insistence that “to grasp in detail . . . the physico-chemical organization ofthe simplest cell is far beyond our capacity” (Eiseley, 1957, p. 206), and hewould, I think, have applauded as the highest wisdom Bateson’s (1979)definitive assertion that “we shall never be able to claim final knowledgeof anything whatsoever” (1979, p. 13). Although he would probably haveagreed with Bronowski’s contention (1973) that with the scientific revolu-tion human beings committed themselves irreversibly to what amounts toa whole new phase in the evolution of life—and not merely to a culturalinnovation—Eiseley insisted again and again that science could never dis-pense with, nor provide the solutions for the most basic yearnings of ourinner life, nor fulfill his almost biological need for an experience of the“holy.”A colleague of Eiseley’s (by his own account) once described him as theman who comes “in with furs to warm himself at the stove, but not to stay”(1975a, p. 127). For Eiseley, the scientist was engaged in a walkabout, as theAustralian Bushmen call it, a vision quest in search of an understandingof the natural world which would be at the same time an understandingof himself. The wisdom the scientist thus acquired made him, in the end,more than a naturalist: for as he “came to know/a nature still/as time isstill/beyond the reach of man” (1972, p. 22), Eiseley became, if you will, a“preternaturalist.”Eiseley (1969) once noted that Circe’s admonition to Odysseus in theOdyssey that “magic cannot touch you” (p. 24) was, in fact an initial recog-nition of the growing scientific mind that would eventually result in twen-tieth century reductionism, and he strove at all cost never to lose the touchof magic upon himself and his art. Eiseley had little taste for materialist orstructuralist explanations in anthropology, sensing in them only signs ofdisenchantment: “Do not believe those serious-minded men who tell usthat writing began with economics and the ordering of jars of oil,” he oncewarned; “Man is, in reality, an oracular animal” (1969, p. 144). He exco-riated “men who are willing to pursue evolutionary changes in solitarymolar teeth, but never the evolution of ideas” (1975a, p. 195), believingthat even scholarship can be the means of revelation for a mind on a vi-sion quest into knowledge. (Eiseley’s own brilliant use of his sources, bothliterary and scientific, lends great credence to the paradoxical assertionof Julius von Sachs—a distinguished botanist—that “all originality comesfrom reading” [Eiseley, 1975a, p. 187]).Carlisle (1974) argued that, though his central insights were “exten-sions of science,” Eiseley succeeded in giving “modern biology and anthro-pology a new idiom” largely because of his ability to interiorize scientifictheory (especially the theory of evolution) so that “it functions as a majorstructure for perceiving and comprehending experience” (pp. 356, 358–59).