In Our Time - Nature

Episode Date: July 10, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the attempt to define humanity’s part in the natural world. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Lord Byron wrote:“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore,There is society where none intrudes,By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:I love not man the less, but Nature more.” In the Bible’s book of Genesis, ‘nature’ was the paradise of Eden, but for the philosopher Thomas Hobbes it was a place of perpetual war, where the life of man was “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short”. The defining of Nature, whether “red in tooth and claw” or as the fount of all innocence, is an attempt to define man’s origins and purpose and humanity’s part in the natural world. With Jonathan Bate, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick; Roger Scruton, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buckingham; Karen Edwards, Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In Childhold Spurgemage, Byron wrote, There is a pleasure in the pathless woods.

There's a rapture on the lonely shore. There is society where non-intrudes by the deep sea and music in its roar. I love not man the less, but nature more. In the book of Genesis, nature was the paradise of Eden, but for the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, it was a place of perpetual war

where the life of man was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. The defining of nature, whether red in tooth and claw, or as the font of all innocence, is an attempt to define man's origins and purpose and humanities part in the natural world. With me to explore the philosophy of nature is Roger Scruton, Professor of Philosophy at Buckingham University, Jonathan Bait, Professor of English Literature

at the University of Warwick and Karen Edwards lecture in English at the University of Exeter. Karen Edwards, the Greeks used to turn to Homer as I understand it, for guidance on just about everything. What did they find in him in 800 BC or thereabouts about nature? They found a lot that was complicated. I think that will probably be a theme of the morning.

Raymond Williams said that nature is probably the most complicated word in the language. But in Homer, there are some fascinating ways in which the relationship between human beings and nature are represented. First of all, I think there's an anxiety about where human beings fit in the scheme of things, an anxiety that human beings might be turning into animals or could very easily. one thinks of Circe and her the drink she offers

Odysseus' men which changes them into beasts because they aren't careful, they aren't wary they don't think first there's also the question of civilization which seems to be that which prevents human beings from turning into animals a constant

theme of the epics the Cyclops for instance is one who doesn't cultivate the land but he's also one who violates the laws of hospitality, and that seems to be the source of his monstrosity. In terms of the forces of nature, how does he think about them,

the actual high tides, floods, winds, storms, that sort of thing? It's very interesting. Domesticated nature, the landscape, is loved and appreciated in the epics. One thinks possibly because they're, possessions. But, for instance, the similes in Homer are very often drawn from a close understanding of the natural world as when Homer compares warriors to flies gathering around a milkmaid's pail of milk. But the sea, so often call the wind-dark sea, I wonder sometimes if that's

an effort to placate the sea. It's almost as if to, almost too domesticated by repeating this phrase. But the point is that nature is often the wild nature, undomesticated nature, is often seen as controlled by gods. It's represented by gods. Zeus,

the thunder is possibly an embodiment of the force and power of storms, lightning and thunder, which isn't fully understood. So that the natural world, there is not, there's nothing like the pathetic fallacy.

sea in Homer. Homer sees a force in the sea that is abstract, perhaps, and distant that he does turn into a god. And when we turn to the Roman poet, much later, of it, he wrote about the golden age in the metamorphosis, and characters are constantly changing into animals and into parts of the natural world. They're changing into young, women become young saplings, men become stags and that sort of thing. What does that represent as a view of nature as far as your concern? It seems to me that Ovid, among other things, has recognized that to be living is to change constantly,

and it's that ability to change or that being subjugated to the forces of change is both frightening and miraculous. but there's also a sense, I think, in which life is plastic constantly in flux. Roger Scruton, in classical times, the natural world, well, there's much more of it, wasn't it, the natural world, it was much wilder, it was much less explored, and so how in general would the classic, I know it's a big question, but never mind, how in general would the classical world look on nature as something out there, as something to be feared, just sort of been a general view of it? I think that the quotation you gave from Byron seems to put before us a separation between man and nature, and I don't think that separation is there, certainly not in Homer. In fact, if you look at Homer's description of natural forces,

