Reason and Primitivism in the American Wilderness

Reason and Primitivism in the American Wilderness

Bruce Silver

I. Introduction

The veneration of natural man living in a prelapsarian age of innocence and indolence is a commonplace in European art and literature.’ In what follows, therefore, I shall not simply rehearse familiar descriptions of a golden age peopled by noble savages who are as rich in inward virtue as they are in the outward fruits of nature. I shall discuss (a) the hints at a growing fatigue, especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with primitivism; and I shall look to (b) the ways in which this fatigue was revealed in attitudes about America and about the Indians who failed to develop its wilderness.2

It is, of course, not enough to point out that certain philosophers and colonial American naturalists were unexcited by the poetic vision of forest primitives and neglected frontiers. Hence the principal aim of my analysis is an exploration of some of the reasons that neither philosophical capitalists like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke nor naturalists like Mark Catesby and William Bartram could comfortably accept the conception of superabundant nature unaltered by its inhabitants.

11. Hobbes and the Rational Basis for a Rejection of Primitivism:

In The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx reminds us that among the many images of nature undisturbed by human art or effort, perhaps none is more familiar than that expressed by Gonzalo in the Ternpe~t .~ Shipwrecked with the remainder of his party on a vaguely situated and unnamed island, Gonzalo announces ex nihilo that if he had “plantation of this isle,” he would permit neither agriculture nor industry nor government:

No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all; And women too, but innocent and pure; No sovereignty.. . . sweat or endeavor. Treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine Would I not have; but nature should bring forth, Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people. (11, i, 153-178)

All things in common nature should produce without

It is not important here whether Shakespeare was himself an advocate of the classical ideal of unlaborincr residents in a land of peace and plenty.

The image itself is what matters. Work is unnecessary because all that one needs is ripe and everywhere at hand. Competition is alien both because there is no scarcity and because the unreflective goodness of men and women prohibits the greed and hostility that express themselves initially in competiton and ultimately in war.

A comparison of Gonzalo’s soliloquy with what Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) says in the Leviathan (1651) of the state of nature reveals how completely discredited primitivism becomes in a philosophy which views human nature cynically and which argues that wherever an unimproved world exists so too do men weakened by conflict and deprived of the advantages of ~ociety.~ Whatever we might wish to think of men living under conditions that exist only in the imaginations of those who yearn for the purity of an Arcadian utopia, the facts for Hobbes are these: the mythical abundance that makes innocents of savages-according to poets eager to reify the age of gold in some Eden across the Atlantic-is nowhere to be found. Generosity and probity, among beings who are essentially similar in mind and body and who equally desire what they cannot equally share, have no place in the natural state.5 That will always be a state of want and war:

To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent: that nothing can be unjust. Thenotions ofright and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.. . . And thus much for the ill condition which man by mere nature is actually placed in, though with a possibility to come out of it consisting partly in the passions, partly in his reason.6

The natural state is not only inimical to peace, morals, and positive law; it is also a state that denies those who live in it the obvious benefits of mercantile and industrial society. Thus Hobbes goes out of his way to indict what traditional primitivists so clearly admired. What Gonzalo would have instituted on his rich and placid island, as manifestations of the ascendancy of instinctive virtue over vice, Hobbes characterized as the inevitable consequence of the absence of sovereign authority and civil order. In short, the conditions required for the felicitous life as primitivists conceive it, i.e., a life of inactivity in some fecund wilderness, are precisely the conditions that obtain “where every man is enemy to every man,” and where, as Hobbes tells us in the most memorable passage of the entire Leviathan, there

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Reason and Primitivism in the American Wilderness 73

can be

no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation nor use of commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no acount of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.7

One would be pressed to find a comparable text, by any other philosopher, that is so fully at odds with the primitivist ideal of a world uncorrupted by industry, agriculture, and trade. These material expressions of the triumph of intellect over nature are absent where there is no polity or sovereign powerful enough to overawe the destructive passions of its citizens and to provide a tissue of laws within which commerce, manufacture, and technology can flourish and be secure: “The impositions, that are laid on the people by the sovereign power, are nothing else but the wages, due to them that hold the public sword, to defend private men in the exercise of several trades and callings.”s

To those who question Hobbes’s analysis of human nature, together with his equation of the state of nature with that of war, and who suggest that in a proper setting a belief in the universal belligerence of mankind is suspect, he answers with this reference to America:

It may peradventure be thought there was never such a time nor condition of war as this, and I believe it was never generally so over all the world; but there are many places where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small families, the concord whereof depends on natural lust, have no government at all and live at this day in that brutish manner. . . .

Here Hobbes’s idea of American savages is not very far from that of the bestial and oscitant Caliban whose principal goal in life was no longer to “scrape trenchering nor wash dish.” This idea, like that of a spurious age of indolence, is objectionable to Hobbes because it offends against his recurrent insistence that what defines man qua man and what separates him from animals is the instrumental use of reason. “I have said before. . .that a man did excel all other animals in this faculty: that when he conceived anything whatsoever, he was apt to inquire the consequences of it and what effects he could do with it. ’m

Following Francis Bacon’s preference for an active life of reason over a life of simple passion or sterile contemplation, Hobbes writes that the

fundamental end of knowledge or philosophy is its deployment in action:”

For the inward glory and triumph that a man may have for the mastering of some difficult and doubtful matter.. . , is not worth so much pains as the study of philosophy requires; nor need any man care much to teach another what he knows himself, if he thinks that will be the only benefit of his labour. The end of knowledge is power; and the use of theorems. . .is for the construction of problems; and, lastly, the scope of all speculation is the performing of some action, or thing to be done.12

