Bob Wallace wrote: "Naïve science may say man is an animal, but every time man believes it, he has to turn himself into a god in order to deal with it." The subject of man and nature has also been addressed this week by Daniel Schmutter and Ilana Mercer. Here are two comments from the wise (and nature loving) J. R. R. Tolkien on the subject:
As far as our western, European, world is concerned, this "sense of seperation" [between man and nature] has in fact been attacked and weakened in modern times not by fantasy but by scientific theory. Not by stories of centaurs or werewolves or enchanted bears, but by the hypotheses (or dogmatic guesses) of scientific writers who classed Man not only as "an animal" - that correct classification is ancient - but as "only an animal."
—p. 97, The Tolkien Reader
Nature is no doubt a life-study, or a study for eternity (for those so gifted); but there is a part of man which is not "Nature," and which therefore is not obliged to study it, and is, in fact, wholly unsatisfied by it.
—p. 95, The Tolkien Reader