Nature

Use in the book

At 214b nature and the whole are the subjects discussed by the wise writers whose claims about like are being tested. At 221e–222a φύσει qualifies the proposed kinship of friends and the obligation to love what is naturally akin.

The two uses should be distinguished: the first names a subject of cosmological inquiry, the second the ground of a proposed relationship. Neither use establishes that whatever occurs naturally is morally right. In the final argument the meaning and relation of “akin” and “like” still need examination.

Places to read

1. 221eφύσει πῃ οἰκεῖοί ἐσθ’ ὑμῖν αὐτοῖς — You are by nature in some way akin to one another.
2. 214b
3. 221e–222a

Use in the book

The chapter on human nature gives the word a broad anthropological setting. In the discussion of the soul’s powers, nature appears as a power among perception, desire, movement, and thought. The same English noun therefore requires different scales of attention.

Places to read

1. I.47.headingHuman nature is the chapter’s subject.
2. I.49.34.3Nature appears among enumerated powers of the soul.
3. I.40.1.63The nature of the whole is praised through order and beauty.
4. I.11.4.1Nature is considered as a principle of motion and rest.
5. I.47.13.1The natural constitution is disrupted and restored.

Translation in this edition

“Nature” remains the chief rendering. Notes clarify whether it denotes a constitution, a life-function, or the ordered whole; no single modern contrast between nature and culture governs all occurrences.

Principle and natural condition

The report about Aristotle calls nature a principle of motion and rest and uses that definition when distinguishing matter from form. The Philebus excerpt speaks of the living creature’s natural constitution being disrupted and restored, relating those changes to pain and pleasure. The first use identifies a principle of explanation; the second describes the condition to which a creature returns. Neither is merely a name for the outdoor environment.

Use in the book

The account of a work as a being requires it to have its own nature, character, proportions, and personality. Nature there concerns a coherent individuality. Poetry made through thoughts can similarly draw upon truth “that belongs to natures,” leaving the plural as a claim about what things are. The notebooks do not always replace this with a generalized abstraction called Nature.

The warning that plentiful artworks can distract artists from nature returns attention to impressions received from objects themselves. Such impressions are said to modify bodily constitution. The Aeolian-harp image gives nature the active role of sending wind to receptive organs. These passages link outward encounter and inward response, while differing from the explicitly personal or moral uses treated elsewhere in the lexicon.

Places to read

1. I, p. 153, entry 5, ¶2A work needs its own nature and personality.
2. II, p. 487, entry 5, ¶1Poetry through thought draws on the truth of natures.
3. II, p. 927, entry 2, ¶1Artists risk consulting art before receiving impressions from nature.
4. II, p. 926, entry 4, ¶1Nature sends the wind that makes receptive organs sound.

Translation in this edition

The English translation preserves plural “natures” and the bodily sense of organisation in the appendix. No single personification or unified doctrine is imposed upon all uses of nature.

Use in the book

The word’s several senses cooperate without becoming interchangeable. Natural things are the world’s given realities; the soul and body have natures constituted by powers and inclinations; and particular things have qualities, relations, causes, and ends available to inquiry. Traherne can therefore speak of the nature of love and of natural philosophy without referring only to what a modern reader calls the outdoors.

In the childhood narrative, nature exposes acquired valuations as artificial. Bodies, souls, senses, and faculties are genuine riches; a ribbon or purse of gold does not become supremely precious simply because other people declare it so. The contrast is not between matter and spirit, since bodily endowments belong among the natural treasures. Nor is every human artifact excluded: the error lies in letting conventional valuation obscure a better and more comprehensive good.

Human inclinations provide a positive route into that good. III.42 asks why the creator fitted persons with such curiosity, ambition, sympathy, and capacity to esteem. Their excess over small objects suggests an end proportionate to them. But native goodness does not make every socially directed choice good. IV.44 explains corruption through a desire to please: an originally generous inclination follows others who have mistaken felicity. Nature’s capacity for relationship helps explain its susceptibility to miseducation.

Natural philosophy can be correspondingly narrow or broad. In III.44 its usual subject is corporeal causes and effects, a worthy study that prepares the enjoyer’s eyes. Extended to the inquiry into all natures, it includes souls, virtues, affections, angels, and God. Traherne makes this expansion explicitly, so the reader should neither impose it on every occurrence nor assume the term always excludes theology.

Finally, nature does not erase the history of sin and redemption. The account of divinity in III.43 examines humanity in innocence, misery, grace, and glory. Natural endowment, acquired disorder, restored communion, and fulfilled life remain distinguishable. The recurring appeal to nature is an effort to recover the goodness and purpose of created powers within that history, not an assertion that whatever occurs is already good.

