Operating inside Nature

Abstract

The law of operating inside nature which Erikson describes in Young Man Luther is a quite fundamental precept for Orwell; one on which depended his whole notion of the free personality. But what does nature really mean to him? It means, of course, the nature of rocks and stones and trees to which he would seem at first glance to have an almost sentimental attachment:

Sometimes on summer afternoons there were wonderful expeditions across the Downs to a village called Birling Gap, or to Beachy Head, where one bathed dangerously among the chalk boulders and came home covered with cuts … And there was the pleasure of keeping caterpillars — the silky green and purple puss-moth, the ghostly green poplar-hawk, the privet-hawk, large as one’s third finger … and … there was the excitement of dredging the dew-ponds on the Downs for enormous newts with orange-coloured bellies.¹

We need no proof of His identity nor of ours as long as, at any given time, an essential part of our equipment and a segment of His world continue to confirm each other. This is the law of operating inside nature.

Erik Erikson