Melville's primary focus in his classic novel Moby Dick is the evil of mankind, a point of interest consistent with his philosophical alignment anti-transcendental. In Moby Dick, Melville illustrates man's feelings of evil towards his fellow men and nature through his carefully developed plot and character. Melville also illustrated this in the components of the thematic layer that underlies the personal motivations of almost every character. Analyzing Melville's own motivations helps clarify the author's reasoning behind each of the examples of man's evil in his novel. In order to fully understand his anti-transcendental belief, it is necessary to first understand the origin of anti-transcendentalism. Transcendentalism is the term related to the Emersonian-Thoreauvian set of beliefs, which incorporated the existence of a higher soul and the benevolent disposition of man as the default soul. Melville and others like him were opposed to transcendental views. The natural opposition to a theory of the general benevolence of man is that of his malevolence towards everything around him; the main idea behind anti-transcendentalism was that all humans have a capacity for evil and that, given the right circumstances, the evil in everyone would manifest itself in their actions. The plot and characters of Moby Dick contribute to its anti-transcendental philosophy; the entire story revolves around the evil of man, which is demonstrated in virtually every person depicted in the book. The story itself is about man pitted against nature, as if the two were never meant to peacefully coincide. The men aboard the ship must fend for themselves against harsh maritime weather and the presumably evil whales they hunt. Natural forces ravage the whaler's population; in the end, only the narrator survives. In turn, man is reciprocally bad towards nature; men destroy giant sea creatures for their blubber and throw the skinned carcasses back into the water. In addition to this collective evil of the people aboard the ship, many individuals are themselves shining examples of the evil of humanity. Captain Ahab, the book's main character, devotes his life's sole dedication to revenge against the great white whale that gives the novel its name. Ahab sometimes shows that he has a less evil side (signified by the scar that apparently divides his body into two separate people), but in the end the bad half of him overrides his goodness..