they are all personified, aren't they, as the wills of gods, sometimes benevolent, sometimes malevolent. But in effect, nature is re-described in terms of human, So it's as though the entire natural world is understood from the point of view of our own understanding of ourselves. And I think that that's something that changed, obviously partly with the recognition that we are dominant over nature, and it is not dominant over us, which we now obviously have to accept. And secondly, with the growth of cities where people deliberately put themselves. apart from the natural world

and developed civilisation as something independent, so that nature is something over and against the human, and that is something which came later, really, than Homer. Although there are cities in Homer, they are essentially fortified places which control a bit of

landscape. Is Aristotle beginning an investigation of nature that we are continuing? Could you tell us how he looked on it as something to investigate and to classify, didn't it? Yes, I mean, Aristotle, I suppose, was the first we know about in our Western tradition, who really took nature as an object of impartial study

and tried to understand the way in which things work, and particularly the way in which life emerges and grows out of itself. And I suppose he was made more advances than anybody has ever done before or since in that. But he was not, his view of nature was not, that of the contemplative poet who sees it as a spiritual resource. On the contrary, he sees it simply as what is given to us to understand. So he doesn't see man as flowing in and out of nature. It doesn't see it as reflecting our moods as being something that can do something for us.

It is an object of studies if a rock is part of nature. Yes, we are part of nature too, but I mean Aristotle, like many of his contemporaries, saw the human person as the high point of creation and the human intellect in particular as something unique, although not apart from the natural order, not something that belongs to some supernatural order, is nevertheless unique to us. He had a very strict hierarchy.

I mean, animals didn't have minds all. They had something like a soul. They have what he called sukei, which is a soul, we might try to say it as a soul. And even plants for Aristotle had, that have a sukk by which he means the principle of organization of the organism. But for a very full idea of the restorative powers of nature of a place to go to change yourself, we're coming to Virgil's Georgics there, are we where?

Well, Virgil was greatly influenced by Theocritus and Alexandrian poets. I think Alexander, I don't know about this is a very technical field, but I have the feeling that Alexandria was a turning point. There is this great pollulating city with every kind of activity going on and its huge library and his contemplative poets who were fed from the library. The librarian at one point was Callimachus, who was the founder, I suppose, of the idyllic poets. And nature in Theocritus is a kind of escape from this great place. And his idylls are, I suppose, the first attempts to give to the natural world this aspect

of our home, in a place where we really belong, from which we've been sundered. And by going back there, we bring something back to ourselves that is lost in a city. Jonathan Bait, can you outline the attitude of Epicurus towards nature and Mandjula, and why do you think he's important to this discussion? Yes, Epicurus is a very interesting figure, and a very influential one. He initiates a whole other way of thinking about nature. Karen and Roger have talked about how for Homer and his successor, nature is a force that is very closely linked to the divine,

in some sense we discover the divine through nature. The Epicurean tradition has no place for the gods. It simply says, all you've got is matter, atoms and vacuum. And Epicurus and his successors, and this was a tradition that actually filtered over into poetry with the Roman poet Lucretius, who wrote a poem called De Rarum Natura of the Nature of Things, which is a kind of versification of the Epicurean system.

What they were interested in was looking at the world, looking at nature as something very, very material, not having a spiritual dimension at all. And the system suggests, as I say, there are atoms and there is void. and the process by which natural forms take shape involves a kind of randomness. Atoms swerve together and then swerve apart.

And so in that tradition, as human beings like other animals, we are made when the atoms swerve together, then we die, the atoms dissolve back into the universe. So nature is seen in that mechanistic way then? Yeah, that's right. And for many centuries, this was a way of thinking about nature that the Judeo-Christian tradition,

the dominant tradition in the West, was very suspicious of because it didn't leave a place for an immortal soul or a transcendent God. It didn't leave a realm above nature. I'm coming to that in a minute, just to stick with Lucretius and try to get an overview from the classical world.

