2 Nature (with Phusis, Kind, Physical etc.)
In this chapter we shall have to consider Greek phusis, Latin natura (with its derivatives), and English kind. Each of the three has a great number of senses, and two of these senses are common to all of them. One appears to have been reached independently by all three words. The other was at first peculiar to phusis and was thence transferred to natura, and through natura to kind. Thus it is phusis that complicates the whole story, and that story will therefore be most easily told if, in defiance of chronology, we begin with some account of the Latin and English words in their un-hellenised condition, and only after that turn to the Greek.
I. ‘NATURA’
By far the commonest native meaning of natura is something like sort, kind, quality, or character. When you ask, in our modern idiom, what something ‘is like’, you are asking for its natura. When you want to tell a man the natura of anything you describe the thing. In nineteenth-century English the word ‘description’ itself (‘I do not associate with persons of that description’) is often an exact synonym for natura. Caesar sent scouts to find out qualis esset natura montis, what the hill was like, what sort of a hill it was. Quintilian speaks of a man ingenii naturâ praestantem (XII, I), outstanding by the quality of his mind. Cicero’s title De Natura Deorum could be translated ‘What the gods are like’.
It will be noticed that whereas Caesar wanted to know the (doubtless unique) character of a particular hill, Cicero wrote about the common character of all gods, and Horace can speak of humana natura, the character common to all men. There is a logical distinction here, but linguistically the two usages are the same. A class or species has a natura, and so has a particular or an individual.
It is not always possible, or necessary, to decide whether the idea of the species or that of the particular is uppermost. Cicero says that ‘omnis natura strives to preserve itself’. It makes little difference whether we render omnis natura ‘every class or species’ or ‘every kind (of thing)’, hence ‘a thing of whatever kind’, and hence almost ‘everything’.
Those who wish to go further back will notice that natura shares a common base with nasci (to be born); with the noun natus (birth); with natio (not only a race or nation but the name of the birth-goddess); or even that natura itself can mean the sexual organs—a sense formerly born by English nature, but apparently restricted to the female. It is risky to try to build precise semantic bridges, but there is obviously some idea of a thing’s natura as its original or ‘innate’ character.
If we look forward, the road is clear. This sense of natura, though soon to be threatened by vast semantic growths of another origin, has shown astonishing persistence and is still as current a sense as any other for English nature. Every day we speak about ‘the nature of the case’ (or of the soil, the animal, the problem).
II. ‘KIND’
From the earliest period of our language this has been both a noun (Anglo-Saxon gecynd and cynd) and an adjective (gecynde and cynde).
The meanings of the noun are very close to those of natura. The Anglo-Saxon word can mean what its modern descendant means, a ‘kind’ or sort. Thus wæstma gecynde are ‘kinds’ of fruit, or the rods which had miraculously been turned into gold in Ælfric’s homily on the Assumption of St John can be presently turned back to their former gecynde. The meaning ‘species’, though now archaic, is still familiar to readers of A.V.: ‘every winged fowl after his kind’.
The gecyndlimu or ‘kind-limbs’ are certainly the genitals. When the author of the Anglo-Saxon Phoenix says (l. 355) that God only knows that bird’s gecynde he certainly means its sex. But whether this is the author’s meaning or the word’s meaning may be doubted. He may use gecynde for ‘sex’ only because sex is a kind of kind, nameless and definable only by the context; just as Ælfric in his Grammar uses it for ‘gender’ when he glosses neutrum as ‘neither cynd’. We easily forget how peculiar Latin is in having a special name for this kind of kind; Greek has to make do with genos, and German with Geschlecht.
Kind also means ‘progeny’, ‘offspring’. In Piers Plowman the beasts all ‘follow reason’, show moderation, ‘in etying, in drynking, in gendrynge of kynde’, and there is a curse on all married couples who produce no kynde. Closely linked to this is the larger sense of ‘family’ or ‘stock’; a whole kindred is a kind, as when Jacob in the Middle English Genesis and Exodus left Canaan with many a man of his kinde (ll. 239 f.). ‘Gentle kind’ and ‘noble stock’ are almost certainly a doublet of synonyms (like the Prayer Book’s ‘acknowledge and confess’) when Shakespeare writes ‘came of a gentle kind and noble stock’.
Thus the noun, though not historically connected with natura (unless you go back very far indeed), has a tolerably similar semantic area and presents no very serious difficulties. The adjective (gecynde, cynde, cyndelic, kind and kindly) has a more complicated repertory of meanings. It is not possible to reconstruct the bridges between them, still less to be sure in which direction the traffic crossed them. Indeed ‘bridges’ are probably too mechanical an image and the mutual influences between meaning and meaning are as subtle and reciprocal as those between a group of friends.
1. The adjective means ‘hereditary’—the hereditary being, of course, what comes to one in virtue of one’s birth or family (or kind). Thus we are told in Beowulf (l. 2197) that the hero and Hygelac both had gecynde land, hereditary estates, in their native country. Similarly, a kind or kindly lord is one who inherits his lordship. In the Anglo-Saxon Metres of Boethius the Goths are said to have had two gecynde kings. In Malory Arthur tells Launcelot and Bors to go and look after their dead fathers’ lands ‘and cause youre lyege men to know you as for their kynde lord’. Presumably by an extension from this, any thoroughly legitimate lord, as distinct from a conqueror or usurper, may be ‘kindly’. ‘The Red City and all that be therein will take you for their kindly lord.’
It is interesting to notice that the derivatives, both French and English, of Latin naturalis develop the same sense. In Villehardouin’s Conqueste de Constantinople the crusaders present Alexius to the Byzantines as vostre seignor naturel; in Sidney we find ‘your naturall prince’; and in Shakespeare ‘his natural king’. It is most improbable that naturalis could have reached this sense by a native Latin development. But those who knew the noun kind, or its Frankish equivalent, as their word for Latin natura, might come, when they were writing Latin, to think that naturalis would do for the adjective kind.
2. Any behaviour or state which shows a thing’s, or a person’s, kind or nature—which is characteristic of it, typical, normal, and therefore to be expected—may be called ‘kind’. We are told that on a particular occasion Beowulf behaved with valour, as was gecynde to him (l. 2696)—as was ‘just like him’. Malory leaves two lovers in a bed ‘clipping and kissing as was kindly thing’—as of course they would. And here again the sense of the Latin derivative may have been influenced by that of the Germanic word. Naturaliter did not mean ‘of course’, as ‘naturally’ and naturellement often do. This sense is so strangely remote from other senses of ‘naturally’ that we can say ‘As my hostess had cooked it herself, I naturally pretended to like it’. But it becomes easy enough when the original equivalence of gecynd and natura has worked for centuries towards the possible infection of almost any sense of one by almost any sense of the other.
From the idea of the characteristic or normal to that of the proper, the fitting, the desirable, is an easy transition. Indeed the sense-development of the word proper itself, from that which belongs to a thing or makes part of its definition to that which ought to be found in it, is a striking instance. When Philautus says ‘so unkinde a yeare it hath beene . . . that we felt the heate of the Summer before we coulde discerne the temperature of the Spring’, ‘unusual’ would cover all he need mean by unkinde, though one may suspect that some complaint of unfitness or unsuitability goes with it. When Criseyde asks how any plant or living creature can last without ‘his kinde noriture’, it is impossible to draw any distinction between an organism’s characteristic or normal, and its suitable or appropriate, food. But the value judgement is clear, and the sense ‘fitting’ or ‘proper’ is certain when Malory, enumerating the knights who tried to heal Sir Urre, says ‘we must begin at King Arthur, as is kindly to begin at him that was the most man of worship’.
