The relationship that Defoe set up between the white man isolated in nature and the good savage is never a man to man relationship, totally comprised in its immediate reciprocity, but an instance of the master servant relation, of intelligence versus devotion, of wise strength against brute force, of reflective courage versus heroic unconsciousness: a social relation, in short, with its literary status and all its ethical coefficients, is transposed to a natural state, and becomes an immediate truth in that two man society.