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.17 They also shared a devotion toa similar methodology.As members of the society explained, the Pre-Raphaelites supported works that the poet, the naturalist, and the geolo-gist might have taken large pleasure from. For their artistic standards ofaccuracy, for example, the Pre-Raphaelites chose the photograph and,tellingly, the topographical report. An artist, the Pre-Raphaelites believed,must have a practical and a scientific knowledge of nature including geology,botany, anatomy, and physics. King was no doubt interested in art as ameans to increase social capital, but the Pre-Raphaelite philosophy nicelyintersected with his broader vision for science.Within a shared culture ofpiety, King believed his science could be as morally informative as art.18King s reading of Ruskin suggested that a truthful analysis of naturerequired a synthesis of scientific and aesthetic sensibilities.Moreover, un-covering nature s verities required scientific skills to understand the orga-nization and mechanisms of the earth.Yet the full emotional significanceof nature could come only from the appreciative eye of the artist.Ruskinintensified King s interdisciplinary approach to nature, and with the Pre-Raphaelites as his guide, he trained himself to accommodate a variety ofnatural perceptions.19 The objectivity of science and the emotion of artblended into what King believed was the perfect understanding of nature.The mélange of science and art, however, became problematic as thecentury wore on.As long as nature reflected the divine, emotion and subjec-tivity remained essential elements of the scientific study of nature.But asprofessional science defined the parameters for the study of the earth, supportfor the amateur Ruskinian approach to nature was doomed to failure.No longer could knowledge be supported by representation alone.By thelate 1870s, few scientists believed that science, religion, and art provideddifferent perspectives on the same truth.Unshaken, King continued tosupport a philosophy that flowed from Nature the key to Art & Science, to God the key to Nature, to balance his interpretation of the nonhumanworld with his science, faith, and aestheticism.20 This method of viewingnature, difficult for many of his contemporaries to understand, enabledKing to pursue his science without falling from the highest moral andreligious standard or, more appropriately, without losing his claim to gentle-manly perspective.50 CLARENCE KING AND THE WESTERN LANDSCAPE The Vertical SublimeKing s blend of scientific observation and aesthetic appreciation took onspecial meaning in the physical world.His elation at the sight of MountShasta, for instance, suggests a changing understanding of mountains andthe sublime within American culture.Throughout the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries, the sublime was continually redefined and reinter-preted, but for many citizens during the time of King s explorations, moun-tains, like those in the Sierras, were places of wonder and beauty.Onehundred and fifty years earlier, however, mountains were often consideredfrightening symbols of confusion and chaos.Until the late seventeenthcentury, steep slopes and isolated peaks aesthetically unpleasant andcommercially useless were reviled.One of the best exemplars of thistransition in thought is the Reverend Thomas Burnet, chaplain to KingWilliam III of England.Burnet was foremost a theologian, but as a man ofstanding, he also considered himself versed in science.In the 1670s and1680s, Burnet grew concerned that enthusiasm for science would lead tothe eventual neglect of scripture.If geology surpassed Genesis, he feared,God would fade from the hearts of his contemporaries.More fundamentally, Burnet wanted to provide a theological explanationfor the appearance of the world.Science could overtake theology, he believed,by providing a convincing narrative to explain how the earth took shape.Before Burnet, the conventional wisdom of Christian orthodoxy held that theyoung earth had always looked the same.Created in the flurry of activityoutlined in Genesis, the earth and its mountains were fast formed and thenessentially frozen in time.But Burnet also thought that such scriptural defini-tions could not account for large global events, like the flood, and he set off tooffer a clarification
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