I know there were many views inside the classical world, but I'm still not clear about the fact there's a tiny population by now, actually. tiny, very tiny, many, many more animals than there are now. Things which we can't even explain now, we were trying to explain volcanoes last week, and they, not me, got a very long way, but they kept saying the things that they can't explain. So many more things that can't explain. What was the, was there any overview of nature?

Did they just get on with it and the intellectuals describe it? Have we got bits and bulbs from poems and that saying it's terrible out there or it's wonderful out there or it's part of us or it's not part of us? Or is this question getting me in nowhere, Jonathan? I think it's a very interesting question because what you find often, and Karen suggested this with Homer, if you start reading the poetry, thinking of the major Roman poets,

such as Ovid, Horace, Virgil, what you find there is that they are poets of the city, they're really writing for the emperor, for the court, the sophisticated people in the city. But when they start writing poetry, they're constantly, in their language, their imagery, start referring out to nature. And so what then happens is that you do get a sort of dialogue set up

between the main aim of the writing, which is to do with cultivating civility, the virtues of the city and of Romanness. But always sort of at the edges of that, you have this sense of another world that is out there, which is in some sense more natural. Roger. Yes, I mean, in Horace, of course, that other world is the place to which you retreat from where you really are, what you are, among your friends at last, and the artifice of the city can be set aside.

And that must, do you see that most clearly in Virgil Georgics, Karen? I think so. But it's also important to say, as Jonathan was suggesting, that the fact that nature is out there and is a kind of a retreat may also depend on, particular historical moment. There still has to be a memory of what it was like, what a cow looked like, and what it was like to live in the country. And that seems to me, it's always at moments like that that, say, a genre like pastoral becomes important. I think an anthropologist might say that literature itself, that this, especially the epic poem, is a product of the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural way of life. You know,

that when people at last settle and regard the landscape as their own and theirs to cultivate, then there... About 10,000 years, 8,000, 10,000 years ago. Then there is a desire, as it were, to record the great adventures, the roaming over the world which we're putting behind us, because we have our own little plot, which is ours. And it's interesting that, you know, Homer is contemporary with Hesiod, whose poems are the first real invocation

of the agricultural way of life as something natural to us. The biblical image of the earthly paradise of Eden, was this a huge shift, Roger Scruton? Does this mark a further development of what you were saying, of the taming of, the idealising of, but the bringing home to inside ourselves of the idea of nature? Well, I suspect that continuing that thought, might say that this is the in the Judeo, in the Judaic tradition, the symbol of the Garden of Eden,

is a kind of reading back of the agricultural way of life into our own prehistory, so to speak. How can we be what we are? What is it that we've come from that is the true perfection from which we've fallen? It is written, as it were, imagined in the form of an agricultural condition. A garden of which some people think still trickles on into the English village green. Karen Ellen. Just to disagree slightly with that. There is a sense, I think, in Genesis that Paradise is actually a kind of oasis.

The Israelites had some difficulty with agriculture because that was too much involvement in the land itself. And, of course, what Judaism was doing was establishing itself in opposition to the cults in the area that did worship the land itself. So agricultural, that sort of settled way of life, presented certain difficulties. One could read the story of Cain and Abel in that light. Abel is a shepherd, that is a nomad who hasn't settled down,

His gift is more acceptable to God, more acceptable than Keynes, who is the farmer, and possibly therefore tainted with some of the cultic myths around. Johnlon, you were to come? Yeah, that's very interesting, because in the Greek-Roman tradition, the equivalent story of origins to the Garden of Eden is the story of the Golden Age. And as Melvin said earlier, at the beginning of Ovid's great epic, the metamorphoses, he gives you this account of the fall from the Golden Age to the Silver Age to the Brazen Age to the Iron Age of the present. And the Golden Age is pre-agricultural.