Knowlege as a handmaid to action functions for Hobbes to free human beings for a lockstep with nature, and it does this in at least two ways. (i) Knowledge properly employed enables men to remove themselves from the contentious state of nature, since it is only when rational beings consult the “laws of nature” or precepts “found out by reason” that stable commonwealths come peacefully into being.13 (ii) Knowledge also permits men, once they have by social contract chosen to restrain their mutually destructive desires, to know and to modify the world in ways impossible where anarchy prevails.14 In its primary function, then, the active use of reason makes possible self-preservation itself, the sine qua non for all else.15 In its secondary function, it helps us to secure the “more contented life,” a life that can be realized only with leisure and security enough to develop the useful arts;16 hence Hobbes writes in De Corpore (1655) that we best understand the “utility of philosophy” by

reckoning up the chief commodites of which mankind is capable, and by comparing the manner of life of such as enjoy them, with that of others which want the same. Now, the greatest commodities of mankind are the arts; namely, of measuring matter and motion; of moving ponderous bodies; of architecture; of navigation; of making instruments for all uses; of calculating the celestial motions. . . , of geography, &c. By which sciences, how great benefits men receive is more easily understood than expressed. These benefits are enjoyed by almost all the people of Europe, by most of those of Asia, and by some of Africa: but the Americans, and they that live near thepoles, do totally want them. But why? Have they sharper wits than these? Have not all men one kind of soul, and the same faculties of mind? What, then, makes this difference, except philosophy? Philosophy, therefore, is the cause of all these benefits.17

The uncivilized inhabitants of America lack the benefits of science and society because they have not taken the trouble to use reason to check their passions or to develop the applied arts required for the commodious life. That they live in something close to the hypothetical state of nature and that they have no industry, engineering, navigation or

74 Journal of American Culture

building testifies to their failure to consult or to employ reason fruitfully. Commenting on the rationality necessary both for political society and for advancement in the sciences, Hobbes declares that those who deny the reasonable basis for sovereign authority because they have never seen it successfully implemented “argue as ill, as if the savage people of America, should deny there were any grounds, or principles of reason, so to build a house, as to last as long as the materials, because they never yet saw any so well built.”’*

It will not do to argue against Hobbes the case that some of Aristotle’s epigones pressed in an attempt to justify the European subjugation of the New World, viz., that the natives of America do not live a life of reason because they are by nature incompletely rational beings (slaves).19 It is clear in the text above from De Corpore and from the Leviathan that Hobbes was convinced that men, whether English or aboriginal, are fundamentally indistinguishable in terms of the capacity to reason. What separates civilized from uncivilized beings is not raw ability but ability actualized in the sciences:

As to the faculties of mind, (setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon general, and infallible rules, called Science; which very few have, and but in few things; as being not a native faculty, born with us; nor attained. . . , while we look after somewhat else.) I find yet a greater equality amongst men, than that of strength.20

Hobbes’s uncomplimentary appraisal of Indians living in the unimproved wilderness of America is not, then, founded on any belief that they are innately slavish beings who are unable, in fact and in principle, to live a reflective and productive life. One does not, after all, disparage a beast for its unavoidable failure to become a man. His objection is that the Indians are men who have ignored the faculty or function that makes them better men, i.e., rationality objectified in ruling the passions and in shaping the world. (In an important sense, Hobbes’s criticism of the savage Americans anticipates Immanuel Kant’s complaint against the “inhabitants of the South Sea Islands’’ who devote themselves to sensual indulgence and idleness. For a rational being to choose to live as they do is to contradict rationality itself: “a rational being. . . necessarily wills that all his faculties should be developed, inasmuch as they are given to him for all sorts of possible purposes.”21)

As Hobbes sees it, there is little to praise and less to emulate in the lives and behavior of the “savage people of America.” They have, despite their capacity to reason, surrendered to an irrationalism that is the negation of what makes them truly men; for to remain in a natural state and to live off only what unadorned nature can offer, as the noble savages of romantic literature are said to do, is to ignore the role that reason alone is able to play. It is to turn from what is specifically human to what is merely anima1.22 We can accept the judgment of a recent commentator who, while considering issues different from those under discussion here, writes:

For Hobbes, then, the state of nature is natural to man but not rational.. . . There is accordingly an antithesis between nature and reason which reason must seek to overcome. It can be overcome, however, only if man is a rational being and not merely a natural creature.23

The true golden age for Hobbes is the modem age of domination and transcendence of nature, not the retreat to some Ovidian Arcadia “untroubled, unharried by hoe or plowshare.” It was the Baconian vision of utopia, developed and presided over by scientists, engineers, and emergent industrialists, that excited Hobbes. It is in Bacon’s New Atlantis (1622), not in the unexploited frontiers of the New World, that man’s end is exactly what it should be- the purposeful exercise of reason for “the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the affecting of all things possible.”24

111. Locke and the Irrationalism of Ignoble Savages:

That John Lmke (1632-1704) was fascinated by the New World is unmistakable. His two most important and enduring works, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Two Treatises of Government (1690), are punctuated with references to the plants, animals, and human residents of America.25 But Locke’s interest in America and its resources by no means entailed any enthusiasm for the unproductive and sometimes barbarous savages about whom he had heard or read.26

Like Hobbes, Locke also appealed to America and its original inhabitants to exhibit the condition of men who had, in some fundamental way, abandoned rationality. He quotes with disgust the account of Peruvian cannibalism in Garcilasco de la Vega’s Commentaire royale (1633) and cites


anthropophagy as the extreme example of what can follow from a political theory that ties the case for absolute monarchy to the belief that fathers have unrestricted powers over their children’s lives.27 Locke knew that even in the New World cannibalism was not the rule; but he held that those practicing it exemplify, in a most reprehensible form, what characterizes American Indians as a class, viz., the atrophy of reason. Of men who eat the flesh of their children, enemies, and mistresses, Lock writes:

Thus far can the busy mind of man carry him to a brutality below the level of beasts, when he quits his reason, which places him almost equal to angels. Nor can it be otherwise in a creature, whose thoughts are more than the sands, and wider than the ocean, where fancy andpassion must needs run him into strange courses, if reason, which is his only star and compass, be not that he steers by.28

The reference to reason in this passage is more than metaphorical. It is for Locke, as it was for Hobbes, “that faculty whereby man is supposed to be distinguished from beasts, and wherein it is evident he much surpasses them.”29 And always, “reason must be our last judge and guide in e~ery th ing .”~~

(When he uses the term “reason” in its most restrictive sense, Locke has in mind an ability to apprehend self-evident truths and to deduce from these a variety of subaltern truths or theorems.31 His model is that of a geometrical proof: “We may in reason consider these four degrees: the first. . .is the discovering and finding out of truths; the second, the regular and methodical disposition of them.. .; the third is the perceiving their connexion; and the fourth, a making a right conclusion. These several degrees may be observed in any mathematical d e m o n s t r a t i ~ n . ” ~ ~ When Locke speaks less restrictively, he thinks of reason as the faculty that takes us beyond simple sensation both to ideas necessarily related to each other and to the merely “probable connexion of all ideas or proofs one to another.””)

