Thoreau's "Walden Pond" has essentially the same structure as Descartes "Meditations on First Philosophy", a book I despise. In that book, Descartes justifies his philosophy by saying something along the lines of: "I doubted everything, got down to the bedrock of experience and knowledge, and this is what I came back with." As it would happen, he came back with exactly the same beliefs he'd started with, and the whole thing seems to have been a ruse to lend an air of certainty and power to those beliefs. Thoreau does exactly the same thing, except that his bedrock of experience is nature rather than systematic doubt. As with Descartes, I get the distinct impression he went into nature with a very good idea of exactly what it was he wanted to hear.

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