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6 Nature, Man, and God The Introduction to Bartram’s Travels Burt Kornegay Any attempt to explain William Bartram’s basic beliefs about life in a short essay is doomed to incompleteness, if not to complete failure. Most writers about Bartram concentrate, as good writers tend to do, on specific topics. But it seems to me that on occasion, we should try to place all of these particular topics into context, should try to give an overview of William Bartram, to describe his sense of life, his fundamental assumptions about life—should try to explain his worldview—as a scholar might say; or, to put it in street talk, to tell where Bartram is “coming from.” And that is what I will attempt here. My authority for this is William Bartram himself. Those of you who have read his Travels know that Bartram begins his book with an “Introduction,” a prefatory chapter that is meant to orient us and lead us into the book proper. Near the end of this chapter Bartram informs the reader that he has “passed through some remarks, which appeared of sufficient consequence to be offered to the public.”1 And it is in these “remarks of sufficient consequence” that Bartram tells us where he’s coming from as a student of nature and man. This is not to say that everything Bartram tells us is perfectly familiar and clear. And why would we expect it to be? Ways of thinking and views of life change over time, even from generation to generation; and more than ten world-changing generations have passed since Bartram wrote his introduction . At least—drawing on my own personal experience—when I first read the introduction, I found that some of Bartram’s beliefs about nature differed markedly from mine and contained notions that seemed strange and antique. I also noticed that this was because my beliefs—and I think those of almost everyone interested in Bartram today—have been much more profoundly affected by the scientific way of looking at things than were Bartram’s. And so, before turning to examine Bartram’s “remarks of consequence” and the view of life they express, first let me try to point out what I think are some of the 82 Kornegay chief influences of modern science on our view of the world.That is, in a summary fashion, let me try to explain where we are coming from as students of nature and man. Doing this will give us the perspective we need to understand Bartram. Our modern view of nature begins to emerge when we ask ourselves, what kind of world is it that science has revealed? I am not referring to the results of this or that experiment that students might conduct in a high-school biology class. Nor am I referring to the peculiarities of animal behavior that zoologists depict for us on public television specials (with a penchant, it seems to me, to show close-up shots of animals mating). I am referring to the view of the world we get when we look at pictures taken of our delicate-looking planet from a satellite orbiting in the black vacuum of space; the world we get an inkling of when we look through a telescope out into that spatial vastness without end. I am speaking about the sobering experience we have all known at some time or other when gazing out into the “billion-galaxied” universe as a whole that science presents to us, and we have wondered, “What does it all mean?” Many of those who have pondered this important question and who have examined the facts of the case as presented by science have been troubled by the answer they found. Bertrand Russell, the well-known twentieth-century mathematician and philosopher, is one. Russell begins his famous essay “A Free Man’s Worship” with the following story. Once upon a time (Russell tells us),Dr.Faustus, the learned man who, in his search for knowledge sold his soul to the Devil, was sitting in his study when the Devil came to tell him about creation.The Devil told Faustus that ages ago God (i.e., the Devil) had grown bored with the praises of the angels, since, after all, the angels had reason to praise him considering the blissful existence he had given them. God decided that it might be more amusing to obtain undeserved praise—to create a universe containing...

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