The Saunterer

Samuel Butler on how not to crush the individuality out of pupils

    It’s better for pupils to learn from studying nature than to learn through secondhand accounts of those who have studied nature, advised Samuel Butler:

That system trains boys to study other people’s works rather than nature, and, as Leonardo da Vinci so well says, it makes them nature’s grandchildren and not her children . . . taught to see nature with an old man’s eyes at once, without going through the embryonic stages. . . . All his individuality has been crushed out of him. (From p. 148 of Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino, by Samuel Butler. E. P. Dutton & Co., 1913.)

    For a brief biography of Samuel Butler, click here.

J. B. S. Haldane's view about committees

    J. B. S. Haldane put it this way:

I would trust Shakespeare, but I would not trust a committee of Shakespeares. (Quoted from page 89 of Science and Human Life, by John Burdon Sanderson Haldane. Ayer Publishing. 1933. )

    For a brief biography of J. B. S. Haldane, click here.

Wallace Stegner on why we need wilderness

    As Wallace Stegner tells it:

For myself, I grew up on the empty plains of Saskatchewan and Montana and in the mountains of Utah, and I put a very high valuation on what those places gave me. And if I had not been able periodically to renew myself in the mountains and deserts of western America I would be very nearly bughouse. Even when I can’t get to the back country, the thought of the colored deserts of southern Utah, or the reassurance that there are still stretches of prairie where the world can be instantaneously perceived as disk and bowl, and where the little but intensely important human being is exposed to the five directions and the thirty-six winds, is a positive consolation. . . . We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope. (Quote from pp. 150-53 of The Sound of Mountain Water, by Wallace Stegner. Doubleday, 1969.)

    The quotation is a small part of Wallace Stegner's "Wilderness Letter," which you can read by clicking here. For a brief biography of Wallace Stegner, click here.