Accepting the universe Author:John Burroughs Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill EACH FOR ITS OWN SAKE "Proud man exclaims, 'See all things for my use!' 'See all for mine," replies the pampered goose." AND the pampered goose was... more » right: all things are just as much for her use as for man's, while there are reasonable doubts whether things were created for the especial use of either. Man, like the goose, appropriates what suits him, but is slow to realize the fact that what suits him, or is fitted to his use, depends upon his own powers of adaptation. We can say that he suits it, rather than that it suits him. He has lungs because there is air, and eyes because there are certain vibrations in the ether. In short, nature is the primary fact, and the forms and organs of life the secondary fact. Goethe said to Eckermann that he followed Kant in looking upon each creature as existing for its own sake. He could not believe, he said, that the corktrees grow merely that we might stop our bottles, and, he might have added, that rubber-trees grow that we might have rubber overshoes. The lady in a public audience who once asked me what flies are for, evidently thought that God had made a mistake in creating that which annoyed her. I was pleased with a remark of John Muir's in his Sierra book about the poison ivy: "Like most other things not apparently useful to man," he says, "it has few friends, and the blind question, 'Why was it made?' goes on and on with never a guess that first of all it might have been made for itself." Coming from the mouth of a Scotch Presbyterian, this is heretical doctrine. Muir had evidently forgotten his early training. It is possible for man to make use of poison ivy; in fact it is used in medicine; but who shall dare to say that it was made for that? Flies and poison ivy and all other noxious and harmful things are each...« less