e
without lies. It is better to be a truthful animal than a civilised man,
as things go. I learnt much from horses and cattle and sheep; the very
prairie dogs taught me; the ospreys and the salmon they preyed on
expressed truths. They didn't attempt to live on words, or the dust and
ashes of dead things. They were themselves and no one else, and were not
diseased with theories or a morbid altruism that is based on dependence.

This, I think, is the lesson I learnt from my own book. I did not know
it when I wrote it. I never thought of writing it; I never meant to
write anything; I only went to America because England and the life of
London made me ill. If I could have lived my own life here I would have
stayed, but the crushing combination of social forces drove me out. For
fear of cutting my own throat I left, and took my chance with natural
forces. To fight with nature makes men, to fight with society makes
devils, or criminals, or martyrs, and sometimes a man may be all three.
I preferred to revert to mere natural conditions for a time.

To lead such a life for a long time is to give up creeds, and to go to
the universal storehouse whence all creeds come. It is giving up dogmas
and becoming religious. In true opposition to instructive nature, we
find our own natural religion, which cannot be wholly like any other. So
a life of this kind does not make men good, in the common sense of the
word. But it makes a man good for something. It may make him an ethical
outcast, as facts faced always will. He prefers induction to deduction,
especially the sanctioned unverified deductions of social order. For
nature affords the only verification for the logical process of
deduction. 'We fear nature too much, to say the least.' For most of us
hold to other men's theories instead of making our own.

When Mill said, 'Solitude, in the sense of being frequently alone, is
necessary to the formation of any depth of character,' he spoke almost
absolute truth. But here we can never be alone; the very air is full of
the dead breath of others. I learnt more in a four days' walk over the
California coast range, living on parched Indian corn, than I could have
done in a lifetime of the solitude of a lonely house. The Selkirks and
the Rocky Mountains are books of ancient learning: the long plains of
grey grass, the burnt plateaus of the hot South, speak eternal truths to
all who listen. They need not listen, for there men do not learn by the