Nature

Published: July 10, 2003, 8 a.m.

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the attempt to define humanity\\u2019s part in the natural world. In Childe Harold\\u2019s Pilgrimage Lord Byron wrote:\\u201cThere 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.\\u201d In the Bible\\u2019s book of Genesis, \\u2018nature\\u2019 was the paradise of Eden, but for the philosopher Thomas Hobbes it was a place of perpetual war, where the life of man was \\u201csolitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short\\u201d. The defining of Nature, whether \\u201cred in tooth and claw\\u201d or as the fount of all innocence, is an attempt to define man\\u2019s origins and purpose and humanity\\u2019s 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.

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