Thoreau sees Etzler's mad utopian dreams as being something like the unstated and unconscious wishes of the more moderate and practical technological utopians of his timethe trajectory wished for (but never out loud) by the Industrial Revolutionaries and scientists and reformers: "Let us not succumb to nature. We will marshal the clouds and restrain tempests; we will bottle up pestilent exhalations; we will probe for earthquakes, grub them up, and give vent to the dangerous gas; we will disembowel the volcano, and extract its poison, take its seed out." And why stop there?