3. Sometimes the adjective has a range of meaning very like that of pius in classical Latin; somewhere between ‘dutiful’ and ‘affectionate’. The man who is pius or ‘kind’ (in this sense) is one who does not good offices in general, but good offices to which close kinship or some other personal relationship binds him. When Sidney speaks of ‘the Paphlagonian unkinde king and his kind son’ he means that the father was a very bad (unfatherly) father and the son a very good (filial) son. Here again we shall find the derivative of natura taking on the sense of the Germanic words, so that unnatural and natural mean ‘lacking (or having) due family affection’, and nature itself can mean pietas. Both usages come together when William Bulleyn writes ‘Parents are more natural to their children then children to their fathers and mothers. Nature doth descend but not ascend.’ The Latin and English words are used as a doublet by Shakespeare: ‘A brother in his love towards her ever most kind and natural.’ But the family (or kind), though the usual, is not the only ground of the special obligation which ‘kindness’ fulfils. Ingratitude is also ‘unkindness’. Sloth, in Piers Plowman, confesses he is ‘unkynde ageyns courtesye’; do him a good turn and he will not respond.
4. The next meaning in our catalogue is closely parallel to that of Latin generosus. If genus is a stock or lineage, generosus ought in logic to mean ‘pertaining to, or having, a lineage’. But in that sense it would be a useless word and to call a man generosus would be to say nothing; for every man has a lineage of some sort. In fact, generosus means well-born, noble, having a good lineage. Similarly when the Germans call a man geboren they mean hoch-geboren, well or nobly born. In just the same way the adjective kind means not ‘having a family or kind’ but ‘noble’. In all three languages one can imagine different routes by which this sense would be reached. When a man advertises his shop as ‘the shop for quality’, he ignores the fact that badness is just as much a quality as goodness; by ‘quality’ he means ‘good quality’. By a similar ellipsis ‘a man of family’ means, or used to mean, ‘a man of good family’. That is one way in which generosus and kind could come to mean not merely ‘familial’ but ‘of a good (noble) family’. Or it might be that certain people were deemed, by earlier societies, to have ‘no family’ in a far more nearly literal sense. The slave, the beggar, the stranger belong to none of the groups which we have been taught, in this settlement, to call families. No doubt (if you come to think of it) they must, in physical fact, have had parents and even grandparents. But not ones we know. They may not even know them themselves. If you ask of which family they come—are they Erlings or Birmings or Wolfings?—the answer is ‘none’. They are outside the organisation we know, as animals are outside it.
By whatever process, kind, then, comes to mean ‘noble’ or ‘gentle’: thus in Genesis and Exodus (l. 1452) we have ‘begotten of kinde blood’. As we should expect—did not our ancestors speak of ‘noble’ and ‘base’ metals?—this can be extended beyond the human sphere, so that one Hales (c. 1656) talks of grafting ‘apples and kind fruit upon thorns’. It is possibly along this branch of meaning that we reach Cleopatra’s ‘kindly creatures, turn all to serpents’—let all the nobler or gentler creatures turn into those we most abhor. The passage in Malory where Percivale helps a lion in its fight against a snake because it is ‘the more naturall beast of the two’ is curious. If ‘more naturall’ means nobler, superior in the supposed social hierarchy of beasts, this will be another instance of the Latin derivative’s semantic infection by the corresponding Germanic word.
Instances of the purely social meaning for kinde are not plentiful. More often (like ‘noble’ itself) it has a vaguely eulogistic sense. Hence ‘kind jeweler’ in Pearl (l. 276), or ‘kinde caroles’ in Gawain (l. 473).
5. The meanings ‘suitable’, pius, and ‘noble’—and especially the last, as the parallel development of gentle shows—may all have played a part in producing that of ‘exorable, compassionate, beneficent—the opposite of cruel’. ‘Each Christian man be kinde to other’, says Langland, meaning, I think, exactly what we should mean now. This is the dangerous sense of the word kind. We may sometimes read it into an old text where it was not intended. In Chaucer’s ‘He was a gentil harlot and a kinde’ the modern meaning for both adjectives is probable, but not, I think, certain. In Herbert’s ‘I the unkinde, ungratefull’ (from Love) the modern meaning would be disastrous; the idea of general beneficence from man to God borders on the absurd. Herbert is classing himself with ‘unkind mothers’ and ‘unnatural children’ as one who, with gross insensibility, makes no response to the arch-natural appeal of the tenderest and closest personal relation that can be imagined; one who is loved in vain.
The peculiar erotic use of the word kind is not a special sense but a special application of the sense ‘beneficent or exorable’—especially the latter. The woman who yields to your suit is exorable, therefore kind. Euphemism and gallantry, not always without a touch of irony, probably lie behind this. It must not be hinted that the lady has any passions or senses, and so her favours must be attributed as in the medieval tradition, to mercy, pite, or ore. Hence Collins writes
fair Circassia where, to love inclin’d,
Each swain was bless’d for every maid was kind.
Elsewhere the euphemism almost ceases to be a euphemism and kindness can become a name for (a woman’s) violent sexual passion; so that Dryden, in a startling phrase, speaks of Roman ladies whispering Greek endearments to their lovers ‘in the fury of their kindness’.
III. PHUSIS
(G)nasci and kind have a common root, if you go far enough back. Phusis has quite a different origin. Its representatives, or what seem to be its representatives, in various Indo-Germanic languages suggest two main branches of meaning; the one, something like ‘inhabit, live (at), dwell, remain, be’ (at a place or in a condition); the other, ‘to grow (transitively, as one “grows” cucumbers or a beard, and intransitively as beards and cucumbers grow), to become’. The latter branch is well represented by the Greek verb phuein. Dionysus grows (phuei) the vine for mortals; a father begets (phuei) a son; ‘not to have been born (phunai) has no fellow’, says Sophocles.
The noun phusis can hardly mean anything except ‘beginning, coming-to-be’ when Empedocles says ‘there is neither a phusis nor an end of all mortal things’. On the other hand, it much more often means, like natura or kind, sort or character or ‘description’. ‘A horrid phusis of mind’, ‘the phusis of the Egyptian country’, ‘the philosophic phusis’, are typical. The connection between this and the meaning of the verb phuein is not obvious, though as usual ‘bridges’ can be devised. Aristotle is trying his hand at one in his famous definition; ‘whatever each thing is like (hoion hekaston esti) when its process of coming-to-be is complete, that we call the phusis of each thing’. On this view a thing’s phusis would be what it grows into at maturity. This explanation does not seem to me at all improbable, but Aristotle’s statement is no evidence for it, and Sir David Ross thinks it philologically wrong. Like all philosophers, Aristotle gives words the definitions which will be most useful for his own purpose and the history of his own language is one of the few subjects in which he was not a distinguished pioneer.
But already, before Aristotle wrote, phusis had taken on, in addition to the meaning ‘sort’, a new and quite astonishing sense. The pre-Socratic Greek philosophers had had the idea of taking all the things they knew or believed in—gods, men, animals, plants, minerals, what you will—and impounding them under a single name; in fact, of regarding Everything as a thing, turning this amorphous and heterogeneous collection into an object or pseudo-object. And for some reason the name they chose for it was phusis. Thus in the late sixth or early fifth century we have the great philosophical poem of Parmenides, whose title is everywhere given as About Phusis. In the fifth century we have that of Empedocles About the Phusis tôn ontón (the Phusis of the things that are).
Why they chose the name phusis is a question to which I can give no confident answer.
We have already noticed that in one of the fragments of Empedocles the word appears to mean ‘a beginning’. This at first sounds hopeful; a work on ‘everything’ might possibly be entitled ‘About the Beginning’ or ‘About Becoming’. But not, unfortunately, a work of Empedocles. For in that very fragment he is denying that there are any beginnings, and we know that his whole system excluded them. Growth and change, and every sort of becoming, he regarded as an illusion. Whatever others might do, he of all men could not write a poem about beginning.
Another hypothesis would be that phusis sometimes meant for him ‘being’. We have seen that words from the same root can mean something like that in other Indo-Germanic languages. And from what we know about the behaviour of language in general we cannot deny the possibility that this sense, protected from the others by the insulating power of the context, might have occurred, and even lasted for centuries, in Greek. The real difficulty is that it has left no trace. We are inventing, to explain one difficulty, a usage for which we have not a shred of evidence.