It is after one understands the importance of reason to Locke that he is in a better position to appreciate his unhappiness with the irrationality of the Indians. The first and obvious question is whether Locke thought of them as rational or nonrational by nature. Are they able, if they so choose, to make the sorts of intellectual inferences that allow human beings-but not beasts-to move beyond their senses or feelings and to calculate, to plan, to change the world? The answer is clear. There is nothing in Locke to suggest that in his view the Indians were naturally without reason. There is, in fact, evidence to argue, as Hobbes already had, that they possess the same kind of faculties and abilities

as Europeans. Thus while not everyone has studied Aristotle’s Organon,

we may take notice, that there are men that reason exceedingly clear and rightly, who know not how to make a syllogism. He that will look into many parta of Asia and America, will find men reason there perhaps as acutely as himself, who never yet heard of a syllogism.34

It is rather the case that the Indians have turned away from reason, and they have done so in a way that Locke could neither comprehend nor abide. At first glance, their retreat from reason is, in the manner that most confounded Locke, subtle enough to go almost unnoticed. It is a retreat made clearer if we digress briefly in order to compare it with some straightforward instances of the lapse of rationality in the Lockeian state of nature.

In Locke’s state of nature, a prepolitical state that thougtful men abandon in favor of civil government,35 there are those who act as reason dictates and those who do not. Reason tells us, for example, that the natural state is necessarily one of “equality. . . , there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subje~t ion.”~~

Given as its starting point this self-evidently true premise of universal equality, reason can make the inference (an inference that does, however, involve the problematic derivation of obligations from facts) that it would be irrational and thus wrong to treat equals unequally, e.g., as the slaves or instruments of others. Reasonable human beings living in the state of nature can, therefore, derive and validate their obligations to respect the rights and privileges of others by looking to reason alone. “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one; and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.~’37

Indians who are “wont to fat and eat the children they got on their female captives” obviously turn from reason and its laws in making other human beings the means towards their own bestial pleasures.38 Anyone else who tries in some alternative fashion to exercise his power over another has equally put reason aside: “In transgressing the law of nature, the offender declares himself to live by another rule than that of reason and common equity ..., and so has become dangerous to mankind.. . . ”39 Even the person who passively lets himself become the slave of someone else has violated the canons of his own rationality. In


permitting himself to become a mere instrument, he has denied the equality that reason declares to exist between him and his master.40

The respective moral lapses of the cannibal, the outlaw, the slave and his master are equivalently lapses in the right use of reason. So persuaded was Locke that moral behavior was above all else rational behavior that he wrote confidently, though without the required detail, of prospects for making morals a demonstrable science on the same footing with logic or mathernat i~s .~~

We can turn now to that subtler inattention to reason which, more than any sensational reports of cannibalism, is at the center of Locke’s rejection of encomia to primordial nature and her noble savages. If for Hobbes reason was the faculty that enabled men to free themselves from nature and thus to secure a commodious life, for Locke it was what directed them to blend their labor with nature in order to create property. It is helpful in this context to look to C.B. Macpherson who, referring to Locke’s treatment of property and its origins, writes: “In the first state of the state of nature, man confronts his natural environment in such a way that rational behavior consists in subduing nature by labour, and appropriating in order to subdue.. . . The essence of rational behaviour is inudstrious appropriation.”4* Indeed, the command to labor and to generate property is an imperative of reason and of religion:

God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational (and labor was to be his title to it;) not to the fancy and covetousness of the quarrelsome and contenti~us.~~

Once more, “God, when he gave the world in common to all mankind, commanded man also to labor.”44 Thus even as the principles of reason proscribe antisocial behavior and require that we regard others as ends rather than as means to our own interest, SO

also do they tell all who will listen that they must acquire property and then put themselves under the protection of government in order to preserve it.45

Still, the rationality involved in working to create property is not enough to argue the dignity of the laboring classes, whose “understandings are but little instructed, when all their whole time and pains is laid out to still the croaking of their own bellies.. . . ’946 The life of a simple laborer exemplifies the minimum requirement for mercantile rationality, uiz., the production or improvement of property. It is not yet the life of reason available to those whose comforts and property are sufficient to permit them

t o en joy contempla t ion a n d t o pursue “learned. . .inquiries.” But just as the propertied capitalist stands above the laborer in rationality and its fruits, so too does the laborer stand above idle men whose reason does not instruct them in the need to wrest property from common nature. “The idle poor he (Locke) seems to have regarded as depraved by choice; the labouring poor as simply incapable of a fully rational life because of their unfortunate position.”47

What, then, of the American Indians? Where do they stand on the scale of reason expressed productively? To the extent that they at least hunt or pick berries to survive, they have invested some modest labor of their own and are thereby entitled to call what they take from nature their property:

The fruit or venison which nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no enclosure and is still a tenant in common, must be his, and so his, i.e., a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it.. . .

Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature has provided and left it in, he has mixed his labor with, and joined to something that in his own, and thereby makes it his property.48

But to take from nature only what one needs to satisfy his daily hunger is to employ reason inconsequentially. Nothing has been improved. No meaningful property has been carved from an undifferentiated wilderness. The simplest animal preys to survive. A man, acting as rationality demands, will use his labor to modify the world in some lasting form, and the result is enduring property where before there was uncultivated and economically barren nature. Benefits accrue not only to him who encloses and cultivates the wilderness but to others as well; and it is in England, not in America, that we see these benefits realized:

He who appropriates land to himself by his labor, does not lessen but increase the common stock of mankind.. . . I ask whether in the wild woods and uncultivated waste of America, left to nature, without any improvement, tillage, or husbandry, a thousand acres will yield the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniences of life as ten acres of equally fertile land do in Devonshire, where they are well cultivated.49

Where nature is left to itself, as in America, we find an indolent and abject population. A n unimproved world is the mark of man’s failure to labor, and this is at the same time the mark of his disinclination to consult reason in an effort to gain a life of comfort. “God and reason commanded him to subdue the earth, i.e., to improve it for the benefit of life, and therein lay out something upon it that was his own,


his labor.”50 For Locke, the Indians of America stand on the same footing with the idle poor of his own country, and the consequences of their idleness are in every way commensurate with their rejection of a life of reason and fruitful labor:

There cannot be a clearer demonstration of anything than several nations of the Americas are of this, who are rich in land and poor in all the comforts of life; whom nature having furnished as liberally as any other people with the materials of plenty. . . , yet for want of improving it by labor have not one-hundredth part of the convenience we enjoy. And a king of a large and fruitful territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day-laborer in England.51

To put the same point another way, the value of land or of any other natural resource is for Locke a product of the effort invested in it. Nature is worth little until it has been parcelled and shaped;52 hence there is no reason, from the point of view of an unsentimental mercantilist, to write effusively of unspoiled nature. A world left to itself is a world that ministers incompletely to the needs and pleasures of mankind: “Land that is left wholly to nature, that has no improvement.. .is called, as indeed it is, waste; and we shall find the benefit of it amount to little more than nothing.”53

There is, in addition, a reciprocal relation between neglected land and those responsible for its neglect, i.e., America’s Indians; and though Locke’s argument is elliptical, his position is surely this: as the value of the wilderness is a derivative of thelabor needed to exploit and to improve it, so also is our estimation of the worth of a human being a product of the effort he expends to acquire and to change that wilderness. Whatever the source of his information, it was Locke’s view that the Indians expended almost nothing. They are obviously very far from the enterprising capitalist who acquires, enhances, and sells property for his own enrichment; and they show no interest in a sophisticated money economy through which transactions and the accumulation of wealth are facilitated: “In the beginning all the world was America.. .; for no such thing as money was known. Find out something that has the use and value of money amongst his neighbors, you shall see the same man will begin presently to enlarge his possession^."^^ (Jonathan Carver, in the 1781 edition of his Travels through the Interior Parts of North America, p. 248, observed that the Indians of the Great Lakes region “can form to themselves no idea of the value of money.. .and are amazed that any honor should be annexed to the possession of it.”)

Indians are far even from the worker who trades his labor for a ~ a g e . 5 ~ They had, as Locke imagined them in their wild setting, the resources and

opportunities to make themselves as prosperous as any man of property and commerce in England;56 and to that extent they possessed a great advantage over the laboring poor of Europe who, because of a comparative scarcity of land and natural commodities, could never own more than their labor and could never enjoy a life of prosperity and ease.57 The Indians’ choice was, however, not to press their advantage but rather to live off the land and merely survive. They had all they needed to profit from the wilderness in which they hunted and roamed; yet they deferred. Thus Locke writes with genuine disappointment.

An acre of land that bears here twenty bushels of wheat, and another in America which with the same husbandry would do the like, are, without doubt, of the same natural intrinsic value; but yet the benefit mankind receives from the one in a year is worth 5 E., and from the other possibly not worth a penny if all the profit an Indian received from it were valued and sold here; at least, I may truly say, not one-thousandth.58

In what Locke says of the tie between reason and property, there is potential for a dark and troublesome conflict. It should be clear that for him “being reasonable” can be understood in at least two ways. Its more familiar expression is (a) that which requires men to acknowledge and to respect the equality of every other rational being. Its less familiar expression is (b) that which describes men who acquire land and capital and who profit from both. These two manifestations of rationality are separate and distinct from each other, the former involving an essentially intellectual perception and the latter demanding effort and action. But in spite of their logical independence, a Lockeian might be tempted to make this unfortunate and invalid inference: if to be truly rational, in sense (b), is to accumulate and to increase the value of property, then those unwilling to act toward this end, having failed to exhibit the kind of behavior that is a sign to others of their rationality, have jeopardized their right to be treated equally by the industrious and the propertied. To put it simply, industrious men of property do not violate the commandment to be moral, i.e., to be reasonable in sense (a), by treating instrumentally the indolent and the impoverished. Though Locke never made this inference directly, his p o s t h u m o u s l y p u b l i s h e d F u n d a m e n t a l Constitutions for Carolina, (1720), section CX, condones the slavery that he condemned as unreasonable and immoral in the Two Treatises of Government.

The failure to appropriate a portion of the wilderness and therein to make life better is thus the


mark of reason in eclipse. Rather than a race of noble savages still living in an anachronistic age of gold, the Indians are simply beings who have neglected enormous possibilities for enrichment. It was the iron age, the historical period so utterly despised by primitivists as the material expression of abandoned innocence, that was for Locke the grand age of expansion and of man’s ultimate triumph over nature; and it was in America-at least in those portions untouched by European civilization-that this era had not yet dawned

Of what consequence the discovery of one natural body and its properties may be to human life, the whole great continent of America is a convincing instance: whose ignorance in useful arts, and want of the greatest part of the conveniences of life. . . , I think may be attributed to their ignorance of what was to be found in a very ordinary, despicable stone, I mean the mineral iron.59

When Locke referred in passing to the “Golden Age-before vain ambition. . .had corrupted men’s minds,” he did not have in view either the classical reign of Saturn or the baroque picture of an America where, as Edmund Waller put it in “The Battle of Summer Islands” (1686), “Heaven sure has kept this spot of earth uncursed to show how all things were created first.” He thought instead of a period of simple and honest government where leaders looked first to the defense and welfare of their subjects and not to their own power and self-interest. When he spoke of subsequent ages of “ambition and luxury,” he was criticizing the abuses of increasingly avaricious rulers, not the proper ambitions of industrious men striving, unlike American Indians, to expand their fortunes.60