Places to read

1. III.9Natural endowments are distinguished from socially invented measures of wealth.
2. III.42The investigation of human powers and inclinations leads toward their divinely prepared ends.
3. III.43Human nature is studied through innocence, misery, grace, and glory.
4. III.44Natural philosophy is distinguished in its usual corporeal scope and a proposed wider inquiry into all natures.
5. IV.44The desire to please explains how a good inclination can be misdirected by social error.

In this edition

Distinguish nature as constitution from nature as the created field. Traherne’s proposed expansion of natural philosophy in III.44 is his own stated move, not the unvarying meaning of the phrase.

Use in the book

At the notebook’s opening, spring behaves like an artist whose reconciliation of contrasts can teach human artists. Subsequent entries ask how that exterior abundance becomes inward knowledge. On 15 March 1833 merely seeing outward forms is distinguished from receiving nature in the soul; on 21 March, reading Bernardin helps awaken a sense that gathers physical beauties. Such passages make perception an active relationship, neither passive copying nor the invention of an entirely private landscape.

The relationship changes. Actual attention to natural processes matters: Guérin reads plant physiology, distinguishes birds and trees, follows light across clouds, and listens to the different phases of a wave. Nature is consequently more particular than an abstract consoling presence. Yet its effects are unreliable. In June 1834 the countryside’s caresses become irritants as they penetrate inward; in April 1835 spring’s descending life feels crushing. The world has not ceased to live because its observer cannot receive it happily.

The journal therefore records a recurrent desire for participation rather than a settled doctrine of perfect union. The conditional wish to become flower, greenery, bird, and song keeps the imagined fulfilment visibly different from ordinary experience. Nature can console, confront, instruct, overwhelm, or remain inaccessible; the movement between these possibilities is central to the writing.

Places to read

1. 10 July 1832 · ¶1Spring’s freedom and combination of contrasts precede the return to remembered childhood places
2. 15 March 1833 · ¶1The inward eye is required to understand nature’s meaning; the next short paragraph makes reception an explicit aim
3. 25 April 1833 · ¶3Identification with spring is posed as a conditional experiment in concentrated attention
4. 26 June 1834 · ¶1Natural sensations soothe at the surface but become irritating deeper within
5. 3 April 1835 · ¶1Spring’s former delicacy is reversed into a weight of oppressive heat

Translation in this edition

The English repeatedly gives nature the pronouns she and her where the French develops the feminine noun through personification. Elsewhere nature means constitution, as in the opening question of 10 December 1834. Those uses should not all be read as names for the landscape. The March faculté spéculaire becomes power of reflection: the force is mirror-like, not a faculty of philosophical speculation.

Use in the book

This agency fixes the boundary of the work. The maxim at p. 44 says that Art begins where Nature leaves off. The immediately relevant consequence is not that Art replaces Nature, but that its initial subject must already be a natural thing to which human preparation has not yet contributed. Nature has performed a subtle separation and composition of body, spirit and soul into the catholic Chaos. The Artist does not recreate the universe or manufacture universality by mixing specified things.

Khunrath develops the relation in his image of the great world as God's universal laboratory. Nature works there continually; the margin says she is never idle. She has already set out the due subject without useful assistance from the Artist. Recognition precedes human intervention because a subject supplied by Nature must be distinguished from one invented according to an operator's preferences. This priority also explains why Nature knows the determinate weights and measures of mineral and metallic generation.

Art nevertheless has real work to do. The natural subject is complete for its role as the beginning, but not yet the more-than-perfected Stone. The discussion of crude Mercury says that Nature has worked upon it a little, giving it a catholic mass and outward form while leaving it imperfect. Khunrath can therefore combine a fully qualified subject with an unfinished result. Preparation assists an ordered natural development; it does not make the initial subject appropriate by arbitrary ingenuity.

Nature is also an interpretive authority. Philosophers' writings are to be read according to what Nature makes possible, and books are accepted insofar as they agree with her. A manipulation can be skilful and its product useful, yet fail the relevant natural criterion. The persistent phrase “Nature-conforming and artful” binds those two demands. Khunrath's Nature is neither an inert supply of ingredients nor a rhetorical alternative to all laboratory action.

Places to read

1. 1599 p. 44Where Nature leaves off, Art begins; the chosen subject has not previously been manufactured.
2. 1599 p. 48Nature alone knows the determinate weights and measures of ongoing generation.
3. 1599 p. 50Nature composes the catholic Chaos from the greater world’s three constituents.
4. 1599 p. 62Nature is God’s deputy and appointed woman-worker in the universal laboratory; the sentence continues on p. 63.
5. 1599 p. 65Nature’s limited working produces crude Mercury, with its imperfection explained on p. 66.
6. 1599 p. 112Nature supplies the touchstone for interpreting philosophical writings.