It's with land ownership and agriculture and possessions of it says that the Golden Age comes to an end and the Silver Age begins. So in a way with Roger's idea of an anthropological fantasy, the imagined Golden Age is the time before agriculture. Sure. Karen Adels, can I ask you, as I understand it, for Christians and Jews, God wrote two books. One was the text, the Bible, the other was the natural world. Did the fact that the idea of the people who followed those religions believe that one of his books was the world we saw in front of us mean that they interpreted it, the natural world in particular and different ways, in a particular and different way? The idea of the natural world being another scripture, there's a lot of, I suppose, evidence for that in the Bible, Psalm 19, the heavens declare the glory of God. The difficulty with that, it became very quickly, it hardened into a cliche, and the same meanings were constantly found. So although it was cited over and over, it didn't become a means of exploring the natural world. very successfully, until the 17th century, Galileo said the book of the world is written in

numbers. And the new philosophers began to say, if we really want to see the creation as an expression of the creator, we must understand the creation more thoroughly than we do. But they went a bit thoroughly in what they would say. They did go about it thoroughly in a way which we might not think is particularly distinguished, interesting now. For instance, the bestiaries, the medieval bestiaries, they are looking to animals to say, these are not just animals. The lion is representing not just something that chases other animals. It is a king, and it is a king like God is a king, and this king

should mean such and such and such, and such, and when the lion does that, that means such and such and such and such. Now, that seems to me to be a very, very interesting way to interpret the world of nature. It's very interesting symbolically. It possibly wasn't very interesting in terms, in zoological terms. The Pelican, for instance, was always seen as an emblem of Christ because it was said to pierce its breast and with its blood feed its children. That notion is found in, say, King Lear and all of Shakespeare's, other Shakespeare's plays. The point with reading animals as symbols of God's beneficence was that it actually created a kind of opposition between what one saw in the natural world

and what one thought one ought to see in the natural world. And though the best theories are wonderful and interesting as allegories, there is some natural history in them, but not a whole lot. Jonathan Bade, in the Midsummer Night's Dream, is Shakespeare still bringing some of that to play in that work? I think there's other things, but that is still continuing up until that time. Yeah, I mean, the fascinating thing about Shakespeare in his period is that he's writing on the cusp

between a very, very ancient sort of folkloric tradition on the one hand and this kind of new way of looking at the world on the other. What happens in Midsummer Night's Dream is that although the play is set in Athens, it has a very, very English feel to it. And when the characters go out from the court back to nature, when they go to the woods, they encounter these fairies, these malicious spirits of the night.

which are, so very much based on a folkloric tradition that imagines there being some kind of magic in every aspect of nature. And it was really the kind of shattering of the idea that nature had something magical, something supernatural about it. It was the shattering of that that was the key to the sort of scientific revolution that brought modernity. That part of Shakespeare, Roger Scruton, might have something to his reading of Ovid. Ovid we know is on the syllabus of the grammar school.

We still kind of absolutely proved that he went to. But it was there, and you see a run through there. Yes, I was very interesting what you said about the bestories, actually, because I would have thought that one ought to make a distinction between seeing the natural world as allegorical, which is what the medieval certainly did. They saw a message encoded within every species, so to speak. and seeing it as in the manifestation of genuine gods and forces that are construed on the human model.

And that for Homer, nature isn't understood allegorically. It is literally a collection of wills, some of them alien, some of them benevolent. So there's a huge transition there. It's as though nature has already been put at a certain distance by the medievals from our hands. and being used as a book, as you said. I think in Ovid, the way in which human beings slip in and out of the natural order is obviously a very influential thing poetically on subsequent writers. I mean, the fact that human beings can change into nightingales and so on,

and that nightingales themselves can therefore communicate with us directly in human voices. That is something which you get, of course, in Shakespeare too. In a way, that raises the very, what almost is the crucial problem about understanding human beings in the natural world, which is, are human beings, do they have a special place, a uniquely high or pivotal place,

or are they simply one amongst all the other animals? Epicurus would, the idea of Adam, would suggest that that human beings as well as animals are made of atoms, therefore human beings do not have a special place. That's one point at which Christianity has

a huge amount to say that human beings are Genesis 1-27 says that God gives human beings dominion over nature, and what exactly that means seems to be almost the crucial question. Nobody wants to go into that, because I can