A third hypothesis would begin from noticing that Parmenides’ title alone is troublesome. We could explain the Empedoclean ‘About the phusis of the things that are’ and the Lucretian De Rerum Natura. Both could mean ‘What things are like’, and both would be simply two more instances of phusis and natura in the sense ‘character, sort’. If we then assumed that phusis in the title of Parmenides’ poem had originally been followed by a genitive (of things, of all things, of all), the story would become perfectly clear. Men begin by asking what this or that thing is like, asking for its phusis. They then get the idea of asking what ‘everything’ or ‘the whole show’ is like. The answer will give the phusis of everything. By an ellipse, the qualifying genitive then comes to be omitted, and the word which originally meant ‘sort’, in certain contexts, and protected by those contexts, comes to mean ‘everything’ or the universe. All this, I believe, could have happened; I am not claiming to know that it did.
However it came about, the amazing leap was made. A comparatively small number of speculative Greeks invented Nature—Nature with a capital, nature (d.s.) or nature in the dangerous sense, for of all the senses of all the words treated in these pages this is surely the most dangerous, the one we are readiest to intrude where it is not required. From phusis this meaning passed to natura and from natura to kind. All three become names for what in China (I am told) is called ‘the ten thousand things’.
Linguistically nature (d.s.) is more important for the slightly different senses which it led into than for any great use which was made of it in its purity. Nature (d.s.), if taken strictly, has no opposite. When we say that any particular thing is part of nature (d.s.), we know no more about it than before. ‘Everything’ is a subject on which there is not much to be said. Perhaps the chief use of nature (d.s.) in its purity is as the grammatical subject for expressions of optimism or pessimism: it is in that way rather like the word life.
But when nature (d.s.) loses its purity, when it is used in a curtailed or ‘demoted’ sense, it becomes important.
Parmenides and Empedocles had thought that they were giving, in principle, an account of everything. Later thinkers denied this; not in the sense that they wanted to add particular items here and there, but in the sense that they believed in realities of a quite different order from any that their predecessors took account of. They expressed this not in the form ‘phusis contains more than our ancestors supposed’, but in the form (explicitly or implicitly), ‘there is something else besides phusis’. The moment you say this, phusis is being used in what I call its demoted sense. For it had meant ‘everything’ and you are now saying there is something in addition to it. You are in fact using phusis to mean ‘all the sort of things which our predecessors believed to be the only things’. You are also executing a movement of thought which would have been very much more difficult if those predecessors had not already impounded all those things in a single noun and, in fact, made the mere aggregate into what seemed to be an object with a determinate character of its own. Once that had been done it was possible, and convenient, to use the word phusis for that object, now no longer equated with everything. The ‘demoted d.s.’ presupposes and profits by, the pure d.s. By (so to speak) inventing Nature the old thinkers had made possible, or at least facilitated, the question whether there is anything else.
There were three principal movements towards demotion.
1. The Platonic. In Platonism, as everyone knows, the whole perceptible universe in space and time is an imitation, and product, of something different: the imperceptible, timeless, archetypal forms. This product or imitation, since it contains all the things which the older writers include in phusis, easily comes to be itself called phusis; as when Plotinus says that the arts imitate, not sensible objects, but those principles (logoi) from which phusis itself proceeds. It is a demoted phusis because, far from being all that is, it is far less real and valuable than the realm of forms.
2. The Aristotelian. Aristotle criticised thinkers like Parmenides because ‘they never conceived of anything other than the substance of things perceptible by the senses’. Phusis he defines as that which has in itself a principle of change. It is the subject-matter of natural (phusike) philosophy. (This is illuminating. We are getting to the age of universities and phusis (d.s.) demoted can be defined as the ‘subject’ of a particular discipline. Soon, in a new sense, everyone will ‘know what phusis is’: it is what so-and-so lectures on. The methodological idiom thus gets to work.) But there are two things outside phusis. First, things which are unchangeable, but cannot exist ‘on their own’. These are the subject-matter of mathematics. Secondly, there is one thing which is unchangeable and does exist on its own. This is God, the unmoved mover; and he is studied by a third discipline. On him ‘the sky and all phusis depend’; words reproduced by Dante in Paradiso XXVIII, 41.
3. The Christian. Christianity involves a God as transcendent as Aristotle’s, but adds (this was what it inherited from Judaism and could also have inherited from Plato’s Timaeus) the conception that this God is the Creator of phusis. Nature (d.s.) demoted is now both distinct from God and also related to him as artifact to artist, or as servant to master; so that God in Tasso has natura under his feet.
In the Middle Ages a still further demotion or restriction occurred, by which nature no longer covered the whole even of the created universe. Nature’s realm was supposed to extend only as far upwards as the orbit of the moon. That may lend an unsuspected precision to the words which Chaucer puts into the mouth of nature personified.
Eche thing in my cure is
Under the Mone that mai waxe and wane.
Childish as this particular demotion may sound, it goes back to a respectable division between the sublunary and the translunary which Aristotle made in order to cover what observation seemed, in his time, to show. Even in the passage already quoted, it will be remembered, not only phusis but ‘the sky and phusis’ hung upon God.
When we emphasise the idea that nature is a divine artifact, we get yet another contrast. Pagan myths (you will find them in the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and Genesis seemed to agree that matter first existed in a state of disorder (tohu-bohu or chaos) and was afterwards ordered and worked up into a kosmos (kosmein, to arrange, organise, embellish, whence also cosmetics). The cosmos can then be called nature and contrasted with the preceding—and perhaps subsequent—disorder. Hence Milton describes chaos as ‘the womb of Nature and perhaps her grave’.
But besides all these demotions there was also apotheosis. This would perhaps have been hardly possible before nature (d.s.) had been named, and seems wholly foreign to the spirit of the earliest Greek mythology. But once you can talk about nature (d.s.) you can deify it—or ‘her’. Hence the sense which I shall call Great Mother Nature; nature used to mean not simply all the things there are, as an aggregate or even a system, but rather some force or mind or élan supposed to be immanent in them. It is of course often impossible to be sure in a given instance whether the sense Great Mother Nature implied genuine personalisation (a deity believed in) or merely personification as a rhetorical figure. When Cicero says that Cleanthes gave the name of God to the mind and spirit of all natura it is almost certainly the former. But when he says ‘What workman save Natura could have attained such skill?’ it might be not much more than a figure. When Marcus Aurelius, or any sound Stoic, calls Phusis ‘the eldest of deities’ (IX, I), I think this is the language of actual religion; about the natura who appears in Statius’ Thebaid I am in doubt. But the kinde or natura and physis or nature, the ‘vicaire of the almightie Lorde’, who so dominates medieval poetry, is a personification, though a very grave and active one.
Great Mother Nature has proved a most potent sense down to the present day. It is ‘she’ who does nothing by leaps, abhors a vacuum, is die gute Mutter, is red in tooth and claw, ‘never did betray the heart that loved her’, eliminates the unfit, surges to ever higher and higher forms of life, decrees, purposes, warns, punishes and consoles. Even now I am not sure that this meaning is always used purely as a figure, to say what would equally make sense without it. The test is to remove the figure and see how much sense remains. Of all the pantheon Great Mother Nature has, at any rate, been the hardest to kill.
IV. ‘NATURE’ AND ITS OPPOSITES
The sense we have just been considering might seem so overwhelming that, once reached, it would dominate, or perhaps devour, all other senses of the word. But we daily prove that this is not so by speaking of ‘the nature of the case’ or ‘a good-natured man’ when there is before our mind no idea of nature (d.s.), strict or demoted, personified or literal. For the hierarchy of meanings is not like the hierarchy of things. That sense of the word which refers to the most ancient thing need not be the most ancient sense; that which refers to an all-embracing thing need not be the all-embracing sense. The thing we mean by nature (d.s.) may be the trunk on which we all grow; the sense nature (d.s.) is by no means the semantic trunk on which all the meanings grow. It is itself only one of the branches. Hence we shall go widely astray if we assume that whenever authors use the word nature they must be thinking of nature (d.s.). Especially, we shall go astray if we think that all uses of the word nature which carry approval indicate an optimistic, and all disapproving usages a pessimistic, view of nature (d.s.). These usages may have a different source and need imply no view of nature (d.s.) at all. Of course the hovering presence of nature (d.s.) in the background often moulds the rhetorical form, and sometimes even modifies the thought when the author is saying things which (fundamentally) require different senses.