Translation in this edition

“Woman-Labourer” preserves the gender and activity of Laborantin; reducing it to an impersonal process would lose the deliberate reversal in which Nature works while the Artist contributes nothing to the subject's origin. The broader cosmological identification with World-Soul remains distinct from each local personification.

Use in the book

The anonymous naturalists in A48 are said to derive fire, water, earth and air by nature and chance, and to explain the subsequent world without art or mind. In that argument nature names an immanent material process opposed to intelligent construction. The testimony concerns a hostile characterization of unnamed thinkers, editorially associated with Empedoclean followers.

Other passages use the same word less programmatically. Galen at A34 speaks of the nature of composite bodies resulting from mingled roots. Aristotle at A40 describes the elements as prior “by nature” to the god: that is an explanatory or compositional priority, not necessarily an earlier moment in time. Ps.-Plutarch at A30 says the sun is not fire “by nature” but a reflection, distinguishing its constitution from its luminous appearance.

The entry therefore keeps constitution, explanatory priority and an anti-teleological cosmological slogan separate. Treating them as one settled doctrine of Nature would conceal differences among authors and among the questions they ask.

The word also marks a dispute about method and identity. In A71 the Hippocratic author rejects the demand that a physician must begin from what a human originally is and how humans were compounded; clear knowledge of nature, he argues, should come from medicine. In A782 Aristotle gives nature explanatory priority over matter and credits Empedocles’ account of bone with identifying its being and nature as a ratio of mixture. The former concerns the route to knowledge of nature, the latter what makes a particular body the thing it is. Neither is reducible to the Laws’ slogan of nature opposed to art.

Places to read

1. A 48 (polemical)Plato, Laws X 889b. Opposes generation by nature and chance to production by art or mind.
2. A 34 (testimony)Galen, In Hippocratis De natura hominis XV 32 K. Uses nature for the constitution of composite bodies.
3. A 40 (polemical)Aristotle, De generatione et corruptione B 6, 333b20. Makes the roots naturally prior to the god.
4. A 30 (testimony)Ps.-Plutarch, Stromateis, in Eusebius P.E. I 8,10. Contrasts the sun’s constitution with the fire whose reflection it is.
5. A 71 (polemical)Hippocrates, On Ancient Medicine. Makes the study of human nature a methodological dispute and argues that clear knowledge of nature derives from medicine.
6. A 78 (polemical)2Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals. Gives nature priority over matter and credits the identification of bone’s nature and being with a ratio of mixture.

Translation in this edition

The English word’s familiarity can erase these differences. A40’s natural priority should not be made into an absolute chronology for the roots and the Sphairos.

Use in the book

Mon cœur mis à nu XXVII's identification of woman with nature and therefore with the abominable is a misogynistic syllogism, not an impartial account of human biology. Mon cœur mis à nu XCVII repeats its logic about commerce: commerce is natural and therefore infamous. By treating market self-interest as spontaneous, Baudelaire turns a supposed justification into evidence against it.

Mon cœur mis à nu XXX subjects revolutionary destruction to a conditional test: it is legitimate if everything natural is legitimate. The condition is a trap, since the surrounding notes repeatedly refuse that premise. His remembered intoxication exposes his own participation in the instincts he condemns rather than placing him safely above them.

Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXI defines true civilization as diminishing the traces of original sin. Cultural advance consequently depends on transformed conduct, not technical equipment or Western identity. Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVIII complicates any absolute antithesis by asking for the same law of gradual growth in works of nature and works of humanity. Nature is at once an ethical problem and a field in which form becomes intelligible.

Places to read

1. Mon cœur mis à nu XXVIILa femme est naturelle, c’est-à-dire abominable. — The opposition is built through an explicitly hostile gender claim.
2. Mon cœur mis à nu XXXGoût légitime, si tout ce qui est naturel est légitime. — The conditional challenges rather than simply ratifies the natural impulse.
3. Mon cœur mis à nu XCVIILe commerce est naturel, donc il est infâme. — The same reversal attacks economic self-interest.
4. Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVIIIdans les œuvres de la nature et dans les œuvres de l’homme — Nature and making are jointly placed under gradation.

Translation in this edition

‘Natural’ is retained even where English might be tempted to soften it to ‘instinctive’. That consistency allows the repeated argument to be heard. In Mon cœur mis à nu XLI ‘animality’ preserves the abstraction, while Mon cœur mis à nu XXVII's ‘in heat’ preserves the animalizing violence of en rut. These are Baudelaire's classifications, not categories endorsed by the translator or lexicon.

Use in the book

The southward attraction is an early, comparatively straightforward example: the narrator stipulates a persistent force and explains how travellers use it. The hereditary law in §323 is more complicated. It promises one additional side to each male generation, then immediately excludes or qualifies much of the population. The confident universal phrase survives exceptions that determine who receives its benefit.

