Nature. Nature, reason, liberty, and utility are
preeminently among the most used keywords of the
period. “There is scarcely a word that is used in a
vaguer way than that of Nature... hardly ever does
it attach itself to a precise idea (Oeuvres diverses de M.
Pierre Bayle, [1727], III, 713). The Encyclopédie empha-
sizes the many different uses of the term, ranging from
physical necessity to utopian idolization, from Hobbes's
awareness of man's animality to an Aristotelian con-
ception of “what every being is in its most perfect
state.” One speaks of nature and natural history in the
context of religion, the soul, the law, reason, sentiment,
taste, virtue, happiness, innocence, society, providence,
physical necessity, order, and liberty. The concept is
brandished as a weapon in the urge to free mankind
from the curse of original sin, against the world of
conventions and of tradition, as, e.g., superstition, prej-
udice, the belief in miracles and the reliance on grace
and revelation, the hierarchical order of society and
governmental constraints of all kinds; all these are
rejected as being unnatural. At the same time, nature
imposes its own constraints, not only through physical
necessity, not only by way of an aristocratic Epicure-
anism, but in the Puritan values of the rising commer-
cial bourgeoisie; work, frugality, usefulness, sexual mo-
rality, and benevolence are regarded as natural, while
passions are not.
However, in the view of the Scots and the Encyclo-
pédie, nature is neutral in the sense that it needs to
be explored to provide the empirical foundation of the
social sciences. Hume defines the term according to
the context in which it is used: justice is an artificial
in contrast to a natural virtue, artificial yet not
arbitrary; it is both socially determined and a sine qua
non for the preservation of society. But “in another
sense of the word, as no principle of the human mind
is more natural than a sense of virtue, so no virtue
is more natural than justice” (Hume, Treatise, Book III,
Part II, Sec. I).
The desire for justice, that is, the awareness of
suffering inflicted and the urge to restore happiness,
as well as the tendencies to improvement and cultiva-
tion, are natural propensities in man which serve “to
obviate the casual abuses of passion” which itself,
however, is natural as well. “If we are asked therefore,
where the state of nature is to be found? we may
answer, it is here; and it matters not whether we are
understood to speak in the island of Great Britain, at
the Cape of Good Hope, or in the Straits of Magellan”
(Ferguson, 1767). The hut is as natural as the palace;
the physical attributes of man are as natural as his
intellectual and moral propensities and the laws which
may be observed to obtain in physical and social rela-
tions. Nature is the raw material on which the science
of human nature is based, and from which the under-
standing of the necessity, the possibility, and the
limitation of the science of the legislator is derived.
In Baconian terms, we must know nature in order to
control it.
