Nature

Summary

Descartes used the term “nature” (Latin natura, French nature) with several meanings, each of which has some relation to previously established usage. The term “nature” might mean “nature in general,” which Descartes glossed as “God himself,” or “the coordination of created things instituted by God” (AT VII 80, Heffernan 199–201). Laws of nature belong here. In this usage, nature when taken as a whole is an ordered system, but it also consists in the “coordination” of individual kinds of thing, such as the human being as a composite of mind and body in which a system of relations has been established between brain states and sensations (see extrinsic denomination). Things “instituted” or “ordained” by nature belong here (AT VI 130, CSM I 167). Further, in this first sense a quality or ability may “naturally” belong to something, such as the natural light or the legitimate teachings of nature (AT VII 80–81, CSM I 56). In a second usage, “nature” is equivalent to essence. It serves as an abstract term for the principal attribute of a substance, the “nature and essence” of that substance (AT VIIIA 25, CSM I 210). Related notions include simple natures and true and immutable natures. There is a third usage that arises in Descartes’ philosophy because of his reorganization of finite substances into two kinds, mind and matter, which necessitated a replacement notion for substantial forms of the various natural kinds, a replacement that construes kinds of material things as possessing only properties permitted in an exclusively corporeal substance. This third notion concerns characteristics of material things stemming from their organization. The most extensive use of this notion occurs in the Principles of Philosophy, but is also frequently found in the Discourse on the Method, the Dioptrics, the Meteorology, The World (or Treatise on Light), and the Treatise on Man.