The best clue is to ask oneself in each instance, what is the implied opposite to nature, and a list of such opposites will now occupy us for some pages. Their very existence proves how little the sense nature (d.s.) (which has no opposite) is involved.
V. ‘NATURAL AND UNNATURAL’
There are two chief branches.
1. Since natural can mean ‘having due affection’, or pius, unnatural (as already noticed) of course means the reverse. Thus old Hamlet’s ghost says that, while all murder is ‘most foul’, his own murder was ‘strange and unnatural’, because it was fratricidal.
2. Anything which has changed from its sort or kind (nature) may be described as unnatural, provided that the change is one the speaker deplores. Behaviour is unnatural or ‘affected’, not simply when it is held to be a departure from that which a man’s nature would lead to of itself, but when it is a departure for the worse. When the timid man forces himself to be brave, or the choleric man to be just, he is not called unnatural. ‘Unnatural vices’ are so called because the appetite has exchanged its characteristic and supposedly original bent, its phusis, for one which most men think worse. (Perpetual continence, though equally a departure from the phusis, would be, and is, called unnatural only by those who disapprove of it.) It is just possible that the Great Mother Nature meaning has had an influence here, for in medieval personifications of her she is very apt to talk about fertility, and the ‘plaint’ which she makes in Alanus ab Insulis’ De Planctu Naturae is one against homosexuality. But I do not think this at all probable.
Why unnatural should always (as unearthly is not) be a term of reprobation is not easy to understand. The strongly pejorative force of its first usage (lacking in due affection) may have something to do with it.
It is sufficiently obvious that neither sense is derived from nature (d.s.) which of course includes fratricide and perversion as it includes everything else.
VI. THE ‘NATURAL’ AND THE INTERFERED WITH
A beautifully pure example of this sense occurs in Chaucer. Medieval astronomers believed that the lower heavenly spheres had an inherent impulse to move from west to east, but that the Primum Mobile, moving from east to west, forced them backwards in that direction. Chaucer complains that the ‘firste moeving cruel firmament’ thus forces westward all those things ‘that naturelly wolde holde another way’. Now of course both movements are equally within nature (d.s.). But Chaucer is not thinking of nature (d.s.). Nor are we while we read his line. His usage is still so familiar and intelligible that we all know at once, without having to think about it, what he means by ‘would naturally’; he means ‘would spontaneously, of their own accord, if they were let alone’. Similarly, we feel no difficulty when Aristotle says ‘We must study what is natural (phusei) in specimens which are in their natural condition (kata phusin), not in those which have been damaged’.
This, as it is one of the oldest, is one of the hardiest senses of nature or natural. The nature of anything, its original, innate character, its spontaneous behaviour, can be contrasted with what it is made to be or do by some external agency. A yew-tree is natural before the topiarist has carved it; water in a fountain is forced upwards against its nature; raw vegetables are au naturel. The natural here is the Given.
This distinction between the uninterfered with and the interfered with will not probably recommend itself to philosophers. It may be held to enshrine a very primitive, an almost magical or animistic, conception of causality. For of course in the real world everything is continuously ‘interfered with’ by everything else; total mutual interference (Kant’s ‘thorough-going reciprocity’) is of the essence of nature (d.s.). What keeps the contrast alive, however, is the daily experience of men as practical, not speculative, beings. The antithesis between unreclaimed land and the cleared, drained, fenced, ploughed, sown, and weeded field—between the unbroken and the broken horse—between the fish as caught and the fish opened, cleaned, and fried—is forced upon us every day. That is why nature as ‘the given’, the thing we start from, the thing we have not yet ‘done anything about’, is such a persistent sense. We here, of course, means man. If ants had a language they would, no doubt, call their anthill an artifact and describe the brick wall in its neighbourhood as a natural object. Nature in fact would be for them all that was not ‘ant-made’. Just so, for us, nature is all that is not man-made; the natural state of anything is its state when not modified by man. This is one source of the antithesis (philosophically so scandalous) between nature and Man. We as agents, as interferers, inevitably stand over against all the other things; they are all raw material to be exploited or difficulties to be overcome. This is also a fruitful source of favourable and unfavourable overtones. When we deplore the human interferences, then the nature which they have altered is of course the unspoiled, the uncorrupted; when we approve them, it is the raw, the unimproved, the savage.
Inevitably this contrast is represented in all the languages we have had to consider. Things may be in a satisfactory condition either by nature (phusei) or by art (techne), in Plato. A death which occurs of itself, without external violence, is a natural (kata phusin) death. The peasant to whom Electra had been, outrageously, married, abstained from her bed for various reasons, one being that he was naturally (ephu) chaste; not through fear, nor by painful efforts of resolution—he was ‘that sort of man’. Quintilian says that in oratory natura can do much without training but training can do little without natura (II, xix). The nature in question is of course the ‘given’ capacity in the pupil, what the teacher finds to work upon. Addison speaks of ‘the rustic part of the species who on all occasions acted bluntly and naturally’: no efforts of their own had modified their given behaviour (given by temperament, environment, and the passions) in the direction either of refinement or affectation.
This contrast easily accommodates, without substantial change of what is being said, allusions to Great Mother Nature; as in Milton’s description of the paradisal flowers
which not nice Art
In Beds and curious knots, but nature boon
Pourd forth profuse
Sometimes it is difficult to say whether Great Mother Nature, even rhetorically, is intended or not. Sannazaro, in the Proem to his Arcadia, prefers to the products of the gardener’s art the trees on the rude mountains ‘brought forth by nature’ (de la natura produtti). Is natura here intended to arouse the image of the Great Mother, or does it only mean naturally? Seneca says ‘for natura does not give virtue: it is an art to become good’. It might mean simply ‘We are not born with all the virtues, they don’t come of their own accord. We have to work at them.’ On the other hand, he was a Stoic and Great Mother Nature was very often in his mind. It is of course very possible that neither he nor Sannazaro could have answered the question or had ever raised it.
VII. THE ‘NATURAL’ AS AN ELEMENT IN MAN
I divide this class into three sub-classes and must give warning that I am in some doubt about all of them except the first. The second I am not sure that I have understood; the third, for a reason which will appear, is bound to have an uncertain fringe. I think it better to give the reader even a dubious classification (which he can then pull to pieces for himself) than a jungle of miscellanea at the end.
1. Speaking of worldly goods Boethius says that natura is content with few of them. Alfred, correctly, translates ‘in very little of them kind (gecynd) has enough’. Spenser, probably with the Boethian passage in mind, remarks ‘with how small allowance Untroubled Nature doth herself suffice’. When Adam and Eve and the Archangel dined together they ate what ‘sufficed, not burdened nature’. The implied contrast in all these is between what the nature of man wants—what a man wants simply in virtue of being the kind of organism he is—and what this or that man learns to want by being luxurious, fanciful, or fashionable. This would be an application of the more general contrast of nature as the given against the interfered with. Our ‘built in’ appetites are interfered with by our individual ways of life.
2. But what are we to make of the following usages? A natural is an idiot or imbecile. ‘Love is like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole.’ Again, the unconscious vital powers in a man’s body can be nature. ‘Ther nature wol not wirche’, says Chaucer of the dying Arcite, ‘Far-wel Physik! Go bear the man to chirche’. Most startling of all, Dryden’s Abdalla says ‘Reason’s a staff for age when nature’s gone’. We could, at a pinch, get rid of the Chaucerian passage. Nature in it might be Great Mother Nature refusing to work in one man’s body. The two other specimens are alike in suggesting a contrast between nature and reason. The idiot is a natural for lacking it, and Abdalla will not use it as long as he has nature instead. Now, since the nature of man was defined as ‘rational animal’, it seems very odd that the absence, or opposite, of reason in him should be natural.
