In the
latter regard, H. Paul Santmire
whose study of the history of Western attitudes toward nature is one of the best available, provides perspective when he writes: «The theological tradition of the West is neither ecologically bankrupt, as some of its popular and scholarly critics have maintained and as numbers of its own theologians have assumed, nor replete with immediately accessible, albeit long - forgotten ecological riches hidden everywhere in its deeper vaults, as some contemporary Christians, who are profoundly troubled by the environmental crises and other related concerns, might wistfully hope
to find» (Santmire, 5).
Maxwell, for instance, showed that the equations of an electric field would be the same as those for the flow of «an imaginary incompressible fluid»; the purpose of invoking the
latter was «
to make the mathematical theorems more intelligible
to certain minds».32 At least in his early work he seems
to have
regarded the incompressible fluid and the electric field as analogues
whose only resemblance is mathematical isomorphism.