If you do, that's fine. Otherwise, I remember that. Yeah, I just want to add to that that the Epicurean's, Epicurean view of things was also anti-religious, wasn't it? Especially in Lucretius. Lucretius' text is one of the great warnings against religion, because he believes that everything, as soon as you turn your attention to the supernatural,

you fill your world with demons of your own creation, and this is one of the origins of the enmity between people, whereas the Christian view is that there is this other entity, the human soul, which cannot be fitted into this Lucretian system, and that is God's special care. I was interested in what you said earlier, Jonathan, about Shakespeare being as we're on the cusp, from the medieval to the pointing towards the romantic, and you talked about the medieval and the folklore,

and such with Winston out stream, the spirit's coming into the woods and so. And when he's talking about the more romantic, if you take something like King Lear and the savage heath, the storm, the storm in his mind, the king's mind, the demented king's mind, the demented king's mind, the storm outside, the world out of joint and so on. There we're moving towards a completely different, it seems to me, you tell me, appreciation, understanding of nature. Perception of us better, isn't it? Yeah, that's right.

I mean, there is this phrase, which was famously coined by John Russell, skin in the 19th century, the pathetic fallacy, which means the fallacy of ascribing to nature the emotions that really belong to the human mind. Now, poets have actually always used that. I mean, this does go right back to Homer. But I think it changes as attitudes to nature change. So if you think of Shakespeare, what happens in King Lear is that there still seems to be a belief in Shakespeare and for his audience in a kind of precise correspondence between the turmoil, the storm,

inside the mind of King Lear, in the social order, and the storm in nature. There's a set of correspondences between the different dimensions of reality. Once you get, after the scientific revolution, once you get into the Enlightenment, the 18th century, the 19th century, people don't really believe that anymore.

That's the point at which putting feelings into nature really does become a fallacy because we know that nature is simply a mechanism, that it doesn't actually have feelings. Though even Ruskin said even of Homer, though, that he wouldn't say the sea is troubled or angry or idle. He would say there is a force in the sea that maybe we read as troubled or,

anger or something like that, but that then Homer ascribes that to a god. Of course, Roger is saying that the Homeric gods are human beings writ large, but at least by ascribing an angry sea to Poseidon, Homer is

abstracting that. It's not immediately relating it to human beings. It's not an instance of the pathetic fallacy, in other words. Before we move out of the Renaissance completely, you mentioned earlier when you were talking about Homer and the idea of cities and the fortification, as it were, against nature.

Well, we have in the Renaissance Europe a time of a very splendid urbanisation. Does that, how does this affect attitudes towards nature, the idea of having these very splendid cities in which everything that a man, a free and rich man could want can have? I think if you look at the great periods of Italian painting, in the Siennes and the Florentine schools in particular this is the art of the city and although the natural world appears in it

it appears always as a background and a very schematic background and usually with buildings in it and perhaps even with another fortified city in it and the foreground is occupied by human beings usually of a religious significance in their full city dress. And I think it's not until very much later

when cities had ceased to be fortified, ceased to be at war with each other, that you get the emergence of landscape painting. It comes out really with people like Claude and Poussin, and their principal interest is ruins. It's not the city as a fortification, but a city that has been destroyed and nature, as it were, taking over again.

What's that saying, They're showing nature superior to it, showing nature is something that will eventually try. What's that saying to you? I'm not sure. I think I'm just venture one little thought here, which is that the medieval city has gone by then. The medieval city has gone

because the circumstances that created it, which is essentially war between city-states, have been superseded. So that the city no longer has to fortify itself against its neighbours, but something else, you know, a more imperial form of order has taken its place. And of course the spaces between cities

have become interesting, interesting because that is where so much of human life now occurs. Jonathan Boe. I think that ruins tradition, which you get very strongly in poetry as well as in painting, is bound up with a very powerful sense that natural forces,

above all, the inexorable force of time, will always outlive the human forces of empire and government. I mean, Shakespeare's famous sonnet, you know, when I have seen by Times fell hand-de-faced, the idea that all, everything that we make in civilisation, sooner or later will come to an end, but the natural force of the waves, of the sea, and of time, those just go on, rolling on and on.