The explanation I would suggest is as follows. We have already seen how the contrast between nature and man arises from our practical life. But it was also reinforced from another direction. Man is represented both in the Timaeus and in Genesis as the subject of a separate and special creation; as something added, by a fresh act of God, to the rest of nature (d.s.) demoted. (In Bernardus and in the Anticlaudian of Alanus the creation of man becomes even more special and more separate.) And of course ‘the rest of Nature’ could easily, in opposition to Man, be called simply nature. It could therefore be felt that what man shares with (the rest of) nature, what he has only because he is a creature and not because he is a special creature, is natural in contradistinction to his specific, specially created, differentia. Thus, paradoxically but not unintelligibly, man could be most natural (most united with the rest of nature) in those states and activities which are least rational. And we may perhaps add to this that the specifically human, the exercise and domination of reason, is achieved in each man only by effort. The state of a man before reason has developed in him, or while reason is in abeyance, may therefore be natural also in the sense of being ‘given’—being what happens if nothing is done about it. The idiot has only remained in the state of irrationality in which we all began. Abdalla identifies nature either with passion itself or with the dominance of passion because passion both arises and rules us unless we ‘interfere’ with ourselves.
Along these lines the word nature could reach the sense ‘that in man which is not specifically human, that which he shares with the animals’. Hence such euphemisms as ‘a call of nature’. Hence, as perhaps in the Chaucerian passage, the unconscious processes (digestion, circulation etc.) could be nature.
3. Here I feel pretty confident that the class I am discussing is a real class; but one older meaning of nature makes it doubtful whether certain instances fall within it or not. We have seen that nature can mean ‘due affection’ or pietas. Thus there are two possible ways of taking the ghost’s words to Hamlet ‘If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not’ (I, v, 81), and Prospero’s ‘You, brother mine that entertained ambition, expelled remorse and nature’ (V, i, 75). The ghost might mean ‘if you have any filial feelings’; Prospero might mean ‘You expelled all the feelings of a brother’. But equally the ghost might mean ‘If you still retain the nature of a man, if you have not departed from the human phusis’. And Prospero might mean ‘You drove out the given nature of humanity, voluntarily depraved yourself from your kind.’ I suspect the first explanation is the more likely for these passages. (Both senses might of course be present, or the distinction might never have been consciously before Shakespeare’s mind.) But the second seems more probable when Lady Macbeth prays that ‘no compunctious visitings of nature’ may shake her fell purpose (I, v, 45). She might possibly be praying that the ‘due affection’ and loyalty which she owes to Duncan as king, guest, kinsman, and benefactor, should not visit her with compunction. But, taken in connection with ‘unsex me here’, nature seems more likely to mean ‘my original datum of human nature’. She is deliberately casting out, and forbidding to return, her womanhood, her humanity, her reason (as our ancestors understood the word reason).
Nature here appears as good because the creature is departing from its phusis for something worse. This has nothing to do with an optimistic view of human nature in general, much less of nature (d.s.). We can interfere with our given nature either to mend or to mar it; we can climb above it or sink below it. Thus in a man who is depraving himself his nature will be the only trace of good still left in him (his form has not yet lost all her original brightness). Later, it will be the good he has finally lost. But when a man is growing better, rising above or (as we say) ‘conquering’ his original psychological datum, nature will be relatively bad—the element in him still unconquered or uncorrected. Banquo is a good man, but he has to pray ‘Merciful powers, Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature gives way to in repose’ (II, i, 7). The original human datum in him is not yet so conquered that it cannot raise its head in his dreams. Thus Johnson can say ‘We are all envious naturally but by checking envy we get the better of it. Pope’s usage is more complex—a good subject for Professor Empson—when he makes Eloisa say
Then Conscience sleeps and, leaving Nature free,
All my loose soul unbounded leaps to thee.
From the point of view of her pious resolutions nature here is the given which ought to be conquered and whose persistence is therefore bad. But she probably also pleads by implication that her passion for Abelard is after all natural and therefore excusable (a usage we must return to); natural as ordinary, to be expected, and also perhaps as something authoritatively sanctioned or irresistibly imposed by Great Mother Nature. The idea that sexual desire is natural because it is not specifically human may also come in.
My examples so far have all been ethical, the natural element in a man appearing as something morally better or worse than what he may make of it. But it can be contrasted as ‘given’ with things which are not, in the context, regarded as obligatory or culpable. An example (despite the borrowing of a religious term in it) is Coleridge’s
And happly by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man.
Coleridge was determining, like Lady Macbeth, to depart from his phusis, but not (on most views) to deprave it. We get the same non-moral contrast, complicated by Great Mother Nature, in this from Tristram Shandy (V, iii): ‘When Tully was bereft of his daughter at first he listened to the voice of nature and modulated his own unto it . . . O my Tullia, my daughter, my child . . . But as soon as he began to look into the stores of philosophy and consider how many excellent things might be said upon the occasion . . . no body on earth can conceive, says the great orator, how joyful it made me.’ ‘Voice’ here brings in the personification; but substantially the contrast is between the given—what Cicero, what anyone, would spontaneously feel—and what philosophy and rhetoric (conceived by Sterne as affectations) could make out of it.
VIII. ‘NATURE’ AND GRACE
Banquo’s evening prayer brought us already to the frontier of this class. Human nature (man as he is of himself) can be contrasted not only, as above, with man as he can become by moral effort but with man as he can be refashioned by divine grace. The antithesis is now not merely moral. ‘The loss of my husband’, says Christiana, ‘came into my mind, at which I was heartily grieved; but all that was but natural affection’. What is here depreciated or discounted as ‘but natural’ is nothing depraved or sub-human; on the contrary, it is something, on its own level and in its own mode, lawful, commanded, entirely good. But it involves none of the new motives, the new perspective, the revaluation of all things, which, on the Christian view go with conversion. It does not (in most theologies) need to be repented of; but neither does it indicate ‘the New Man’. It is therefore merely nature, not grace—or not of faith, or not spiritual. Often, of course, this contrast is merely implicit:
see, sons, what things you are!
How quickly nature falls into revolt
When gold becomes her object!
The choice of the word nature, in the context, would in Shakespeare’s time have made the theological implication clear. Nature means ‘we human beings in our natural condition’, that is, unless or until touched by grace. This is what ‘Nature’ means as the title of one of Herbert’s poems. It is about the element of untransformed, ungraced human nature in the poet—his Old Man, Old Adam, his vetustas, full of rebellion and venom, untamed, precarious, and perishing. The classic place for this contrast is the Imitation (III, liv): ‘Diligently watch the motions of nature and of grace . . . nature is subtle and always has self for end . . . grace walks in sincerity and does all for God.’ In the next chapter the author adds a linguistic note: ‘for nature is fallen and so the very word nature (though she was created good and right) now means the weakness of fallen nature.’
IX. NATURE AND THE MIMETIC ARTS
The contrasts we have hitherto been considering are all really variations upon a single contrast; that of nature as the given or uninterfered with, over against what has been, for better or worse, made of it. We now come to a different contrast; the nature of a thing as its real character, over against what it is thought to be or represented as being or treated as if it were.
Thus poets and painters are said to be imitating nature. Nature in this context primarily means the real character (the phusis or what-sortedness) of the things they are representing. When the horses in your picture are like real horses or the lovers in your comedy behave like real lovers, then of course your work is ‘true to nature’ or ‘natural’. And just as we call the painted shapes ‘horses’ and the dramatic personages ‘lovers’, so the correct depiction of them in the mimetic work can itself be called nature. Thus Pope can speak of a work ‘Where nature moves and rapture warms the mind’; or Johnson can complain ‘In this poem there is no nature for there is no truth.’
A full account of nature as a term in neo-classical criticism would require a whole book and will not, of course, be attempted here. But two points must be made.