IV. Primitivism and Exploitation of the Eighteenth-Century American Wilderness:

Throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, one can detect both conscious and unintended echoes of the Hobbesian and Lockeian belief that reason made active ought to show itself in the exploitation of nature. It has been frequently argued, for example, that Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) is not only important literature in a New World setting but that it is also a parable about capitalist rationality victorious over inactivity and barbarism; and if R.W. Harris’s interpretation is sound, then perhaps the social and economic philosophies of Hobbes and Locke determined the meaning of Crusoe’s adventure as much as William Dampier’s A New Voyage Round the World (1697) determined its plot: “Always the lesson was the same, that with industry, peace, and co-operation, and guided by

reason, men could build a fruitful and abundant life for themselves.”61

But if Crusoe improved his modest share of the wilderness, others closer to Friday than to the acquisitive Englishman did not. Thus Mark Catesby (1679-1749), writing not as a novelist or philosopher but as a naturalist who lived for a time in colonial America, offered this Lockeian assessment of the Indians he had met:

The Indians are a temperate people, not from a principle of virtue, but from an ancient savage and indolent custom, which all examples of industry and economy can never eradicate. They have a vast country to range in, and the choice of the most delightful and fertile parts of it to inhabit, by which with little labour they might indulge the greatest luxury. Yet so little are they inclined that way, or even make so little use of their blessings, that, by depending wholly on providence, they are sometimes drove to necessity.62

Catesby’s Indians lack not only a strong desire for acquisition and expansion but also the inherent moral sense that belonged even to Montaigne’s cannibals. Their moderation, far from being the quality of a moral microcosm ruled by reason, arises-like their inattention to prospects for a richer life-from simple idleness.

While it is true that Catesby is but one among scores of naturalists who traveled colonial America, his complaints are nonetheless typical of a then growing impatience with exaggerated praise for noble savages and their primeval setting. He grants that Indians are modestly educable but is not sanguine about their capabilities for any significant intellectual achievement. (Catesby seems to have been among those who held the position that Thomas Jefferson tried later to refute, uiz., that Indians are genetically unable to attain to intellectual and cultural equaltiy with men of British or European stock. “The Indians are generally allowed to have a good capacity which seems adapted and even confined to their savage way of life. Reading and writing is the highest erudition I have known or heard of any of them attain to.. . . ”63) The persistent mark of their irrationality is, however, not a failure to contribute to the republic of letters or fully to profit from the resources a t their command. It is rather their contentment with an unimproved life and a need to retreat to it, despite all the obvious advantages of industry and culture, that are the signs of failed reason:

So innate an affection have they to their barbarous customs, that though from infancy they have been bred, and fared well with the English, yet as they approach

79 Reason and Primitivism in the American Wilderness

towards manhood, it is common for them to elope several hundred miles to their native country, and there to resume their skins and savage way of life, making no further use of learning.. . . G 4

Catesby’s ethnological pessimism is even more pronounced than that of Hobbes and Locke. For them, as we have seen, Indians are wild and unproductive by choice. It is not inability but will which prevents their becoming truly civilized. For Catesby, however, Indians are essentially and irremediably wild. They are destined to remain in nature or, once estranged, to return to it at the first opportunity. Choice is not a factor; thus any efforts colonists or well-meaning missionaries make to nurture a n Indian’s intellect or to exorcise his indolent and “savage way of life” must fail.

It is instructive to compare Catesby’s condensed and unflattering picture of the southeastern Indians with the earlier and apparently more tolerant remarks in Robert Beverley’s The History and Present State of Virginia (1705). At the end of a straightforward description of the customs, religion, and economy of the Indians, he writes:

Thus I have given a succinct account of the Indians; happy.. .in their simple state of nature, and in their enjoyment of plenty, without the curse of labour. They have on several accounts reason to lament the amval of the Europeans, by whose means they have lost their felicity, as well as thier innocence. The English have taken away great part of their country, and consequently made everything less plenty amongst them. They have introduced drunkenness and luxury amongst them, which have multiplied their wants, and put them upon desiring a thousand things, they never dreamt of before.65

On its face it may seem that Beverley casts his lot with the romantic primitivists, but a more careful reading is essential. In the first place, he is surely not an apologist for idleness. He repeatedly chides the colonists for neglecting the rich land they have settled, and there can be no good reason to believe that the laziness which he calls a vice among transplanted Englishmen should somehow become a virtue among native Amerians. And where he is rhapsodic about Virginia’s climate and geographical situation as “very near. . .the same latitude with the Land of Promise,” h e quickly a d d s h i s disappointment that no one has taken trouble enough to profit from either. Inaction, whether among colonists or native inhabitants, is always indictable:

If anyone impartially considers all the advantages of this country, as nature made it; he must allow it to be as fine a place as any in the universe; but I confess I am ashamed to say anything of its improvements, because I must at the

same time reproach my countrymen with a laziness that is unpardonable.. . .

All the countries in the world, seated in or near the latitude of Virginia, are esteemed the fruitfullest and pleasantest of all climates.. . . These are reckoned the gardens of the world, while Virginia is unjustly neglected by its own inhabitants and abused by other people.@

Beverly’s Indians may well have been happy enjoying life “without the curse of labour;” but it is the unwillingness to toil, not simple happiness, that is the real issue for him. If, after all, labor is a curse, its products are not; and he is impatient with all who choose not to garden, weave, build, manufacture, or trade.67 He is, therefore, no friend to the inactive life painted in ideal tones by the primitivists. To be sure, Indians and lazy colonists are, like lapsed Protestants, happy in their inertia; but where one can be happy simply by being inert, the cost of happiness is too high. As Beverley saw it, the problem with the Virginians was that they were living just as the Indians whom they displaced had always lived. The presumption is that they should do better. Thus the closing lines of his History, describing settlers who prefer inaction to industry, are at once a firm rejection of the ideals of traditional primitivism and an indirect retraction of his earlier endorsement of the kind of life led by the Indians of pre-colonial Virginia:

They depend altogether upon the liberality of nature, without endeavouring to improve its gifts, by art or industry. They sponge upon the blessings of a warm sun, and a fruitful soil, and almost grutch the pains of gathering in the bounties of the earth. I should be ashamed to publish this slothful indolence of my countrymen, but that I hope it will use them out of their lethargy, and excite them to make the most of all those happy advantages which nature has given them.68

The disappointment of Catesby and Beverley over inattention to agriculture, industry, and commerce in America finds an ambiguous and somewhat surprising echo in William Bartram (1739- 1823). Bartram, the Philadelphia naturalist and artist whose Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida.. . . (1791) influenced nineteenth-century romantic poetry,69 wrote as a kind of primitivist who, in spite of his attachments to nature and natural man, could not bring himself to justify a neglected wilderness. Afew


texts from the Travels point to what at first appear to be tensions in his own thought.

