Good and Wild
The words of “Higher Laws” 1, 3, 5, and 7 in A are similar to those in the published Walden, but in part because they are ordered differently, they leave a significantly different impression.
Remember that the entire sequence of manuscript pages we have been examining, which contains no chapter divisions, begins with Thoreau escaping environments of either culture or cultivation into the wild, where his primary engagement with Nature is through the activity of fishing, prompting some reflection on both fishermen and hunters. It is in this last part of the sequence that Thoreau expresses some reservations about his own fishing, about consuming fish as food, and about diet generally. As we have seen, he notes, in what would become paragraph 5, that “always when I have done I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished,” words that survive verbatim in the published text. But whereas in the published paragraph 5 Thoreau next connects his fishing with an “instinct in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation,” confessing that “if I were to live in a wilderness I should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter,” in A, he makes a very different connection, initially writing that fishing “tempts me continually because perhaps if I can anylize my motive it is a means of becoming acquainted with nature – not with fishes merely – but with the night and the water and the scenery – which I should not otherwise see under the same aspects.” Later, in pencil, he revises the material following “fishes merely,” replacing it with a new version of material we observed him canceling a few pages back, where he had written that fishermen and hunters see nature “in a deshabille, as members of her family.” The new version reads, “It introduces me to the night & to the wildest scenes & detains me there. The best way to become acquainted with any scenery is to follow some pursuit in it which harmonizes with it. Fishermen and hunters see nature at an advantage which the philosopher never enjoys. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them.”
Detail: Middle of HM 924, 1:199.
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HM 924 Volume 1, p. 199
He next explains that “I love sometimes to take rank hold of life, and spend my day more as the animals do. The novelty and adventure that are in this pursuit recommend it to me. Whatever humanity I may conjure up against it is all factitious, & concerns my philosophy more than my actual feelings . . .” Readers will recognize these words, too, as belonging to the published Walden—where they precede, rather than follow, his reservations about fishing.
The difference in order is crucial. It reverses the logic. In the published Walden, that logic is, roughly: “I am drawn to fish, but in retrospect I regret it.” In A, it is, roughly, “I regret fishing, but I am continually tempted to do it because it gives me a different and fuller view of nature.” In general, moreover, the ordering in A presents a more continuous and therefore more robust justification of both fishing and hunting as ways of knowing rooted in an instinctual connection with the material world, unveiling realities not visible to a disembodied mind, not discoverable through philosophy or formal education—ways of knowing that expand the boundaries of life and affirm humanity’s family relation to the rest of the animal world, indeed to all of nature.
To be sure, in A we already find something of a struggle in progress between mind and body, the spiritual and the material, with diet serving as the arena of this contest. “What if we were to obey these fine dictates these divine suggestions which are addressed to the mind and not to the body which are certainly true – not to eat meat, not to buy or sell or barter &c.,” Thoreau pencils vertically in the margin of one page, posing a question that does not survive in so many words in the published chapter but prefigures both his penciled chapter title in the E and F drafts—“Animal Food”—and his final decision to name the chapter “Higher Laws.” Strikingly, in A Thoreau’s “genius” advises him in one passage to “grow wild . . . like these ferns and brakes,” yet admonishes him in another that to renounce animal food is to live “in conformity to higher principles.”
Detail: Left margin of HM 924, 1:201; image rotated 90 degrees.
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HM 924 Volume 1, p. 201
But if Thoreau’s first draft of “Higher Laws” does not unequivocally put body over mind, does not reverse the published chapter’s polarity of lower and higher, and already reveals a deep ambivalence as his genius pulls him in opposite directions, it convincingly expresses an idea that the published chapter announces yet seems, in so many ways, to undermine: “I love the wild not less than the good.” In fact, there is little if anything in the first draft to suggest that the wild is anything other than good, even if a different kind of good from the good we embrace by obeying the mind’s “fine dictates” regarding the consumption of animal food—or what Thoreau elsewhere calls, in both A and the published Walden, the “faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels.”For a discussion of Thoreau’s juxtaposition of “wild” and “good” here, in the Journal, and in Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” see Milder, p. 132.
As we began by noting, it is beyond the scope of this essay to explain why that one healthy man eventually decides to divide health itself in two, setting animal health and spiritual health in stark opposition, or to assess how well the double vision of the published “Higher Laws” holds up to scrutiny.
We hope, however, that the essay has shed some light on the material evidence that Thoreau’s “Higher Laws” of 1846–1847, and his published chapter of 1854, differ remarkably in spirit.