Section II

Summary

A considering person may well be tempted to suspect that men have generally had but imperfect and confused notions concerning nature, if he but observes that they apply that name to several things, and those too such as have (some of them) very little dependence on or connection with such others. And I remember that in Aristotle's Metaphysics, I met with a whole chapter expressly written to enumerate the various acceptions of the Greek word φύσις, commonly rendered ‘nature’, of which, if I mistake not, he there reckons up six. In English also we have not fewer, but rather more numerous significations of that term. For sometimes we use the word ‘nature’ for that author of nature whom the schoolmen harshly enough call natura naturans [literally, nature naturing], as when it is said that nature has made man partly corporeal and partly immaterial. Sometimes we mean by the nature of a thing the essence, or that which the schoolmen scruple not to call the ‘quiddity’ of a thing – namely, the attribute or attributes on whose score it is what it is, whether the thing be corporeal or not, as when we attempt to define the nature of an angel, or of a triangle, or of a fluid body as such. Sometimes we confound that which a man has by nature with what accrues to him by birth, as when we say that such a man is noble by nature, or such a child naturally forward or sickly or frightful.