nature demands both hubris and humility

Nature demanded both hubris and humility, both an unrelenting commitment to understand and an acceptance of our inability to achieve understanding – an immersion in “the magnitude and surpassing splendour of the realities” and a dependenc eon “all the wild legends of fairy magnificence” that our “imagination” and “fancy” can conjure.

I get it all but the hubris.

from Sachs’s The Humboldt Current: 19th Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism, p138.  Quotes from Reynolds, “Leaves from an unpublished journal.”