The “Law of Compensation” goes further, explaining how increasing intelligence deprives workers of dangerous sharpness. A relation between shapes is celebrated because it preserves an aristocratic constitution. The narrator moves from what the world is said to do to the conclusion that the rulers deserve their position. Calling the arrangement divine converts successful domination into evidence of rightful domination.

Yet human intervention is everywhere. Priests arrange marriages, boards certify births, physicians reshape bodies, statutes divide entrances, and schools develop one perceptual faculty while forbidding another. These interventions do not simply apply a completed natural design. They continually produce the social facts subsequently offered as proof of that design. In §723, Expediency joins Nature in approving Regularity, and legislation supplies the enforcement. The personifications stage a consensus among authorities which the narrator has himself made to agree.

Women reveal the uneven distribution of necessity. Their inability to rise is named a decree, while men in favoured classes enjoy an almost automatic future improvement. Later, the admission that withholding education has reduced women's powers places historical policy alongside supposed bodily destiny. The account does not explicitly reconcile these explanations, leaving readers to examine the gap.

Abbott's satire should not be flattened into a denial of natural laws. The geometry of angles and optical inference is essential to the narrative and often sound on its stated assumptions. The critical distinction is between such relations and the additional claim that a social order is therefore inevitable or just. The same prose can demonstrate an angle accurately and smuggle a moral conclusion through the demonstration. Reading requires attention to the point where is turns into must be or ought to remain.

Places to read

1. §22“By a Law of Nature with us”
2. §323“a male child shall have one more side than his father”
3. §323“How admirable is this Law of Compensation!”
4. §423“a Decree of Nature”
5. §723“Nature wills all Figures to have their sides equal”
6. §723“Expediency therefore concurs with Nature”

In this edition

Notes 38–4323456 offer Platonic, hereditary and providential contexts; notes 75 and 792 clarify the regularity assumption and majority-interest argument. These comparisons are modern explanatory apparatus. The capitalised authorities and their argumentative work belong to Abbott's text, whether or not a particular external parallel is pursued.

Legislature

The lawmaking authority, presented as capable of regulating both buildings and permissible inquiry. Its move from taxing investigations of light to prohibiting them exposes the political enforcement behind the appearance of settled natural knowledge. Printed form: Legislature (§ 22). See Nature and law.

Lunatic asylum

An institution confining people deemed insane. Flatland’s unsuccessful investigators of the origin of light crowd these establishments, preparing the connection between intellectual nonconformity and coercive custody that the narrator later experiences himself. Printed form: lunatic asylums (§ 22). See Nature and law.

Ordinance

An authoritative decree or prescribed arrangement. Calling the relation between intelligence and blunter angles an ordinance of Nature lends the vocabulary of government to biology, as though the natural world had legislated for aristocratic security. Printed form: ordinance (§ 323). See Nature and law.

Prearrangement

An arrangement supposedly made in advance by a wise governing power. The Square praises it for denying women the memory or expectation that would let them dwell on their oppression, converting deprivation into a consoling evidence of providence. Printed form: Prearrangement (§ 423). See Nature and law.

Once a Woman, always a Woman (contextual phrase)

“Once a Woman, always a Woman” (§ 423)

The proverb-like balance gives exclusion the sound of an unquestionable truth. It is immediately named a Decree of Nature, placing a social limit beyond any apparent possibility of revision. Its force depends on the contrast with the Isosceles man: he may at least imagine his descendants acquiring better angles, while no comparable prospect is offered to women. The sentence therefore marks the boundary of Flatland’s promised progress. Biological ascent is not a universal law benefiting every inhabitant, but a selectively distributed hope. The narrator’s next consolation is still more revealing: he praises the arrangement that allegedly prevents women from remembering or anticipating their misery. Instead of challenging the prohibition, he imagines the oppressed as fortunately incapable of comprehending it. See Women, Birth and ascent, and Nature and law.

Painlessly and mercifully consumed (contextual phrase)

“painlessly and mercifully consumed” (§ 723)

Consumed means put to death, but its passive form leaves the executioner and the physical act unnamed. Painlessly describes the proposed manner of killing; mercifully assigns it a moral character before the reader can judge the policy. The phrase completes the Square’s advertised middle course between immediate destruction at birth and unrestricted tolerance. He would postpone the decision until the body begins to set and medical recovery is judged improbable. That delay looks moderate only because the child’s right to survive remains conditional on achieving an approved shape. The Medical Board supplies procedural authority, while the soft adverbs convert a political decision into a supposed act of care. The passage exposes how a reform in timing can preserve the underlying principle of elimination. See Surgery and extermination, Irregularity, and Nature and law.