The Importance of Reverie

THE MIND AS NATURE (60 pp.)--Loren Eiseley--Harper & Row ($2.75).

"There is a legend circulating about a late distinguished scientist who, in his declining years, persisted in wearing enormous padded boots. He had developed a wholly irrational fear of falling through the interstices of that largely empty molecular space which common men in their folly speak of as the world." To this extent, writes Anthropologist Loren Eiseley, 55, has the world of science diverged from the world of common sense, with little communication between them. In his own field, Eiseley has labored to rejoin the two worlds by tracing man's 20th century behavior back to its dark evolutionary beginnings, in language that is not only plainly comprehensible but richly poetic as well. In so doing, he has illuminated both the discoveries of the past and the confusions of the present. "Too often," says Eiseley, "a barbarous jargon separates the scientist from the rest of the world."

The Dream Animal. Most scientists ruthlessly exclude anything personal in their writings; Eiseley makes science an intensely personal experience. One evening, he recalls in The Firmament of Time, he was accidentally locked in a museum among grotesque skeletons of giant crabs. As the crabs began to glow in the light of sunset, he had an uneasy feeling that they had come back to life and were once again going to take over the world. When a guard showed up, Eiseley gasped in relief: "Davis, you're a vertebrate. I never appreciated it before, but I do now. I believe I'm right in congratulating you. Just remember that we're both vertebrates and we've got to stick together. Keep an eye on them now--all of them. I'll spell you in the morning."

Eiseley writes extensively of evolution only to show that it does not completely account for the success of human life. The brain, Eiseley emphasizes, allows man to escape from laws of evolution, since his body no longer has to keep adapting to environment to survive. "Man," Eiseley writes in The Immense Journey, a study of the origin of life, "was something the world had never seen before--a dream animal--living at least partially within a secret universe of its own creation and sharing that secret universe in his head with other similar heads. Man had escaped out of the eternal present of the animal world into a knowledge of past and future."

Double Choice. Unlike the usual "popularizer" of science, Eiseley is himself a scientist who commands the respect of his colleagues. Yet as a boy in Lincoln, Neb., he seriously considered becoming a poet. He got his love of language from his father, a little-known Shakespearean actor. His passion for science was roused by roaming the plains of western Nebraska, one of the world's finest Tertiary fossil beds. But anthropology alone seemed too narrow a field to his roaming mind, and he also studied biology and sociology in trying to understand the nature of man. After graduating from the University of Nebraska, Eiseley taught his special brand of anthropology at various universities and for twelve years was chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Pennsylvania.

In his latest book, The Mind as Nature, a modest little primer for teachers, Eiseley argues that the mind is as mysterious as nature, and that its intuitions are as significant as cold empirical conclusions. "I have been labeled a mystic," writes

Eiseley, "because I have not been able to shut out wonder occasionally, when I have looked at the world. [My accuser] was unaware, in his tough laboratory attitude, that there was another world of pure reverie that is of at least equal importance to the human soul."

Born of Love. Eiseley demonstrates that understanding of man's evolution can provide insights into many areas of life. Examining the cliche that "the battle is to the strong, that pity and affection are signs of weakness," Eiseley points out: "The truth is that if man at heart were not a tender creature toward his kind, a loving creature in a peculiarly special way, he would long since have left his bones to the wild dogs that roved the African grasslands where he first essayed the great adventure of becoming human. The human infant enters the world in a peculiarly helpless and undeveloped condition. Without the willingness of loving adults to spend years in nursing the helpless offspring they have produced, man would long since have vanished from the earth." Watching the stars, he brings the trained mind of the evolutionist to bear on the possibility of the existence of life on other planets, but explains his conclusion with his own special brand of eloquence: "Life, even cellular life, may exist out yonder in the dark. But high or low in nature, it will not wear the shape of man. That shape is the evolutionary product of a strange, long wandering through the attics of the forest roof, and so great are the chances of failure, that nothing precisely and identically human is likely ever to come that way again. There may be wisdom; there may be power; somewhere across space great instruments, handled by strange, manipulative organs, may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners yearning as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever."

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