Emerson’s essay “The American Scholar.”

            Thus, Thoreau engages in a different kind of transcendentalism, one that readers should pick up as different from Emerson’s, and also proves that he is as scientifically active as his contemporaries. As Rossi argues, “Thoreau articulates an interdependent model in which ideal development is both bidirectional and reciprocal” (38). It is a natural philosophy that maintains a tangible contact and experimental mode of thought with the earth, as seen by his appreciation for Gray’s botany and Walden Pond in the winter. But Thoreau’s philosophy, besides enabling him to contribute to science, provides a moral and spiritual quality as well, one that he tenaciously holds on to for the rest of his life. As Rossi says, “The image of bidirectional growth that Thoreau appropriated from Gray, then, served further to embody this vision of humanity as simultaneously naturalized and spiritualized” (38). Thoreau makes this explicit in the chapter titled after the transcendentalist’s phrase for the laws of conscious, “Higher Laws,” when he says, “I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both” (189). It could be that the phrase “most men” here refers to transcendentalists, but he makes sure to distinguish himself by also noting the affinity he has for being in touch with, presumably, the lower instincts.

            In a passage of “The Ponds,” Thoreau describes an unforgettable and valuable experience felt by the occasion of fishing during the hours of midnight. With darkness all around him, he describes his thoughts soaring towards heaven, but then pulled back to earth with the tug of his fishing line. He says his thoughts “had wandered to vast cosmological themes in other spheres,” when the jerk of his fishing pole, “link[ed] [him] to Nature again (W 159). Amazed and thankful that he can figuratively and literally be pulled from both ends, heaven and earth, he says, “It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward in this element which was scarcely more dense” (W 159). His reward for being connected to both the material and the aerial has results he can imagine as something tangible, yet symbolic as well. “Thus,” Thoreau says, “I caught two fishes as it were with one hook” (159).

            Thoreau saw equal value in both the material and the spiritual world. As science emerged into a discipline of its own, Thoreau welcomed it as an opportunity to buttress, rather than demote, his interest in natural philosophy and transcendentalism. Laura Dassow Walls argues science was becoming “a priesthood of the few who [had] the independence, talent, and ability to withdraw from the world in pursuit of Truth” (“Believing in Nature” 23). Thoreau saw this retreat from the world as a threat to knowing as best as one could what nature had to teach. He says, “If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practiced but the art of life” (W 47). Instead, Thoreau would opt that the one who seeks to learn about nature and one’s self should have an awareness of both, as Walls says, “the source of the necessary hard granitic core of truth and eternal, higher law” (“Believing in Nature” 23). In other words, Thoreau shows how daily action in the world of facts, combined with an inclination to seek spiritual truths, yields an opportunity to know one’s self, others, and the world around them. This could be, as Walls argues, “the plot of Walden, but also the plot of the scientific laboratory, in which the disciplined self enters a sacred place…and prepares to be the clear channel for the voice of truth” (“Believing in Nature” 23). Thoreau practiced this kind of science and transcendentalism because “it showed him how believing in nature,” as something containing both reality and ideas, “might mean believing in humanity as well” (Walls, “Believing in Nature” 26).

Works Cited

Buell, Lawrence. New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance. New York: Cambridge UP., 1986. Print.

---. “Thoreau and the Natural Environment.” Myerson 171-193.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature and Other Essays. 1836. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2009. Print.

Myerson, Joel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.

Rossi, William. “Thoreau’s Transcendental Ecocentrism.” Schneider 28-44.

Sattelmeyer, Robert. “Thoreau and Emerson.” Myerson 25-40.

Schneider, Richard J, ed. Thoreau’s Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing. Iowa City: UI, 2000. Print.

---. Walden. Myerson 92-107.

Snow, C. P. “Introduction.” The Two Cultures. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. 1854. Ed. Stephen Fender. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Print.

Walls, Laura Dassow. “Believing in Nature: Wilderness and Wildness in Thoreauvian Science.” Schneider 15-28.

---. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-century Natural Science. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 1995. Print.