In Krutch's autobiography [More Lives Than One], there is a strong sense of crisis, insight and redirection at two points in his career; the result in both instances was a book that seemed to write itself, rapidly, out of a fullness of conviction and intensity of feeling. The first was The Modern Temper; and to the extent that it entailed a deliberate embracing of human values sanctioned by art, history and tradition, it may better be termed a reversion than a conversion. Apparently it saved him from the later Marxist conversion of his contemporaries, as he became in both literary and social criticism a spokesman for a conservative humanism. Experience and Art (1932) developed an aesthetic consonant with the cosmic pessimism of The Modern Temper; in it, he argued for the value of the arts in maintaining an imaginative environment hospitable to human nature, a kind of sanctuary within the inhospitable world revealed by the sciences. Was Europe a Success? (1934) developed a roughly analogous argument for Western culture vis-à-vis the Marxist vision of the future. But throughout these middle years of his career he continued his youthful hobby of amateur microscopic investigations; he bought a rural home in Connecticut, commuting to New York; and in 1948, shortly after completing his study of Thoreau, there came a second book that, like The Modern Temper, seemed to write itself as though flowing naturally from a hidden spring. It was a series of "nature" essays, based on his observations in his garden and through his microscope; and to just the extent that The Modern Temper crystalized his early despair, so did The Twelve Seasons contain the essence of the qualified optimism of the closing decades of his career—"a kind of pantheism," as he later put it, "which was gradually coming to be an essential part of the faith … which would form the basis of an escape from the pessimism of The Modern Temper."

From pessimism to pantheism in twenty years. The Twelve Seasons celebrates the arrival; but it is a pantheism essentially empirical rather than mystical or transcendental, a perception not of nature as mirror of the human spirit but of the human spirit as one of the wonders of nature. The keynote is sounded in the initial essay, in which he is concerned with spring, the historic rituals of rebirth and the absurd technical problems of placing Easter on the calendar each year. Far better, he suggests, to mark the day by the first sound of the spring peepers, the small frogs who voice their new life only when "the temperature has been above freezing often enough and long enough to bring them to life."… Implicit in [one] passage is Krutch's whole postretirement career as natural historian and scientific humanist, an attempt to locate man in the natural order without sacrificing the traditional norms of his humanity. And although it is easy and tempting to identify Thoreau as the tutelary spirit in this conversion, we must consider also his involvement with Samuel Johnson. For Krutch's book on Johnson forms a natural sequence with the earlier Modern Temper, the subsequent study of Thoreau, and the later works of philosophical natural history. The question here is not so much Krutch's status as scholar in regard to these writers as it is the affinities that drew him to them. The relations are complex, but it can be said most simply that Johnson and Thoreau appear as exemplary figures in Krutch's own pantheon—triumphant figures, that is, in whose careers he could discern versions of the dilemma vexing himself. (pp. 270-71)

The study of Johnson still stands as one of the best general introductions, which is to say that Krutch's work is scholarship rather than self-display, but the terms of his analysis and tonality of the whole mark his special interest. The work turns on the contrast of Johnson's pessimism with his zest for life, and Johnson emerges implicitly as a transitional figure between an age confident of a supernatural order behind the empirical one and the modern age, confident of nothing save the empirical order. (p. 271)

What I intend to emphasize here is at once Johnson's characteristic tendencies of thought and the attractiveness of these for the author of The Modern Temper. For Johnson's hard-won religious faith, and the whole body of traditional values adhering to it, were what had fallen out of Krutch's world, while at the same time Johnson's enormous experiential vitality, his immersion in the world of sense and common sense, planted him squarely in the mainstream of empirical thought that runs from Bacon to our own day. (pp. 272-73)

