John Burroughs was an American
naturalist
and essayist important in the evolution of the U.S. conservation movement
. According to biographers at the American Memory
project at the Library of Congress
,
John Burroughs was the most important practitioner after Thoreau of that especially American literary genre, the nature essay. By the turn of the 20th century he had become a virtual cultural institution in his own right: the Grand Old Man of Nature at a time when the American romance with the idea of nature, and the American conservation movement, had come fully into their own.
"Hence when the man of science says, 'There is no God,' he only gives voice to the feeling of the inadequacy of the old anthropomorphic conception, in the presence of the astounding facts of the universe.
“The deeper our insight into the methods of nature . . . the more incredible the popular Christianity seems to us.”
"Science has fairly turned us out of our comfortable little anthropomorphic notion of things into the great out-of-doors of the universe. We must and will get used to the chill, yea, to the cosmic chill, if need be. Our religious instincts will be all the hardier for it." (p. 2)
"We are here to see and contemplate the great spectacle." (p.10)
"Science kills credulity and superstition, but to the well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in the presence of the miraculous universe." (p.108)
"In us or through us the Primal Mind will have contemplated and enjoyed its own works and will continue to do so as long as human life endures on this planet." (p.111)