1. Some of those who were neo-classical critics held optimistic views about nature (d.s.) and willingly used the figure of Great Mother Nature. But their frequent eulogies on nature in works of art are not necessarily connected with this. They may be emotionally tinged by it, or the writers themselves may sometimes be confused. But in logic, if your theory of art is mimetic, then of course you must praise artists for ‘following’ nature and blame them for departing from it—must praise nature in a work of art and censure the absence of nature—whatever you think about nature (d.s.). An imitation must be judged by its resemblance to the model.
2. We have already learned from Aristotle that the phusis of anything is ‘what it is like when its process of coming to be is complete’. We have learned also from Aristotle, that we must ‘study what is natural from specimens which are in their natural condition, not from damaged ones’. An immature or deformed specimen does not display its phusis accurately. Now if you once get (from Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s De Arte) the theory that art imitates the general, not the individual, that the nature to be imitated is really the natures of whole classes (horses, lovers), then the same principles apply to art as to biology. This doctrine of generality was of course widely held in the neo-classical period; ‘nothing can please many and please long’ except by ‘just representations of general nature’. It would have been clearer if he had said ‘general natures’. Obviously you can depict the general nature of a class only by displaying it in a fully developed, normal, undeformed specimen. The general nature of feet is not revealed by a drawing, however accurate, of a club foot (though of course club feet are an item in nature (d.s.)). The general nature of pedlars is not revealed by Wordsworth’s portrait of the Wanderer in The Excursion (though of course it is not strictly impossible that nature (d.s.) should once have included an individual pedlar who was just like him).
This view explains some otherwise unintelligible statements by Thomas Rymer. ‘Nature knows nothing in the manners which so properly distinguishes woman as doth her modesty’. This does not mean that Rymer is so simple as to deny the existence of immodest women. He knows perfectly well that nature (d.s.) includes immodest women, as it includes bearded women, hunchbacks and homosexuals. But they are not specimens in which we can observe general female nature. He makes this quite clear by adding ‘if a woman has got any accidental historical impudence’ (i.e. immodesty, impudicitia) ‘she must no longer stalk in Tragedy . . . but must rub off and pack down with the carriers into the Provence of Comedy’. She is proper in comedy (no doubt) because its corrective function is precisely to pillory aberrations from (general) nature. But female ‘impudence’ is no matter for serious poetry because, though it certainly occurs in nature (d.s.), when it does so it is merely ‘accidental’ (in the logical sense) and ‘historical’. That is, it merely records the particular, which, as Aristotle had taught, is the function of history, not of tragedy. It is in the light of this that we must understand his notorious remark about Iago. He condemns Iago for being an ‘insinuating rascal’ instead of a ‘plain-dealing souldier’—‘a character constantly worn by them for thousands of years in the World’. Rymer is not in the least denying that such a soldier as Iago could exist; the point is that, if he did, he would be a mere historical accident, not instructive as to the general nature of soldiers, and therefore improper in tragedy.
It will be seen that this demand for the typical easily merges into a demand for the perfect. The quest for the wholly normal cabbage—as we significantly say ‘the perfect specimen’—would involve the rejection of every cabbage which had suffered from such historical accidents as bad soil, unequal sun (and therefore different growth) on this side and that, too much or too little rain, and so on. In the end you would be looking for the ideal cabbage. This development, I suspect, is more easily seen in the criticism of painting. But Rymer is moving in that direction when he says that ‘no shadow of sense can be pretended for bringing any wicked persons on the stage’. I fear he was encouraged by Aristotle’s strange maxim that the characters in a tragedy should, before everything else, be ‘good’.
X. BY ‘NATURE’ OR BY LAW
Here, as in the preceding contrast, nature is the actual. What a thing is in its own nature and therefore really is, is set against what law (or custom, or convention) treats it as being. The claims made by women when the suffragist movement began, or by native Africans in parts of Africa, could in traditional language have taken the form ‘Our inferiority to you (men or whites) is legal or conventional, not natural’. A good example is the discussion on slavery in the first book of Aristotle’s Politics. Aristotle thought that some men were specially qualified by their character to be slaves and others to be masters. The one sort were therefore natural slaves, the other natural masters. But of course the actual working of the slave trade, which gets its livestock by kidnapping, purchase, or capture in war, did not at all insure that only the natural slaves were enslaved. (He oddly ignores the equally obvious truth that those who own slaves will often not be natural masters.) We must therefore distinguish the natural from the legal slave: him who ought to be, who is fit only to be, a slave, from him who is a slave in the eyes of the law.
Again, it must have been a primeval question whether what your father, or teacher, or king, or the laws of your country declared to be just or right was ‘really’ just or right. Linguistic analysts may (and what a comfort that will be to all governments!) succeed in convincing the world that the expression ‘really right’ is meaningless; but for millennia it was accepted as full of meaning. The idea of the ‘really right’, as against the law of the political ruler, is expressed in its purity by Sophocles through the mouth of Antigone: ‘I did not think your proclamation of such force that you, a man, destined to die, should override the laws of the gods, unwritten and unvarying. For those are not of yesterday nor of today, but everlasting. No one knows when they began.’
In plain prose the antithesis takes the following form. Someone in Plato’s Gorgias (482e) speaks of things ‘which are laudable (kala) not by phusis but by law or convention (nomô)’. Or Cicero says ‘If, as it is naturally (naturâ), so it were in men’s thoughts, and each regarded nothing human as alien from him’. Plato’s phusis could here be rendered ‘really’: Cicero’s natura ‘in reality’. But such thoughts lead to a new usage which has, historically, been more important even than the conception of nature (d.s.). We can see it beginning in another passage from the Gorgias: ‘They do these things according to the phusis of justice and, by heaven, according to the law of phusis, though perhaps not according to the law we men lay down’ (483e).
Notice, first, that an abstract like Justice (at least, it is an abstract for modern thought) can now have its phusis. This I take to be a consequence of asking whether the state’s ‘justice’ is real justice or not. For this seems to imply that the question ‘What’s justice like—really like?’ is significant; and what would you then be asking about if not about the real phusis of justice?
Secondly, we now have the conception ‘law of phusis’. I am not at all sure what Plato meant by this second phusis; but it would seem at least to mean ‘reality’. The law of reality would be the real law. But is he also bringing in something of nature (d.s.) or of Great Mother Nature? (His own particular demotion of nature (d.s.) is not relevant at this point.)
However that may be, the way is now open to the gigantic antithesis (ancient, medieval, and early modern) between natural and civil law; the unchangeable and universal law of nature and the varying law of this or that state. But the ambiguity of the word nature allowed men to use this antithesis for the expression of very different political philosophies.
On the one hand, if nature is thought of mainly as the real (opposed to convention and legal fiction) and the laws of nature as those which enjoin what is really good and forbid what is really bad (as opposed to the pseudo-duties which bad governments praise and reward or the real virtues which they forbid and punish), then of course ‘the law of nature’ is conceived as an absolute moral standard against which the laws of all nations must be judged and to which they ought to conform. It will be in fact the sort of thing Antigone was talking about. Great Mother Nature may well come in at this point but she will be either, for Stoics, a deified Mother Nature, or, for Christians, a Mother Nature who is the ‘vicaire of the almightie lord’, inscribing her laws, which she learned from God, on the human heart. This is the conception of natural Law that underlies the work of Thomas Aquinas, Hooker and Grotius.
On the other hand nature may mean nature (d.s.), and even with a special emphasis on the non-human parts of it (the obstinate contrast of Nature and man helps here) or, within man, on those motives and modes of behaviour which are least specifically human. The ‘laws of Nature’ on this view are inferred from the way in which nonhuman agents always behave, and human agents behave until they are trained not to. Thus what Aquinas or Hooker would call ‘the law of Nature’ now becomes in its turn the convention; it is something artificially imposed, in opposition to the true law of nature, the way we all spontaneously behave if we dare (or don’t interfere with ourselves), the way all the other creatures behave, the way that comes ‘naturally’ to us. The prime law of nature, thus conceived, is self-preservation and self-aggrandisement, pursued by whatever trickeries or cruelties may prove to be advisable. This is Hobbes’s Natural Law.
