But the woodcutter resists rising beyond his animal nature, and consequently offers no insight into the integration of man's animal and spiritual sides.
Thoreau considers man's dual nature — animal and spiritual — in "Higher Laws." He writes of his own urge to gobble down a raw woodchuck as an expression of animal impulse that is as much a part of him as of any man. Throughout the chapter, he writes of subduing the appetites, of subordinating the animal to the higher instincts. In writing of hunting and fishing, Thoreau writes that he himself, formerly a fisherman, no longer has a taste for fishing: "There is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation; yet with every year I am less a fisherman . . . at present I am no fisherman at all." In stating that if he lived in the wilderness he would be tempted "to become a fisher and hunter in earnest," Thoreau acknowledges that no matter how well developed a man is intellectually and spiritually, the animal is always present within. The individual's awareness of self, of nature, and of higher purpose provides the key to surpassing animal nature. The reconciliation of animal and spiritual — if sublimation can be considered reconciliation — takes place through human understanding.
Nature, too, has its duality in Walden. Thoreau clearly perceives and enjoys nature as reality. He writes at the beginning of "Sounds" of the "language which all things and events speak without metaphor." And yet, throughout the book, he repeatedly uses objects and creatures in the natural world — Walden Pond, his bean-field, and the loon, among others — metaphorically. He clearly shares Emerson's Transcendental understanding of nature (expressed in Nature in 1836) as symbolic of spirit. Thoreau writes that he values the very real beans in his bean-field not merely as beans, but as "tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day." And in discussing just why particular species, and only those species, exist in nature, Thoreau comments that "they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts."
In the chapter "The Ponds," Thoreau suggests integration of nature as reality and nature as symbol. He writes of fishing on the pond at night:
It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.
The thinking man is thus abruptly brought back from the spiritual realm to reality. The pond is the work of the divine creator, a point of access to the universal for the alert seeker. Through the pond, through nature, man sits at the gateway between earth and heaven. The physical pond can be surveyed. But the symbolic pond seems bottomless to some men, and will continue to be so perceived as long as men need to believe in the infinite. Man (as Thoreau writes in "Spring") wants to understand things, and yet, at the same time, craves the inexplicable. Such synthesis as is possible between the reality and symbolism of nature takes place within the mind of the observer, through flashes of intuition, inspiration, and imagination.