Karen, do you see a moving on in the work of Milton after Shakespeare? Do you think a move, well, a change in the way that nature is regarded. Yes, I was thinking when Jonathan was talking about Shakespeare being on the cusp, Milton has, Milton wrote Paradise lost in which he had to represent the Garden of Eden after the new philosophers had really, the experimentalists had begun their work. One of the difficulties or challenges that Milton faced with representing the Garden of Eden was which animals are going to go into it.

Will they be the old biblical, classical animals, or will his Garden of Eden include, say, iguanas or armadillos. It was that sort of question that Milton faced in a way that Shakespeare didn't. And Milton's I think answer was to take advantage of what everybody knew, which was animals had all kinds of allegorical and symbolic meanings.

But at the same time, he often included, I think, in rather humorous ways, suggestions that we don't believe these stories literally anymore. What is Thomas Hobbes, Roger Scruton, about this time, mid-seventeen century, what does he bring to the table in terms of philosophy of nature and about nature? Well, what you said earlier, of course, is what he's famous for, which is the idea that outside government,

outside an established legal order, we are at war with each other, and that we shouldn't therefore romanticise. the condition of man in a state of nature, because that condition is one which we have thankfully superseded. So in one sense, he's quite on the opposite side from Milton, in his view of what nature is. I suspect, although he was a great writer, Hobbes, he was not interested in the natural order. He was interested in human beings. whom he described as they really are, with all their defects apparent.

He was an utter realist, and I think he would have said about Milton's, I don't know whether we have a record of what he did think about Paradise Lost, but I think he would have said that this is a wonderful poetic concoction, but also a dream. So to him nature was wild. Nature was something against which civilized men and women had to defend themselves and to make institutions and constructions which made sure that they led a life free of it. We bind ourselves in a social contract

to establish a sovereign who will govern us all. And I think if I were Hobbs, I'd go on from there and say that one of the great things that we can establish if we have a legal order is a garden. And that garden will then be a symbol of what nature would be had it been created by a divine order.

Jonathan Bates, Hobbes is soon to be contradicted, well, soon in historical terms, to be contradicted by the man who did believe in innocence of nature and did believe in the innocence of children. And on these two twin beliefs, you could say, for the sake of conversation, that the Romantic movement was informed, heavily informed, perhaps even started, and that's Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What, again, his noble savage, his innocent child, become massively part of any ideas on nature, don't they?

Yeah, Rousseau is that. absolute crucial figure here, and he's precisely the opposite of Hobbes. Whereas Hobbes says man in the state of nature is brutal. Russo looks at the inequalities of society in 18th century France and says, in the state of society with a hierarchical, oppressive government, that's brutal. So Russo imagines the noble savage. He imagines man in the state of nature. He imagines a time before property and inequality. So he writes this essay, a discourse on the origins of inequality. And he says, let's have a kind of thought experiment. In a way, it's a sort of modern equivalent of the myth of the Garden of Eden or the Golden Age, in which we imagine what things would be like before cities,

property owning, institutions like law and marriage. And so he imagines the noble savage, who's a vegetarian happily going around eating berries and just living a natural life. The Noble Savage for Russo is never subject to, say, depression or there's no pollution. These are all things that come with modernity and with the city. And in terms of the life cycle of the individual, as opposed to the life cycle of mankind, the equivalent of that natural state is, of course, childhood. And so those two ideas of a rejection of society and government in all that goes with it, a return to the natural world on the one hand,

and a return to childhood on the other. Those in many ways are the twin pillars of the romantic movement. But nature then begins to attain an enormous, in the aesthetic hierarchy, it becomes more important than art. Nature can't. Can you discuss this, Roger, because I can't get much further. I'm really impressed, by the way in which you weave all these things together as though they belong with each other when we know that they don't.

