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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: out-of-door adventure. He was forever extolling the hunters and
field-observers of living animals' habits, and keeping up a fire
of invective against the "closet-naturalists," as he called them,
the collectors and classifiers, and handlers of skeletons and
skins. When I was a boy, I used to think that a closet-
naturalist must be the vilest type of wretch under the sun. But
surely the systematic theologians are the closet-naturalists of
the deity, even in Captain Mayne Reid's sense. What is their
deduction of metaphysical attributes but a shuffling and matching
of pedantic dictionary-adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from
human needs, something that might be worked out from the mere
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