The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley (Cambridge Companions to Religion) by Randy L. Maddox & Jason E. Vickers

Author:Randy L. Maddox & Jason E. Vickers
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781139796354
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2009-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

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One other characteristic of Wesley's engagement with the study of nature in his day deserves attention. It concerns the purpose of this study. Rejecting earlier notions of natural philosophers as individual seekers after the arcane mysteries of the natural world, Francis Bacon helped make standard by Wesley's day a self-understanding of natural philosophers as public figures in service of the public good.30

Wesley's embrace of this basic emphasis is evident in The Desideratum; or, Electricity Made Plain and Useful (1760). Like Survey, this volume contains extended extracts from recent works on electricity by Benjamin Franklin, Richard Lovett, and others. But, Wesley makes clear in the preface that he is much less interested in the “philosophical” parts of these treatises that posit explanations of how electricity works than he is in the scattered accounts of medical benefits of electrical shock.31 Whereas some viewed these accounts with scorn, Wesley collected them and added accounts from his own experiments in public clinics with “electrifying machines.” He then published them inexpensively, for the public benefit of the poor in particular. (For more on Wesley's medical interests, see the Chapter 10.)

But, there was a specific current in Bacon's writings on natural philosophy which Wesley resisted – the tendency to emphasize human control and exploitation of the natural world.32 Wesley was familiar with champions of this anthropocentric, exploitive emphasis in scientific investigation. He had to look no further than William Derham, who insisted “We can, if need be, ransack the whole globe,…penetrate into the bowels of the earth, descend to the bottom of the deep, travel to the farthest regions of this world, to acquire wealth, to increase our knowledge, or even only to please our eye or fancy.”33

This is one of the passages from Derham that was not selected by Wesley for inclusion in Survey. Nor does anything in its vein from other sources appear there. Part of the reason is that Wesley imbibed more deeply than Derham the convictions of the chain of beings model of nature. Although this model highlights (as ecologists would today) a range of ways that any particular species might contribute to the well-being of others above or below it in the chain, it also insists that every species has intrinsic value and a right to exist for its own purposes. John Ray, who was deeply shaped by this model, emphasized the relevant implication: “It is a generally received opinion that all this visible world was created for man, that man is the end of creation, as if there were no other end of any creature but some way or other to be serviceable to man.…Yet wise men nowadays think otherwise.”34 Although Ray went on to insist that, in this interdependent chain, all species are in some sense serviceable to humanity and we would frustrate the purposes of their creation if we did not make appropriate use of them, he offered Wesley a model of modest anthropocentrism.

Wesley appropriated this model in a way that moved beyond Ray through his distinctive emphasis regarding our role as “stewards.

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