XI. THE STATE OF ‘NATURE’ AND THE CIVIL STATE
On either of these views civil law is man-made and natural law is not. The one is a contrivance, the other a given; so that this contrast, though it seems to begin in that of real and conventional, slides back into the more familiar one of the raw (or unspoiled) and the improved (or sophisticated). That was perhaps why nearly all political thinkers except Aristotle assumed that men had once lived without social organisation and obeyed no laws except those (whatever those were) of nature. That pre-civil condition was described as nature or ‘the state of nature’. This too, of course, might be conceived in opposite ways. It might be a primeval innocence from which our transition to the civil state was a fall. ‘The first of mortals and their children followed nature, uncorrupted, and enjoyed the nature of things in common’, says Seneca. The ‘nature of things’ which they enjoyed is nature (d.s.). The nature they followed is primarily their own, still unspoiled, phusis. But they enjoyed ‘the nature of things in common’ because civil government and private property had not yet been contrived—not while they were in the state of nature. So Pope:
Nor think in Nature’s state they blindly trod;
The state of Nature was the reign of God.
On the other hand it could be conceived of as the state of savagery to escape from which we had contrived the civil state, finding that in the state of nature man’s life was, as Hobbes said, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.
The state of nature which (it was thought) had preceded civil society, and would return if civil society were abolished, still in a sense underlies it. Government is supposed to do for us certain things we should have done for ourselves in the state of nature; it can be maintained that where it fails to do any of them we are, as regards those things, still in the state of nature and may act accordingly. Johnson says that a man whose father’s murderer, by a peculiarity of Scotch Law, has escaped hanging, might reasonably say ‘I am among barbarians who refuse to do justice. I am therefore in a state of nature and consequently . . . I will stab the murderer of my father.’
It should be noticed that the expression ‘state of nature’ is sometimes borrowed from its proper political context and given a meaning which really attaches it to our section VI. It may be used to mean not the pre-civil but the pre-civilised; the condition of man, not without government, but without arts, inventions, learning, and luxury. Thus in another part of his Hebrides Boswell records ‘our satisfaction at finding ourselves again in a comfortable carriage was very great. We laughed at those who attempted to persuade us of the superior advantages of a state of nature.’ The ‘state of nature’ here means ponies and mountain tracks as against carriages and metalled roads. He even uses nature by itself in what I take to be the same sense when he speaks of wishing ‘to live three years in Otaheite and be satisfied what pure nature can do for man’.
XII. ‘NATURAL’ AND ‘SUPERNATURAL’
1. In its strict theological sense this distinction presents little difficulty. When any agent is empowered by God to do that of which its own kind or nature would never have made it capable, it is said to act super-naturally, above its nature. The story in which Balaam’s ass speaks is a story of the supernatural because speech is not a characteristic of asinine nature. When Isaiah saw the seraphim he saw supernaturally because human eyes are not by their own nature qualified to see such things. Of course examples of the supernatural need not be, like these, spectacular. Whatever a man is enabled to receive or do by divine grace, and not by the exercise of his own nature, is supernatural. Hence ‘ioy, peace and delight’ (of a certain sort) can be described by Hooker as ‘supernaturall passions’ (I, xi, 3). If this were the only sense the word bore, I should of course have mentioned it above when we were dealing with nature and grace. Unfortunately it has others.
2. We have already noticed that Aristotle speaks about things being ‘in their natural condition’: i.e. not damaged, or otherwise interfered with. But things can be changed from this natural condition: changed, in that sense, from their nature. A farmer can give a pig a degree of fatness which its nature, unaided, would never have achieved. It would then be fat ‘above (its) nature’. Illness can raise a man’s temperature higher than in his natural (normal, unimpaired) condition it would rise. To call him then supernaturally hot would now be startling, but the word could once, and quite intelligibly, be so used. Elyot says ‘Unnaturall or supernaturall heate destroyeth appetite’. In The Flower and the Leaf (l. 413) ‘Unkindly hete’ means, with some hyperbole, feverishness, pathological heat.
3. But neither of these senses is very close to that which supernatural bears in modern, untheological English. Why is a ghost called supernatural? Certainly not because it stands outside nature (d.s.). The proper word for ‘outside nature (d.s.)’ is ‘non-existent’. But that cannot be what supernatural means, for it would be used of ghosts equally by those who believe and those who disbelieve in them. Nor does anyone call phlogiston supernatural. You could of course make ‘demotions’ of nature (d.s.) which would exclude the ghost, but they would have to be artificially contrived for that express purpose. The Platonic one would not do, for ghosts, being particulars, could not be in the realm of forms; nor the Aristotelian, for ghosts are not God, nor are they mathematical concepts; nor the Christian, for they are creatures. It is indeed doubtful whether the modern usage arises from nature (d.s.).
Macbeth calls the witches’ prophesying a ‘supernatural soliciting’ (I, iii, 130). Witchcraft and magic are at first supernatural, I think, in a sense close to the theological. By the aid of spirits the magician does that which his own nature could not have done, or makes other objects do to each other what their natures were not capable of. It is not the spirits by whose aid he works that are supernatural but the operations performed. Again, when a prophet sees angels his experience is supernatural, in the sense already explained. It is equally so when he foresees the future. To call the angels themselves supernatural is, at first sight, no less odd than if we called the future supernatural. But certainly modern usage allows us to speak of ‘supernatural beings’. It is a usage philosophically scandalous. If demons and fairies do not exist, it is not clear why they should be called supernatural any more than the books that no one ever wrote. If they exist, no doubt they have their own natures and act according to them.
Several causes probably contributed to this sense. Whatever such creatures might be in themselves, our encounters with them are certainly not natural in the sense of being ordinary or ‘things of course’. It may even be supposed that when we see them we are acting above our nature. If on these two grounds the experience were vaguely felt to be supernatural, the adjective might then be transferred to the things experienced. (It is of course linguistically irrelevant whether the experience is regarded as veridical or hallucinatory.) Again, such creatures are not part of the subject matter of ‘natural philosophy’; if real, they fall under pneumatology, and, if unreal, under morbid psychology. Thus the methodological idiom can separate them from nature. But thirdly (and I suspect this might be most potent of all), the beings which popular speech calls supernatural, long before that adjective was applied to them, were already bound together in popular thought by a common emotion. Some of them are holy, some numinous, some eerie, some horrible; all, one way or another, uncanny, mysterious, odd, ‘rum’. When the learned term supernatural enters the common speech, it finds this far older, emotional classification ready for it, and already in want of a name. I think the learned word, on the strength of a very superficial relation of meaning to the thing the plain man had in mind, was simply snatched at and pummelled into the required semantic shape, like an old hat. Just so the people have snatched at once learned words like sadist, inferiority-complex, romantic, or exotic, and forced them into the meanings they chose.
The process is apt to shock highly educated people, but it does not always serve the ends of language (communication) so ill as we might expect. Supernatural in this modern and, if you like, degraded sense, does its work quite efficiently. Anthropologists find it convenient to talk of ‘supernatural beings’ and everyone understands them; and if our friend says, ‘I can’t stand stories about the supernatural’, we know, for all ordinary purposes, what books not to lend him. A general term whose particulars are bound together only by an emotion may be quite a practicable word provided that the emotion is well known and tolerably distinct.
4. Finally we have once (in Golding) ‘the supernaturalls of Aristotle’, meaning his Metaphysics. That leads to my next.
XIII. PHYSICAL AND METAPHYSICAL
Aristotle’s works were usually arranged in the following order: 1. The Organon (tool) or works on logic. 2. The scientific works or phusika. 3. A book or books on God, Unity, Being, Cause, and Potentiality. 4. Works on human activities (Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Poetics). As it was not very easy to find a name for the things in the third section, they were named simply from their position and called ‘the things after the phusika’ (ta meta ta phusika). When these ‘things’ came (no doubt wrongly) to be regarded as one book, this book was called ‘the Metaphysics’.
