Naturalizing Man (and/or Woman)

Naturalizing Man (and/or Woman)

"What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, umbilicaria, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop. The lip--labium, from labor (?)--laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genial influences would have caused it to flow yet farther" (206-207).

I thought that the above passage, in which Thoreau naturalizes the human body, was particularly interesting. I would simply like to ask the following: What does everyone think that Thoreau is trying to communicate here?

To me, this passage strongly indicates Thoreau's transcendental belief that humanity is part of a greater whole in nature. Essentially, it seems that Thoreau is trying to break down the barrier that civilization often creates between humanity and nature. By implying that man is indeed natural, he criticizes the societal trends of materialism and unrestrained technological progress that are separating man from his natural roots.