Throughout his description of the Southeast, Bartram continuously celebrated nature in its unaltered state. Traveling along the Alatamaha river in Georgia, he pondered the “marvelous scenes of primitive nature, as yet unmodified by the hand of man” and sketched a lush word-picture of the “little Isle of Palms” in Florida’s Lake George.70 It is an island untainted by human art or interests: “This delightful spot, planted by nature, is almost an entire grove of palms, with a few pyramidal magnolias, live oaks, golden orange, and the animating zanthoxylon. What a beautiful retreat is here! blessed unviolated spot of earth.”71

He was no less moved by the Indians who left the living world undisturbed; and in what stands as the definitive study of the Travels, N.B. Fagin notes the extent to which Bartram’s Indians are rendered almost inseparable elements of the landscapes he portrayed. The Indians “exist in the unviolated nature he so much admires. This attitude leads him to elegiac expressions over the decay of a Golden Age due to the coming of white traders and ~ettlers.”~z To support his observation, Fagin quotes Bartram’s remarks on the Seminoles who, living amidst plenty, find no need to change or to forsake their wild surroundings:

They enjoy a superabundance of the necessaries and conveniences of life.. . . The hides of deer, bears, tigers and wolves, together with honey, wax and other productions of the country, purchase their clothing, equipage, and domestic utensiles from the whites. They seem to be free from want and desires. No cruel enemy to dread; nothing to give them disquietude, but the gradual encroachments of the white people. Thus contented and undisturbed, they appear as blithe and free as the birds of the air.. . . 73

Bartram was unhappy not only with the “white people” who corrupted the Indians but also with those who established plantations in America and were at the same time indifferent to its beauty. Refemng specifically to a plantation east of Lake George, he mused:

I have often been affected with extreme regret, at beholding the destruction and devastation which has been committed or indiscretely exercised on those extensive fruitful orange groves. . .by the new planters under the British government, some hundred acres of which, at a single plantation, have been entirely destroyed, to make room for the indigo, cotton, corn, batatas, &c.. . . Some plantations have not a single tree standing; and where they have been left, it is only a small coppice. . . , nakedly exposed and destitute.74

It is thus foreign settlers who, according to these

passages, abuse the wilderness and threaten the Indians’ simple tranquility; yet Bartram’s primitivistic distrust of progress and of those who import it into America is clouded. In spite of his romanticism, he sometimes betrays an underlying discomfort with the natural and unfettered life. Midway through the Travels, for example, he wrote in rich, idyllic prose of a plain bordering the Suwannee River; but the conclusion of this same account appears a t once to contradict his primitivism and his general impatience with settlers who exploit America’s frontiers and noble residents. What he says is almost indistinguishable from what a Lockeian might have said:

This vast plain. . . , if permitted (by the Seminoles who are sovereigns of these realms) to be in possession and under the culture of industrious planters and mechanics, would in a little time exhibit other scenes than it does at present, delightful as it is; for by the arts of agriculture and commerce, almost every desirable thing in life might be produced and made plentiful here, and thereby establish a rich, populous, and delightful region; as this soil and climate appears to be of a nature favourable for the production of almost all the fruits of the earth, as corn, rice, indigo, sugar-cane, flax, cotton, silk, cochineal, and all the varieties of esculent vegetables; and I suppose no part of the earth affords such endless range and exuberant pasture for cattle, deer, sheep, &c. . . , and lying contiguous to one of the most beautiful navigable rivers in the world.. .is most conveniently situated for the West India trade, and the commerce of all the world.75

Bartram’s assessment is no doubt hyperbolic, but it raises a question of obvious importance: what can one make of his desire for the establishment of manufacture and agriculture-a desire which, if it were realized, would require either the intrusion of colonists or the turning of the “wandering Seminole, the naked red wamor,” from innocence and ease to labor and commerce? Under either alternative, the primitivists’s aesthetic attachments to nature, as well as his wish to protect the Indians from the dark side of civilization, are subjugated to the pragmatic values that find objectification in trade and expansion.

Fagin, who himself facilely characterizes Bartram as a primitivist, notes this apparent inconsistency in the Travels and passes it off as a reflection of the age of Enlightment and of the “utilitarian perspective” Bartram shared.76 But this answer is too simple. Bartram was more than a romantic traveler occasionally overcome by an undercurrent of utilitarianism. The purpose of his journey, as he declared it in the opening paragraph of his book, was one of science and useful discovery;77 and when one looks carefully at the Travels, he finds that Bartram’s practical interests regularly take


precedence over all others. He admires the splendor and proportions of the “pompous palms of Florida,’’ the delicate Kalmia of southern Georgia, and the “expansive umbrageous oak;” but he values more the plain and “most useful tribes” of vegetable^.^^ He is moved by the freedom, moderation, and goodness of the Cherokees but disparages the mean state of their “mechanic arts or manufacture.”79 He enjoys speculating about the patterns and mysterious origins of bird migration but justifies his curiosity, as the ancients had before him, in terms of its potential use in establishing an agricultural calendar.sO

Bartram was not, in short, a single-minded and uncompromising primitivist. He was above all else a careful naturalist who believed that the beauty and useful resources of the American wilderness are not at irreconcilable odds with each other. The too zealous planter who strips the land of its fruits is criticized not because he wishes to shape the untended wilderness to his use and profit but because he abuses nature in ways that exceed what is essential and justifiable for his purposes.

We must, of course, try to preserve the beauty of a virgin grove or savannah where diminishing it serves no defensible end. (This aesthetic imperative in Bartram is analogous to Locke’s proprietary demand that one must never appropriate more from nature than he and those with whom he deals can use.R1) But the admonition to spare natural beauty where we can and to sacrifice it only where we must, uiz., where legitimate material comforts and commodities are proportionately augmented, is far different from an unwavering romantic declaration that the aesthetic purity of nature must remain inviolable at every cost. It is a recognition of this difference that serves to reconcile what appears, on a first reading, to be the unsupportable inconsistency between Bartram’s primitivism and his pragmatism.