Well, they do this morning. Yes, yes, I know. It's the next half hour. We've got to make them belong. Few. Yes, it's true that Kant was very much influenced by Rousseau in his aesthetic theory. And Kant's view is that, indeed, that the experience of beauty has as its primary object, the natural world, and that nature is higher in the order of aesthetic values than art.

because it is something towards which we can have, a completely disinterested attitude. We stand back and contemplate it, and in contemplating it, we have a kind of religious epiphany in which we see revealed not just the meaning of the world, but our own harmony with it. And this is something which can't sketched in language which has never really been fully explained to the ordinary mortals, but it was extremely influential on those who had already been influenced, in a way that Jonathan says about by Rousseau

into this, into thinking of nature as the found of innocence. And the Kant's aesthetic vision was extremely influential on Schiller and the German romantic poets and the German romantic painters, of course. Well, you've just woven it all together, but also, as I understand it, Coleridge translated Kant, and he brought that over to this country

because we can't discuss this. We haven't got a great time without talking about the English Romantics, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Coleridge. What's your view of their view of nature current, but what do you think they were? Were they bringing anything new, or were they, as it were, just a development of Rousseau and what Rogers, so expertly were over together with the others?

I think Jonathan is actually the one to talk about this. I think my view of Wordsworth, I fear, is very close to Oscar Wilds. You know, the sermons that Wordsworth found in the trees and stones were ones he had hidden there. But perhaps Jonathan should speak to what is new about what... It's an intense feeling of you guys slinging the ball around the table. It's like a bunch of three quarters, one of you get rid of it, before you get crushed, tuggled. Go on, Jonathan. Well, I mean, if you think about mountains for a moment,

if you still go back to the 17th and early 18th century, the way that people write about mountains, mountains are, they're in inconvenience, they get in your way on a journey, and there would be no possible reason to spend time looking at a mountain or climbing up a mountain unless you absolutely had to because you were a shepherd and your sheep were lost up there.

But as urbanisation, industrialisation took off in the later 18th century, increasingly people felt a very strong sense of an alienation of the human spirit as a result of the conditions of living in big cities and the origins of factories and so on. And so people began actually to get out into the countryside and to look at mountains in new ways. What then happened with writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge, making use of ideas like Kant's idea of the sublime,

was that they were given a spiritual language for talking about nature. And it's as if that whole process of nature having been disenchanted, the magic of it, having been removed by the scientific revolution, by the March of Modernity, was overturned and was challenged by the way that the poetry of Wordsworth and, Coleridge could make you see something of profound value in nature. Can I ask you, because we, alas are coming at the end of this, and there's a lot of, I would want to ask about Coleridge experiment on his son Hartley, which brought all these things

to buy, innocence, nature, childhood, ended in complete disaster for the boy. It's a wonderful story of anecdote, alas, another time. We have to mention Darwin. We can't go out without Roger Scruton. What do you think that Darwin, did Darwin undercut most of what had been? said before about nature? Well, certainly he rewrote our place in nature in a radical way, in a way which people are still trying to come to terms with.

And he made it absolutely clear indeed that the natural world that we, as we understand, it is the result of a long process and cannot be seen as something static or of having its meaning its meaning as permanently within it. It is constantly evolving and changing in response to its own inner movement. Is there a sense in which Caroline? I don't think so. I think he put meaning in it in a different way. I think as Roger says,

we're still trying to come to terms with that. It's something that if one believes that the natural world expresses the creator's beneficence, this is simply another way of understanding creation. Jonathan Beck? We use nature as a way of understanding ourselves and understanding society. The Darwinian model looks very similar as a model of nature

to what 19th century capitalism was all about. It was to do with competition, the survival of the fittest. But I think if you look more closely at Darwin's sense of how evolution worked and at some of the people who wrote after him, you find that there is another dimension to it. There was a very interesting anarchist writer at the end of the 19th century called Kropotkin, who wrote a book called Mutual Aid,

which suggested that we could use the fact that species actually rely on each other to help each other. We could use that as a more positive image of how nature can help us to live constructively together in society. I'm afraid. I'm sorry, Roger. We have come to the end of our time.

Thank you very much, Roger Scrooen, Jonathan Bait, and Karen Edwards. Next week, it's the final. program in our series and by happy coincidence we'll be talking about the apocalypse. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other

programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com. com.uk forward slash radio 4.