Jefferson and Nature [antikvár]

Jefferson, Nature, and the Enlightenment Io read widely in tiic papers of Thomas Jefferson is to be struck by a remarkable fact: the words "nature" and "natural" appear with great frequency, in countless contexts, and with many meanings. This study takes Jefferson at his words, his favorite words. It is an attempt to understand how he uses "nature" and "natural" and why he uses the two words so often. "Nature" flourishes in Jefferson's writings from the earliest letters that have been preserved, in the 1760s, to his final statements in the 1820s. He was always the farmer, always the natural historian, always interested in natural theology and natural morality, always ready to base the political order on natural law and natural right. But as an avowed experimenter and a person outspoken against the constraints of "system"; as an exceptionally long-lived man with myriad interests, a man whose pubhc consciousness began before the French and Indian War and ended after the Missouri Compromise; and as the author of tens of thousands of letters but of no papers that seemed to require a consistent use of the term, Jefferson deployed "nature" not as a bright thread that led through his intellectual universe but as an unpatterned fabric that enveloped it. Although he was typical of his time and place in using "nature" in his writings, Jefferson uses the word more often, more variously, and more seriously than do other Americans of his era. The published papers of his contemporaries show that Jefferson wrote on nature when John Adams wrote on history and religion; that Jefferson wrote about natural law, while Madison seemed deliberately to avoid it; that Jefferson wrote on the natural sciences but Hamilton did not; and that Jefferson took nature far beyond George Washington's interests in farming and the