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John Burroughs

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Autographs Start Price:NA Estimated At:1,000.00 - 1,500.00 USD
John Burroughs

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Auction Date:2018 Dec 05 @ 18:00 (UTC-5 : EST/CDT)
Location:236 Commercial St., Suite 100, Boston, Massachusetts, 02109, United States
ALS - Autograph Letter Signed
ANS - Autograph Note Signed
AQS - Autograph Quotation Signed
AMQS - Autograph Musical Quotation Signed
DS - Document Signed
FDC - First Day Cover
Inscribed - “Personalized”
ISP - Inscribed Signed Photograph
LS - Letter Signed
SP - Signed Photograph
TLS - Typed Letter Signed
Famed American naturalist (1837–1921) best known for his writings on nature and travel. Handwritten manuscript in pencil, unsigned, three pages, 5.5 x 9, no date. Burroughs writes some philosophical musings on the nature of man, in full: “‘What folly to quarrel with a man or call him a liar because he does not see as you do.’ I have often heard the substance of this remark made by persons who sought to justify or excuse the nature fathers. As a general proposition I quite accept it. When you apply it to specific cases I might not be able to follow you. What kind of seeing do you refer to? Seeing with the mind's eye is one thing, and seeing with the corporeal eye is quite another. We do not expect persons to think alike or to reach the same results in their thinking. In politics, in religion, in philosophy, they are bound to differ as day from night. But in matter can we surprise the mind in the act of clothing its ideas with words? Do we have the idea first and the words afterward? Is it not true rather that the two are never separated, that the two are one and that we think in words? Our feelings, our emotions are independent of language. Our…nature expresses itself in action. We should experience fear, pleasure, pain, hunger, joy, love, anger if we had no language and we might communicate them to others by our looks and gestures. But our thoughts and emotions as rational beings, all that distinguishes us from the brute is dependent upon abstract terms. We cannot go behind matter as matter turns out in its final analysis to be pure…or one with spirit itself. If we try to go behind energy to find intelligence we are lost in a vast profound. It is like going behind matter to find gravity, or chemical affinity. Intelligence too is inherent in matter and ever active there. Where our fathers saw an external arbitrary, omnipotent creator who called the universe into being by the fiat of his power, science sees an internal, eternal, principle of life in no wise separable from the universe, and in which all things live and move and have their being.” An additional paragraph, written on the reverse of the third page, has been struck through by Burroughs. In very good to fine condition, with light toning and creasing.