V. Conclusion:

There are other authors whose reputations as rigid primitivists or as pure romantics are incommensurate with what they actually said about the American Indians and about the frontiers in which they ranged. Thus while Crevecoeur’s (1755- 1813) sketch of the Indians in Letters from an American Farmer (1782) is sentimental and laudatory, he worried that children of European origins, reared among the “aborigines,” might adopt their wild and indolent ways. His solution to “this great evil” was labor; for “as long as we keep ourselves busy tilling the earth, there is no fear of any of us becoming wild.” Where, in short, there are hazards in taking too seriously a romantic ideal that

was better suited to poetic mythology than to a life of responsibility, Crevecoeur sided with agrarian virtue, not with the unfettered existence of nomadic savages.82

So too Chateaubriand (1768-1848)) a romantic par excellence, found a place in Atala (1801) not only for Bartram’s imagery and geography but also for Bartram’s interest in tempered progress. The fictional settlement in which the love between Chactas and Atala played to its tragic denouement is not an idyllic niche wrested temporarily from the wilderness. It is a permanent mercantile society in miniature, and it is guided both by the benign influence of religion and by Lockeian principles of rational activity:

In a comer of a cypress grove, in what had once been the wilderness, new civilization was coming to life. Ears of grain were swaying in golden billows over the trunk of a fallen oak, and the sheaf of summer replaced the tree of three centuries.. . . Surveyors with long chains went about measuring the land. Arbitors were establishing the first properties. The bird surrendered its nest and the lair of the wild beast was changing to a cabin. Forges were heard rumbling, and the falling axe was forcing the groans from the echoes as they expired with the trees which had served as their refuge.83

This passage is not from some promotional tract broadcasting opportunities for aggrandizement in the New World nor is it from a philosophical treatise arguing the legitimacy of property and the importance of industry. But it expresses as well as any of these the dominant theme and conclusion of the present study: strict primitivism, with its rejection of progress and civilization, fared as poorly in an age of ambition as did the virgin wilderness and golden age it worshipped.84

Notes IThe history of this idea in literature and speculative thought is

traced in G. Boaz’s “Primitivism,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. P.P. Weiner (New York, 1973), Vol. 111, pp. 577-598. For a classic discussion of this theme, as it is expressed in the European picture of the New World, see G. Chinard’s L’Ameriqw et le Reue exotiqw dans la Litterature francais (Paris, 1913).

21 understand by the term “primitivism” the belief that the earliest condition of man. . .was the best condition:” L. Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress (New York, 1961), p. xi.

The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964), pp. 34-72.

‘For a provocative study of the capitalist origins of Hobbes’s view of human nature, see C.B. Macpherson’s Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford, 1973). pp. 238-250.

5Leuiathan, ed., C.B. Macpherson (New York, 1966), p. 183. 61bid., p. 188; emphasis added. ?Ibid., p. 186. elbid.. p. 386. 91bid., p. 187; emphasis added. loIbid., p. 113. Cf. pp. 93-94. “L. Strauss reviews Bacon’s position and its foundations in The


Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 1936), trans. G.M. Sinclair, pp. 86-94.

12W. Molesworth, ed., The English Works of Thomas Hobbes (London, 1839), Vol. I, p. 7.

‘3Leuiathan, pp. 189-193, 223-228. I‘Zbid.,, p. 227. I5Zbid., pp. 160-161, 189-190. ‘The contented life for Hobbes is far from one of repose or

inactivity: “Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the latter. The cause whereof is, that the object of man’s desire, is not to enjoy once only.. .but to assure forever, the way of future desire.” Zbid., Cf. pp. 129-130.

I7The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, Vol. I , pp. 6-7; emphasis added.

‘SLeviathan, p. 378. IgFor Aristotle’s definition and justification of slavery, see his

Politics, 1253b-1255a. For the position of his sixteenthcentury successors, especially Juan Gines de Sepulveda (1490-1573), see L Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, (Chicago, 1959).

ZOLeviathan, p. 183. Hobbes explicitly denies the Aristotelian position in his catalogue of the various laws of nature: “The question who is the better man, has no place in the condition of mere nature; where. . .all men are equal.. . . Therefore for the ninth law of nature, I put this, That every man acknowledge other for his equal by nature.” Ibid., p. 211.

21Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), trans. L. W. Beck (Indianapolis, 1959), p. 41.

22For classic statements of the principle that a human being’s unique end or function, one that forever sets him apart from the beasts, is the excellent use of reason, see Plato’s Republic, 352b-354c, and Aristotle’s Nicomachaen Ethics, 1097b,25-1098a,20.

23RR.M. Lemos, Hobbes and Locke: Power and Consent (Athens, Georgia, 1978), p. 18.

24B. Farrington, Francis Bacon, Philosopher of Industrial Science (New York, 1949), p. 139.

*%See, for example, the fourth edition of A n Essay concerning Human Understanding (London, 1700), Bk. I, ch. i, sect. 27; ii, 12;iii, 8; II,i, 6; xxvii, 9,and Two Treatisesof Government, Bk. I , sect. 56-58; 11, 26, 30, 37, 41, 43, 48.

26For Locke’s chief sources of information and misinformation about the New World, see P. Laslett’s critical edition of the Two Treatises of Government, revised edition (Cambridge, Eng., 1963), pp. 149,160-161; hereafter cited as Two Treatises. For the most part Locke wrote of the Indians of savages of the New World without taking the trouble to distinguish native North Americans from South Americans; however, when he found it important to stress the barbarism of the Indians, he referred specifically to the Caribs, the Peruvians, and the Tupinamba of Brazil. A n Essay concerning Human Understanding, Bk. I, ch. ii, sect. 9; hereaftercited as Essay.

27Two Treatises I , vi, 57. ZRZbid., 58; emphasis added. 29Essay IV, xvii, 1. 30Zbid., xix, 14. Commenting on this sentence and the argument

to which it was addressed, R.W. Hams writes: “Locke’s chapters on faith, reason, and enthusiasm. . .were of enormous importace in their influence on eighteenth century thought. His argument enthroned reason; his book more than any other made the period the Age of Reason.” Reason and Nature in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1969), p. 75.

