ROOTED IN THE ABSENCE OF PLACE5had felt “the confining walls of scientific method in his time” (1957, p. 13).And because his full disclosure is inextricably intertwined with his ownattempt to write both nakedly honest autobiography and, at the same time,a kind of philosophical anthropology, his work provides us with consid-erably more than just a candid revelation about the workings of sciencelike Watson’s The Double Helix (1980). It causes us to wonder to whatdegree mankind’s own realization of itself as a species is mirrored in itssupposedly objective pursuit of scientific knowledge and to ask, moreover,whether both processes are not reflections of the psychological life of sci-entists themselves. Because Loren Eiseley never separated these processeswithin his own mind into water-tight compartments, they flow togetherin his work, providing thereby a pure specimen in which to study theirinterrelationship.THE TWO CULTURES“It is very seldom,” the fantasy writer Lord Dunsany once observed,“that the same man knows much of science, and about the things that wereknown before science ever came” (Eiseley, 1969, p. 191). Eiseley was onesuch man, a gifted writer who blended imagination, memory, an acutesense of the miraculous, keen perception, and profound scientific specula-tion into a single “Orphic voice,” as Elizabeth Sewell (1960) has called it.”He paid no attention to the claim of a fellow scientific historian that theliterary naturalist is obsolete.Eiseley possessed a faith in the unity of things which permittedhim to see, beyond the increasing specialization of his age, that (in thewords of R. Buckminster Fuller) “nature does not have/Separate de-partments of/Mathematics, physics/Chemistry, biology,/History and lan-guages,/Which would require/Department head meetings/To decide whatto do/Whenever a boy threw/A stone in the water/With the complex ofconsequences/Crossing all departmental lines” (1973, p. 191). Yet his col-leagues in the sciences repeatedly attacked him for his open-ended sense ofwonder, which they took to be his “mysticism” and suspected, with somejustification, of being religious in origin, demanding on one occasion, inwords which, Eiseley (1971) explained, sounded “for all the world like a hu-morless request for the self-accusations so popular in Communist lands . . .that he “explain” himself (p. 214). Such incidents brought Eiseley to con-clude that modern science has become a vehicle for the human mind whichhas lost all respect for “another world of pure reverie that is of at least equalimportance to the human soul” p. 214), the world his imagination openedonto