ABSTRACT
When Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked on an uninhabited island off the coast of America, but having got abundant supplies ashore, sat down to consider his situation, he prepared a list of what he called his ‘miseries’ and ‘comforts’. Three of his six miseries involved his separation from all human company and conversation. He later described his condition as follows:
I seem’d banished from human Society…I was alone, circumscrib’d by the boundless Ocean, cut off from Mankind, and condemn’d to what I call’d silent Life… I was as one who Heaven thought not worthy to be number’d among the Living, or to appear among the rest of His Creatures…to have seen one of my own Species, would have seem’d to me a Raising from Death to Life, and the greatest Blessing that Heaven itself, next to the supreme Blessing of Salvation, could bestow.
