Perhaps the main charm of An Essay on Nature, by Frederick J. E. Woodbridge1 (Columbia University Press, $3), is its verbal integrity, the author’s splendid determination to stand no nonsense from words. However often he may have wondered what sort of uniform Nature’s messenger boy wears, he is not to be taken in by the imp of ambiguity in a messenger boy’s disguise.
His pronounced dislike for what has been dubbed in philosophy “dualism” is somewhat akin to a chess-problem composer’s attitude toward “duals”; what distresses a philosopher of Professor Woodbridge’s type is the possibility of solving a philosophical problem in more than one way just because this or that term involved is ill defined and thus polymorphic—a flaw invalidating the problem itself. Such is his wariness in dealing with a given term (whether it be “knowledge,” “light” or “matter”), so repellent to him is the chance of some second sense being smuggled in under the belly of an innocent looking noun, that he finds it preferable to shear the whole flock. In result a certain crisp dryness of expression is attained, and thought goes about almost naked, shuddering a little on its way, but unmistakably genuine.
The major assumption is (and his wisdom would appreciate my using the present instead of the past) that man being within nature, there cannot be any independent explanation of what we do and of the world in which we do it. This is an example of the author’s very refreshing common sense, but it does not quite manage to put the solipsist into the fool’s paradise which it assigns to him. Every monistic philosophy must somehow avoid (or ignore, as Prof. Woodbridge does) the old pitfall of that dualism which separates the ego from the non-ego, a split which, strangely enough, is intensified the stronger the reality of the world is stressed.
True, natural death achieves a natural fusion (“…to die and to remain somewhere and somehow in Nature’s embrace,” as Prof. Woodbridge beautifully says in another connection), but while the brain still pulses one cannot escape the paradox that man is intimately conscious of Nature because he is walled in himself and separated from her. The human mind is a box with no tangible lid, sides or bottom, and still it is a box, and there is no earthly method of getting out of it and remaining in it at the same time. Prof. Woodbridge finds the world so real and analyzes the reality with such masterful vigor that the question whether our knowledge of the world is real, too, has no time to interest the fascinated reader; one recalls it only afterward, just as one wonders after a journey whether that picturesque scene in the Old Town was not staged perhaps for the tourist’s benefit. I particularly liked Prof. Woodbridge’s “optical structure of the universe.”
That philosophers are essentially diurnal creatures (no matter how late into the night their inkpots and spectacles glitter) and that space would not be space if color and outline were not primarily perceived are suppositions that transcend the author’s “naïve realism” just at the point where he seems to be most securely hugging the coast. But is visibility really as dominant as that in all imaginable knowledge of Nature? Though I personally would be satisfied to spend the whole of eternity gazing at a blue hill or a butterfly, I would feel the poorer if I accepted the idea of there not existing still more vivid means of knowing butterflies and hills.
Then again there is Prof. Woodbridge’s suggestion that memories and imagination are consequences of retrospective and prospective events of Nature and not vice versa. One would have liked him to have explained in that light what “growth” is, because in the course of his very close reasoning one is disappointed not to find discussed the connection so naturally felt by the layman of Nature between the idea of time and that of development. Philosophers are born to be criticized, and the fact that some passages in Prof. Woodbridge’s book make one a little cross with his dynamic common sense, is in no way detrimental to his work. The clarity of his style, his mental inclinations, his art of selection, the rich store of wisdom which lies behind the assorted samples displayed all go to make a work of permanent value, a monument to the memory of a fine scholar and, as one may infer, of a kindly man. Taken as a piece of writing, it is a good instance of the author’s contention that language is not applied to Nature but is really made in Nature, and one thinks of the way a creative writer must feel, namely that trying to set down his sentence in the best possible state—of conservation rather than creation—is but an effort to materialize something which already exists in the somewhere which Prof. Woodbridge obligingly terms “Nature.”
* V. Nabokov, “Professor Woodbridge in an Essay on Nature Postulates the Reality of the World” (review of Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, An Essay on Nature [New York: Columbia University Press, 1940]), New York Sun, Dec. 10, 1940, 15.