Perhaps I should immediately explain that the term “Nature” in my title has little to do with the Zolaesque naturalism that conventionally serves as the basis for discussion of Norris's ideas. Rather, my thesis is that The Octopus is best explicated by examining it within the context of the late nineteenth- century American attempt to reconcile evolutionary science and religious faith. I hope to prove that the guiding system of ideas in the novel is an evolutionary theism that attributes to nature the powers and qualities usually assigned to a personal, supernatural deity. An understanding of this system is important because it frees the novel from its traditional charge of philosophical inconsistency, and because it indicates the native intellectual roots of a writer usually considered a prime example of foreign indebtedness. First, a few words about evolutionary theism in late nineteenth- century America.

There were perhaps two major ways in which Christian evolutionists, as they were often called, attempted to reconcile evolution and religion. The first, and by far the more conventional and popular, was to assign to God the traditional role of first cause or designer— His was the master- hand that had devised or was guiding the eternal processes of change. Natural law was therefore divine law, and since the evolution of man's soul was God's primary intent, man was returned to the center of the world's stage, and order, symmetry and direction were reestablished in cosmic affairs. The second method of reconciliation derived from Herbert Spencer, and was more radical, since it came perilously close to the heresy of pantheism. Spencer, arguing from the law of the conservation of energy, claimed that the basic constituent of the universe was force, though this force or energy took the correlated forms of matter, motion, space and time. Evolution, to Spencer, was the universal process of change caused by the omnipresence and persistence of force. Though Spencer was an agnostic, a number of his disciples immediately recognized the possibility of identifying force with divine energy, that is, to attribute to God not only the function of first cause, but also of immanence in nature and in nature's processes and laws. Such an identification was particularly attractive to those who desired to reinvest nature with the qualities of a benevolent and apprehendable divinity, qualities that it appeared to have been deprived of by the initial shock of Darwinism.