The Miracle of Being - Science and Nature

"If the scholar is only scientific, if he is not at all intuitive, an artist, a poet, a mystic (...), he is only a scientific brute... If he does not cling hard to analysis, to experience, to action, the poet is a poetic brute." These two sentences perfectly sum up the purpose of this work published in 1946 under the title "Nature and Mechanism", in the almost general indifference of an era when ecology had no say in the face of economics and technology. While the 20th century ended in a climate of general disenchantment with the misdeeds of industrial society, Robert Hainard offers an invigorating reflection on the dangers of a thought and a civilization dominated by science and reason to the detriment of nature and intuition. As Philippe Lebreton writes in his preface: "He invites us to resist economism, this inhuman and unnatural machine that has invaded the Western world and then the entire planet." Europe's most famous engraver, painter and animal sculptor, the author expresses himself here as an advanced sentinel of civilization, whose coming crisis he foresaw. With great freshness of tone and spirit, he communicates to us through text and drawing his visceral passion for wild nature and allows us to observe the "miracle" of the living world "acting by itself."