ABSTRACT
Fascination with organic behavior held sway over much of Western thought for centuries preceding the dawn of the Enlightenment. One encounters the metaphor of human institutions in the guise of organisms as early as Aristotle and Paul of Tarsus. By way of contrast, Democritus and Lucretius, with their view on nature as comprising encounters between unchanging, lifeless atoms, were notable for being exceptions to the prevailing view that the universe was suffused throughout with life [1]. So dominant was the vision of the ubiquity of life that the overriding challenge to
philosophical thought before the 17th century had been to explain somehow the existence of death in the world.