It would be easy to make an ironic point by saying that the word metaphysical, for all its grandiose suggestions, thus has no higher origin than a librarian’s practical device for indicating a subdivision of the Aristotelian corpus which nobody could find a name for. But the name is not so unhappy and certainly not so foreign to Aristotle’s thought as this sally would suggest. We have already seen that he believed in realities outside what he called phusis and made them the subject of disciplines distinct from phusike (or natural philosophy). If the names are superficial, the division they express is genuinely Aristotelian.
These names, and the academic arrangements which go with them, affect the semantic situation. Originally a thing was phusikon because you thought it belonged to, or was included in, phusis; your own definition of phusis would come into play. But once phusike (natural philosophy) as a subject, distinct from mathematike and metaphusike, exists, most people have a shorter way of deciding what is or is not phusikon. Any thing is phusikon if you meet it while doing your course in phusike. You need not ask what phusis itself is; you need only know whose lectures a thing comes in, in what year you read about it, finally for what examination it prepares you. Here, in fact, we have the Methodological Idiom at work.
Aristotle’s division of studies, or divisions derived from it, lasted for centuries. Under it a man who is phusikos means, not a ‘natural’ man but that particular kind of learned man who studies phusike. ‘Savants (philosophi)’, says Isidore, ‘are either physici or ethici or logici.’ The physici study natures—sort things out and tell you their kinds. But the part of their work which the public is most interested in is, of course, that which may relieve our pains or preserve our life. Hence the physicus or physician comes to mean primarily a doctor of medicine. The stuff he gives you becomes physic (‘throw physic to the dogs’, says Macbeth, V, iii, 47). The adjective physical comes to mean medicinal, or ‘good for you’; so that Portia can say
Is Brutus sick, and is it physical
To walk unbraced and suck up the humours
Of the dank morning?
Metaphysical, as we should expect, comes to mean (in the popular sense) supernatural; either as ‘pertaining to what things do when acting beyond their natures’, or (more probably) ‘studied by arts and sciences which go beyond those of the physicus’. Hence in Marlowe a magical ointment has been ‘tempered by science metaphisicall’; and witchcraft is for Lady Macbeth ‘metaphysical aid’ (I, v, 30).
Phusike (natural philosophy) had from its beginning been ‘principally concerned with bodies’, as Aristotle notes. It was therefore to be expected that physical, by the methodological idiom, would sooner or later come to its modern sense of ‘corporeal’. This tendency would be encouraged by the fact that, as special sciences which dealt with bodies from a special point of view (like chemistry) or with only some bodies (like botany) were quarried out of the once undifferentiated phusike, and were given their separate names, phusike, left like a sort of rump, became the name of that science which still dealt with bodies, or matter, as such. The plural form physics survives to remind us that it was once all ‘the phusika’, as metaphysics were once ‘the things after the phusika’. A singular form, metaphysic, is now gaining ground, but physics will perhaps hardly drop its final -s until the meaning ‘medicine’ for the word physic has become more completely archaic.
‘Corporeal’ is a mildly dangerous sense of physical. When Baxter says ‘common love to God and special saving love to God be both acts upon an object physically the same’, physically means ‘in its own nature’. When Hooker says that sacraments ‘are not physical but moral instruments of salvation’ (V, lvii, 4) I do not think he means ‘corporeal’ by physical any more than ‘ethical’ by ‘moral’. He probably means ‘Their efficacy is of the sort that would be studied by moral, not by natural, philosophy’.
XIV. THE ‘NATURAL’ AS THE EXCUSABLE
Coleridge once entitled a piece of verse ‘Something childish but very natural’. In Rider Haggard’s She, when the young native unwisely avows her passion for Leo in the presence of the Queen, Holly pleads ‘Be pitiful . . . it is but Nature working’ (ch. XVIII). ‘It’s only natural’ is used daily in the same deprecatory way. One extenuates one’s peccadillo as natural, I suspect, in more than one sense. It is natural, ordinary, a thing in the common course, I’m no worse than others. It is at least not unnatural, I have been foolish or faulty at least in human, not in bestial or diabolical, fashion. What I did was natural, spontaneous, I have not gone out of my way to invent new vices. Sometimes a higher plea, less of a defence than a counter-attack, is urged, as in Pope’s
Can sins of moment(s) claim the rod
Of everlasting fires,
And that offend great Nature’s God
Which Nature’s self inspires?
A medieval poet would have been surprised to find Great Mother Nature inspiring sins, for he would have supposed that her ‘inspiration’, so far as concerned man, lay in the nature (animal rationale) appointed by her for man. Pope is closer to Dryden’s Abdalla; the ‘voice’ of Nature here is the less rational, less specifically human, element in us.
XV. ‘NATURE’ IN EIGHTEENTH- AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETRY
Nature (d.s.) and hardly even demoted, appears in Pope’s couplet
All are but parts of one stupendous whole
Whose body Nature is and God the soul.
When Thomson, on the other hand, describes the colour green as ‘Nature’s universal robe’ an enormous shrinkage has occurred. Most of nature (d.s.), as anyone can see on a fine night, is not green but black, and the better the visibility the blacker. Even terrestrial nature is by no means all green. Thomson is actually thinking of British landscapes when he says Nature.
Wordsworth’s doctrine of Nature does not here concern us; his contrasts make it clear how he (and others, and presently thousands of others) used the word. In the Prelude Coleridge is congratulated on the fact that, though ‘reared in the great city’, he had ‘long desired to serve in Nature’s temple’ (II, 452–63). Nature, in fact, or anyway her ‘temple’, excludes towns. ‘Science’ and ‘arts’ are contrasted with Nature in III, 371–78; books and Nature in V, 166–73; Man and Nature in IV, 352, and of course in the sub-title of Book VIII. Whatever his doctrine may have been, he does not in fact use nature in the d.s.; for nature (d.s.) of course includes towns, arts, sciences, books, and men. The antithesis of Nature and man, and again of nature and the man-made, underlie his usages, and those of most ‘nature poets’.
For most purposes, then, Nature in them means the country as opposed to the town, though it may in particular passages be extended to cover the sun, moon, and stars. It may also, despite its frequent opposition to ‘man’, sometimes cover the rustic way of (human) life. It is the country conceived as something not ‘man-made’; Cowper’s (or Varro’s) maxim that God made the country and man made the town is always more or less present. That the landscape in most civilised countries is through and through modified by human skill and toil, or that the effect of most ‘town-scapes’ is enormously indebted to atmospheric conditions, is overlooked.
This does not at all mean that the poets are talking nonsense. They are expressing a way of looking at things which must arise when towns become very large and the urban way of life very different from the rural. When this happens most people (not all) feel a sense of relief and restoration on getting out into the country; it is a serious emotion and a recurrent one, a proper theme for high poetry. Philosophically, no doubt, it is superficial to say we have escaped from the works of man to those of Nature when in fact, smoking a man-made pipe and swinging a man-made stick, wearing our man-made boots and clothes, we pause on a man-made bridge to look down on the banked, narrowed, and deepened river which man has made out of the original wide, shallow, and swampy mess, and across it, at a landscape which has only its larger geological features in common with that which would have existed if man had never interfered. But we are expressing something we really feel. The wider range of vision has something to do with it; we are seeing more of nature (in a good many senses) than we could in a street. Again, the natural forces which keep the buildings of a town together (all the stresses) are only inferred; the natural action of weather and vegetation is visible. And there are fewer men about; therefore, by one of our habitual contrasts, more nature. We also feel (most of us) that we are, for the moment, in conditions more suited to our own nature—to our lungs, nostrils, ears and eyes.
But I need not labour the point. Romantic nature, like the popular use of supernatural, is not an idle term because it seems at first to stand up badly to logical criticism. People know pretty well what they mean by it and sometimes use it to communicate what would not easily be communicable in other ways. To be sure, they may also use it to say vaguely and flatly (or even ridiculously) what might have been said precisely and freshly if they had had no such tool ready. I once saw a railway poster which advertised Kent as ‘Nature’s home’; and we have all heard of the lady who liked walking on a road ‘untouched by the hand of man’.