NATURE. In the history of philosophy the term "nature" has been used in various inconsistent senses, corresponding more or less to the different attitudes which thinkers adopted towards the material part of the world in relation to the rest. The early Greek thinkers known as the hylozoists were not conscious of any fundamental difference between mere matter, on the one hand, and life and consciousness on the other. For them, accordingly, "na ture" (chimns) included everything that is, or that ever came into being (Latin natura from nasci, to be born). Later on the Sophists contrasted the "natural" with the "conventional," or that which anything is originally and what it is as the result of human intervention. In this way they and others described as conven tional not only law and custom, but even colours and other sec ondary qualities in contrast with matter and motion. Thus the "natural" came to be contrasted with the "human" and, of course, the superhuman. Then owing partly to the influence of Plato, and partly to the influence of Christianity, it became customary to set body and mind (to say nothing of Platonic "Ideas," the "Good," and God, etc.) sharply against one another, and to identify "na
ture," or "the world and the flesh," with the material part of the universe only. This is one of the reasons for the rather common tendency to identify "naturalism" with materialism. With the Renaissance there came a more friendly attitude towards the ma terial world, and the older Greek conception of "nature" was re vived. And so in due course we find in Bruno and Spinoza, among others, the term "nature" used in the all-comprehensive sense of the entire universe—a sense which, of course, excluded the possi bility of anything "supernatural." Hence the other meaning of the term "naturalism," merely as the antithesis to "supernatural ism" in science and philosophy. For the conception of nature in recent science see A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (1920).