Thoreau wanted to see the "means" of science not become its "end." Therefore he admired Isaac Newton, his end having been the discovery of universal laws. Such discovery to Thoreau was a kind of knowledge of the grand rhythm of the universe with which he wished to keep pace, his different drummer. He liked Newton's concept of himself as a rapt child wandering along the beach, picking up a pebble or a shell, while the vast ocean of truth lay undiscovered before him. Thoreau said that some of his own contemporaries might "be seen wandering along the shore of the ocean of truth, with their backs to that ocean.”
So what kind of "scientist" was Thoreau himself? (4) He wrote one essay, which he said, was on a "purely scientific subject" "The Succession of Forest Trees." It explains why pines spring up when an oak wood is cut down and why the process would be reversed should a stand of pines be chopped down, provided both trees are common.
As a scientist, too, Thoreau was an endless note-taker and a constant measurer. For instance, he marked out the side of his walking stick in inches so that he could measure some phenomenon of nature when he sauntered out each day. His doing so can be taken in two ways -- the scientist-sauntered contradiction again. Either he was so much a scientist that even on a stroll he had to measure things precisely, or, his measuring was merely a by-product of his essential sauntering.
Thoreau measured and recorded water depths and temperatures at various levels, pointing out the relationship to fish distribution. His work here earned him the accolade of "first American limnologist” (7). He also measured tree rings, to find the peak years in rate of growth, and this information, we know, would have had ramifications for harvesting of the trees. But when an old town elm was felled, his measurements were more a kind of praise, an affectionate touch. "I have taken the measure of his grandeur," he wrote.
He was really trying to add a spiritual dimension to science, a further seeing beyond the verge of sight. So let us focus on the sauntering aspect of Thoreau as scientist-sauntered. He himself, as he said in "Walking," preferred to derive the word "sauntered" from Saint-Terrer, a Holylander, a kind of pilgrim, wandering with always a sense of wonder
-- enjoying, in Emerson's terms, an original relation to the universe,(8) the most intense moments of which would amount to a kind of mysticism.(9)
Thoreau described his most intense moments of seeing beyond the verge of sight in this fashion:
“I had seen into paradisiacal regions.... Yet had I hardly a foothold there. I was only sure that I was charmed and no mistake. It is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from the habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance.”
Thoreau himself discovered a species of fish new to science in Walden Pond, a striped bream. He wrote: "I can only think of precious jewels, of music, poetry, beauty, and the mystery of life". It was his way of running down the street and shouting "Eureka!" In another instance he so closely observed a fish that, he said, he almost felt one with it -- another example of his seeing beyond the verge. He began to feel, in his terms, "amphibious
Thoreau's nature mysticism led invariably to an "acquaintance with the All," as he put it. In his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849, he spoke of a "Universal Soul", an everlasting "Something" apprehended through the "divine germs called the senses". "May we not see God?" he asked: God "exhibits himself...in a frosted bush today, as much as in a burning one to Moses of old.”
That Thoreau described God as "Something" suggests a rather indefinite concept of deity. But when he asked,
"Is not Nature rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?" -- that is, is not nature God?” He seemed to be a pantheist in sensing a spiritual presence or deity within nature. He did in one place say that he was "born to be a pantheist" but then added "if that be the name of me."(15)
Thoreau in A Week spoke also of a nature "behind" the natural world. This presence would then be something distinct and apart, a "Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over," as he said in Walden. "There is suggested," he wrote, "something superior to any particle of matter, in the idea or mind which uses and arranges the particles". Perhaps, Thoreau could rightly be termed a panentheist in entertaining a two-faceted view of God, but he would likely again attach the proviso -- "if that be the name of me."
He simply was not interested in theologizing about this deity but in experiencing him. "What is religion?" he once asked, and then answered -- "That which is never spoken”. Quarrelling about God was no more his propensity than quarrelling with God. When dying, he was asked if he had made his peace with God; his reply was that they had never quarreled. When someone else asked him about the next world, he said: "One world at a time."(16) His prime concern ever was to experience nature -- and the spiritual presence, however manifested.
Some of his descriptions talk of a food chain and a struggle for survival, which he considered with a scientific objectivity. "In Nature," he wrote, "nothing is wasted. Every decayed leaf and twig is only better fitted to serve in some other department". This he said in 1856. Then in 1859 Darwin's Origin of Species was published. Thoreau read the book and spoke favorably of it.(20) He had already said in A Week that "Nature has perfected herself by an eternity of practice". This statement along with his concept of nature as "gardener", appears to harmonize with Darwin's conviction concerning natural selection.
So here we have Thoreau, ahead of his time in so many ways, casting his ideas in the framework of a comprehensive ecological overview. Thoreau was a man who really likes nature, nature is so important for him – he is a transcendentalist.
