Naturalism

Ever look at the world and feel small and powerless? The philosophy of "Naturalism" says you are, but you don't know it. Your "self," full of ambition and hope, is what your brain fabricates to deny the larger environmental forces governing your behavior: social class, economics, war, biology, climate, geography. And yet the literature of Naturalism, while dramatizing this belief that the place creates the "person," quietly marvels at the power of human will, much as America still marvels at the Romantic dream of the individual who creates the self.