While coming home from fishing one night, the narrator was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of rank, primitive animality, a feeling of wildness. Seeing a woodchuck cross his path, he felt "a strange thrill of savage delight" and was "strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw." This same instinctual urge had come to him previously. At times, he found himself "ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might devour." The narrator qualifies these somewhat extreme remarks by telling his readers that he was not literally hungry, but that he did strongly desire the experience of wildness, the vicarious feeling of animal existence in nature.
Almost immediately, the narrator tells us of another instinctive urge that he frequently felt: "I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men." Thus there are two instinctual drives that dominate his personality, and he tells us that he reveres them both: "I love the wild not less than the good." Yet, while this is true, he spends the rest of the chapter explaining how his instinctual animality is not only inferior to, but in conflict with, his inclination toward spirituality.
He explains this problem by focusing on the matter of his nourishment while at Walden Pond. While gradually developing his spiritual faculties, he adopted a diet of ascetic, more spiritual foods. This was a part of his self-purification process, for he had virtually given up hunting and fishing because eating flesh seemed "essentially unclean." Yet, he realized that the animal urge toward flesh was still very much a part of him: "If I were to live in a wilderness I should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest." His animal nature can be controlled and lessened, but it cannot be eradicated—"possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature."
The narrator believes, however, that he and all men are gradually evolving through time toward a more spiritual, less animal, state. "Whatever my own practice may be," he says, "I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals." To give a concrete illustration of this point, he tells us how he once, in his youth, greatly delighted in hunting. In fact, he still believes that it is a very valuable activity for young men because it brings them in close contact with nature. Because of this contact, the narrator gradually gave up hunting for animals in nature and began to "hunt" for higher, more spiritual "game." He sees this change in his own interests as natural in a man's growth process, and he advises parents to encourage such growth in their boys: "Make them hunters, though sportsmen only at first; if possible, mighty hunters at last, so that they shall not find game large enough for them in this or any vegetable wilderness—hunters as well as fishers of men." Some day they will bag spiritual truths, higher laws, instead of woodchucks and rabbits. Once the individual lessens his animality, as the narrator was able to do, his spiritual purity will be increased and he will come to his perfection.