31Essay, IV, i, 1-7. 32Ibid.. xvii, 3. 33Essay, IV, xvii, 2. S‘Zbid., 4. ”They abandon it not because it is so brutal as Hobbes’s state of

war but because there are no judges or positive laws to which they can appeal in settling disputes involving life and property. Two Treatises, 11, iii, 19-21; ix, 123-127.

36Ibid.. ii, 4. ”Ibid., 6; emphasis added. For a critical review of the

epistemological status of Locke’s moral imperatives, see M. White,

Science and Sentiment in America (New York, 1972), pp. 20-23. 3RCompare Kant’s second formulation of the Categorical

Imperative: “Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.” Foundation sof the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 47.

39Two Treatises, 11, ii, 8; emphasis added. “Zbid., 11, vi, 23. 41Essay. IV, iii, 18-20; iv, 7; xii, 8. “The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford,

TWO Treatises, 11, v, 34; emphasis added. “Zbid., 32. ‘SZbid., 30-31; ix, 124. For Locke, but not for Hobbes, property is

antecedent to government. 46Essay, IV, xx, 2. It is instructive to compare Locke’s view of the

laboring classes with the elitism of Plato’s Republic, 413~-416a, 434d, and Aristotle’s Politics, 1277b,35-1278a,15.

47The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, p. 226. 4 R T ~ ~ Treatises, 11, v, 26, 27. 4gIbid., 37. “Ibid., 32. SIZbid., 41. 52Ibid.. 40, 42. 531bid., 42.

55Macpherson discusses labor as a worker’s only marketable commodity in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, pp.

1962), pp. 232-233.

541bid.. 49.

214-217. “6Two Treatises, 11, v, 48. 57 The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, p. 243. See

A.D. McKillop’s introduction to James Thomson’s The Castle of Zndolence (1748), (Lawrence, Kan., 1961), pp. 3-4, for thedifference in eighteenth-century thought between “indolence” and “ease.” The former is slothful; the latter is among the principal rewards of a life spent in successfulindustry. For Hobbes, as for others in the English mercantile tradition, the remedy for poverty and indolence was resettlement in the new World where land and opportunities to cultivate it were abundant. Leviathan, p. 387.

58Two Treatises, 11, v, 43. “gEssay, IV, xii, 11. “See S. Lamprecht, The Moral and Political Philosophyof John

61Reason and Nature in the Eighteenth Century, p. 127. GZNatural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama

Islands, ed. George Edwards (London, 1754), Vol. 11, p. ix. See a similar evaluation in Jonathan Carver’s Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America, pp. 243-244.

“Zbid., 11, xii. For the Jeffersonian belief that the Indians’ inconsequential attainments were the result of their impoverished environment, not of an inherent inequality, see D. Boorstin’s The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1948), pp. 82-88.

Locke (New York, 1962), p. 127.

64Zbid. “The History and Present State o f Virginia, ed. L.B. Wright

(Chapel Hill, 1947), Bk. 111, ch. xiii, sect. 49. GGZbid., IV, xix, 78; emphasis added. Compare William Byrd’s

more familiar attack on the idle and slothful North Carolinians. Histories of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina (1728), ed., P. G. Adams (New York, 1967), pp. 66-68, 110,305.

67The History and Present State o f Virginia, IV, xxii, 97-100. GsZbid., 101. Cf. Machine in the Garden, pp. 75-90. Marx admits

that Beverley was not a “doctrinaire primitivist” but argues nonetheless that he was enthralled by the Indians’ carefree enjoyment of Virginia’s bounty, “without the curse of industry, their diversion alone, and not their labour, supplying their necessities.” The History and Present State of Virginia, 11, v. 29. A closer reading of the passages which Marx himself quotes suggests that the effortless pleasure of the Indians is no more to be admired or praised than the colonists’ failure to enlarge the “natural products of that country.”

69In his Road to Xanadu (Boston, 1927), pp. 365-370, J.L. Lowes discusses Bartram’s importance to Coleridge. For Bartram’s influence on Chateaubriand, see I. Putter’s translation of Atala/Rene (Berkeley, 1952). pp. 115118 passim.

70Travels of William Bartram. ed. M. Van Doran (New York,


1928), p. 65; hereafter cited as Travels. Cf. p. 292.

see pp. 135136, 159-160, 165166, 207.

(Baltimore, 1933), p. 53.

7lZbid., p. 143. For other idyllic visions of nature in the Trawls,

7 2 William Bartram: Interpreter of the American Landscape

7:JTravels, p. 182; emphasis added. 74Ibid., p. 199. ?”bid., p. 107. For a similar blending of aesthetic with

commercial interests, see Pierre de Charlevoix’s remarks on Natchez and its surrounding landscape, in Journal of a Voyage to North America, English trans. (London, 1761), Vol. 11, pp. 252-253.

76 William Bartram: Znterpreter of the American Landscape, p. 55.

77Trauels, p. 15. 7HZbid., p. 17. 79Ibid.. p. 401.

HOIbid., p. 234. I discuss the importance of science and utility in the Travels in “William Bartram’s and other Eighteenth-Century Accounts of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXIX (4), pp. 597-614.

81Two Treatises, 11, v, 31. 825. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American

Farmer, ed. W.B. Blake (New York, 1957), pp. 209, 215. See also Machine in the Garden, pp. 112-114.

83Atala/Rene, trans. I. Putter (Berkeley, 1952). pp. 54-55. For a compelling argument that even the primitivsm of Rousseau’s Discourse on the origin of Inequality (1775) defers to society and to civilization in germ, see A.O. Lovejoy’s “The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau,” Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948), pp. 14-37.

8 4 1 am grateful to Professor Jack Moore for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Bruce Silver is an associate professor of philosophy a t the University of South Florida. His principal research interests are early-modem philosophy, American philosophy and epistemology. He has published articles in the Journal of the History of Ideas, the New Scholasticism, and the Southern Journal of Philosophy.

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Reason and Primitivism in the American Wilderness