ABSTRACT
Out of the eighteenth century's general interest in intellectual and cultural progress came a more specialized concern with the process of human development. The framework of this interest in development was called variously "natural history", "conjectural history", "hypothetical history", and "deductive history". The first point to make about the eighteenth century's cherished natural history is that it is part and parcel of that century's general adoration of the idea of nature. The reason why philosophers of the classical age and the eighteenth century alike so often looked imaginatively back to the origin of things was that it was thought that these in their supposed primal state might reveal the true essence, the nature, of things. The idea of a natural history flowed directly from eighteenth-century usage of nature, and much of the full flavor of the Greek physis was thereby restored.
