rejoins at one extreme the history of the world and at the other the historyof myself [unveiling] the shared motivations of one and the other at thesame moment” (1955, p. 51)—his grasp of literary form, his understandingof the expressive potential of the concealed essay, however, became moreand more sure. But his fusion of science and art brought about more than amasteryoftechnique.Inhisownartoftheessay,Eiseleyinterwovethestoryof an individual life—his own—with the story of life’s immense journeyso tightly that, looking back over his work as a whole it is difficult to saywhich was warp and which woof.In the tradition of Montaigne, Eiseley knew that the success or failureof his essays as art depended primarily on his presentation of self: “Theself and its minute adventures may be interesting . . . but only if one isutterly, nakedly honest and does not pontificate” (1975a, p. 178). Yet, as hehimself admits in his preface to Notes of an Alchemist (a book of poemsthat he refused to publish until retirement, at least partly out of fear of thecriticism it would bring upon him), to be “nakedly honest” about the innerlife is not considered to be “normal science” within the tradition in whichEiseley’s professional life transpired: “the austerities of the scientificprofession,” he noted, “leave most of us silent upon our inner lives”(1972, p. 11). On his own inner life, however, Eiseley remained anythingbut silent. His injunction to his readers in All the Strange Hours—“Myanatomy lies bare. Read if you wish or pass on” (1975a, p. 219)—appearsin an autobiography gripping in its candor, and the same might be saidfor all his works. Consequently, he has, by telling the story of a lifegrounded in science, bequeathed to us a body of work in which sciencebecomes a means of expressing the “personal knowledge” of the worldwhich Michael Polanyi (1962) has insisted it always has been, despite thebravura of its false show of unimpeachable objectivity. And yet Eiseley’svoice has not really been heard, nor his achievement as a writer trulyappreciated. In a time like our own, still entranced by the temptations ofpositivism, his imaginary genius has prevented his work from being as yetinfluential.In Darwin Retried, Norman Macbeth (1971), critical of the predomi-nance of Darwinian thought in the development of evolutionary theory,asks that evolutionists admit their secret doubt of the validity of Darwinismto the public; he petitions them to make a full disclosure. It is no small partof the achievement of Loren Eiseley that he made such a disclosure. Hisprose and poetry present, however, much more than his questioning ofthe Darwinian world view, which on one occasion he described as “toosimplistic for belief” (1975a, p. 245). They reveal as well Eiseley’s doubtsabout the nature and meaning of science itself, the doubts of a poet andthinker whose own world view saw beyond the “two cultures” and who