[Out of the moment of insight when he wrote, in The Twelve Seasons, "We are all in this together"] came Krutch's post-professional career and his systematic reassembly of a world man can live in. In the most general sense, this meant to give up the comprehensive hypotheses of the various determinisms on which The Modern Temper had been based, and this for the best of reasons: because they were, for all their range of certitude, inadequate to important areas of experience and destructive of unique human potential. His argument in these years progressed along two fronts: the one best represented by two volumes of social criticism (The Measure of Man, 1953, and Human Nature and the Human Condition, 1959), the other by his several volumes of nature essays (especially The Desert Year, 1952, and The Great Chain of Life, 1956). The main thrust of the first pair was to define a uniquely privileged human nature and to rescue it from the social dogmas implicit in mechanistic biology, statistical sociology, and stimulus-response psychology—dogmas that might be subsumed in the popular fallacy that "man is an animal and an animal is a machine." His achievement is to meet these adversaries on their own grounds, to detect the unwarranted extensions of their claims, and to create in the margins between their legitimate competencies a basis for what he calls Minimal Man: the few things needed to justify in the natural order the traditional norms of human value.

As complement to these wide-ranging essays are his nature books, continuations of the impulse tapped in The Twelve Seasons, and really the basis on which his social criticism is built. The best of these is The Great Chain of Life, which carries forward the premise arrived at in the earlier book, that "we are a part of Nature, nevertheless, no matter what she may be…. Whatever we discover about her we are discovering also about ourselves." Few in these days could disagree, but this premise rests in turn upon another that separates Krutch from his opponents: that man has mistakenly conceived Nature upon the model of a machine, thus alienating himself from the principle of life. The Great Chain of Life seeks to rectify this error, which has collapsed man and his values into mere conditioned behavior and has posited a blind evolutionary mechanism as the sole principle connecting man and the rest of creation. Krutch reexamines the whole question, working his way up the phylogenetic scale with his microscope, his field observations, and his keenly felt rapport with the natural order. What emerges most obviously is a purely biological basis for a solid core of human values; what emerges also, however, is a criticism of mechanist and behaviorist theories of evolution and biology for their failures to be empirical enough—that is, for loving the security of a hypothesis (or a dogma) too well to assess adequately the whole body of human experience…. For merely to be alive is to participate in a complex and wonderful enterprise, one much richer than the mere elaboration of survival mechanisms can explain; and life contemplated wholly and openly reveals evidence not only for the deepest-laid of traditional values but for an optimistic view of man's place in nature, a special glory and a special future attaching to that nature that is uniquely human. Neither so cosmically pessimistic as Johnson nor so cosmically optimistic as Thoreau, yet as deeply attached to the human order as Johnson and to the natural order as Thoreau, Krutch offers in his own career the example of the restorative power of our literary heritage. For by this time, he is able to see our need for literature, and for the arts generally, in a more positive light than in the thoroughly existentialist Experience and Art of 1932. Now he sees it not merely as a symbolic alternative world to the natural order, but as a unique product of that order as man is a unique product, a refined adaptive instrument for exploring the potential of that aspect of nature that is human. Cut off from that realm of experience, he warns, and nurturing ourselves solely on the seductive certainties of an arid naturalism, we run the risk of betraying ourselves and our destiny.

I have mentioned that I find Krutch a prophetic figure, especially in The Modern Temper. At the time of his death in 1970, he had lived just to the verge of but not into the contemporary age of ecological awareness. Certainly he prefigured this awareness; no doubt he helped in some measure to bring it about. What is most interesting, however, is to contemplate the implicit prophecy of his later study when set against his particular concern for the death of tragedy in the modern world. Krutch had succeeded in finding a basis for human value in the natural order, but he had not wholly connected his philosophic and social concerns with his earlier literary ones. It takes only a little reflection, however, to bring together his early essay on the intimate universe in which tragedy occurs with his late study of man's deep affinities with the scale of life below him, and to bring into alignment with these hierarchies not only the classical Great Chain of Being—which mediates among them all—but also the Darwinian evolutionary succession and the sensitive, mutually interdependent ecological hierarchy that we now know to be the basis of life on our small planet. (pp. 277-78)