The events in the book are also given general human and even cosmic significance.This is perhaps because the island on wich Crusoe finds himself is treated by the writer as an environment ,in the full modern use of the word.That is ,it is seen as one of a number of posible kinds of surroundings. Perhaps it was for this reason ,as well on general grounds of probability, that Defoe shifted the locale of the solitary life from the relatively ordinary clime of the temperate Juan Fernandez, to a more exotic, tropical island which he placed off ´the river Oronoque, commonly called the Great River'. Put on this island with some of the goods suitable for other climates and places ,Crusoe sets out to subdue his new environment, to construct in his tropical island a standard of living (even a kind of living) equivalent to life in his native England. He masters the new environment to produce the norm he is accustomed to, his ingenuity in improvising.

In Crusoe´s new environment, he has only himself to rely on,the ordinary processes of everyday English living take on a new and strange aspect for him. He is reduced to first principles and is able for the first time in his life to generalize his ideas (indeed forced to do so).This is, of course, a common feature of eighteenth-century travels and voyages ,where the change of the scene is often used to make the familiar unfamiliar ,and so induce judgement of it .

Crusoe writes

Starting as a heedless young man ,who had "never handled a tool in my life ",he goes through in a few years all the long history of human technological inventiveness solving almost every problem from the beginning. Of human inventiveness and technological resource, Defoe was in his way the sincere if clumsy celebrator. So, the book still has life as a generalized comment on all human life and effort.