In this essay, Brett Foster summarizes C. S. Lewis's defense of objective value in The Abolition of Man and attempts to determine the relevance of these lectures to our contemporary milieu. He considers specifically those assaults on "nature" which endanger language, analysis and experience itself. Comparisons with passages from William Wordsworth, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Walker Percy and others suggest both the consequences of and solutions to this conflict. Mr. Foster is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University.