Nature and the cosmos
The order of the world and our place in it.
178 works · Refine in the browser → · Marked passages →
The first philosophers were physicists: Thales said everything is water, Heraclitus fire, Democritus atoms in the void, and the surviving fragments of the Presocratics are the first attempts to explain nature without gods. Plato’s Timaeus gives the cosmos a maker and a mathematical plan. Aristotle’s Physics gives it purposes: things move toward where they belong, and the whole is a living order with the earth at rest in the centre.
That picture lasted eighteen centuries. Aquinas built theology on it and Dante built a poem. Then Copernicus moved the earth, Galileo saw the moons of Jupiter, and Newton wrote the laws that hold for a falling apple and a planet alike. Lucretius, rediscovered in 1417, had already offered an atomist universe without providence, and his poem was the shadow the new science cast backwards.
The theme does not end with physics. Wordsworth and Thoreau find in nature what Aristotle found, a home, after the science had made it hard to see one. Darwin gives the living world a history without a plan. Shakespeare’s Tempest asks whether a man can command the elements and what he should do with the power. Start with Lucretius, who gets the wonder and the argument into the same lines.
