ABSTRACT
To the ancients, the nature of something was its inherent essence: what it is fundamentally, in itself, in the wild. This was the source of its properties, powers, behavior, qualities, and relationships to other things. Nature as a whole consisted of the natures of things collectively. The root meaning of the word nature, however, suggests self-generation, a reality that maintains itself independent of outside agents, whether human or divine. Nature as a whole was once thought to be like a living thing, with powers of agency like an organism, not merely the passive inertness to which the philosophy of mechanism has reduced it. The religious heritage of science deeply informed the philosophy of mechanism. Divorcing teleology from nature was a reasonable choice for a budding science that sought to apply reason to the relatively simple phenomena it could embrace. An explanation assimilates something to larger context, to rectify a cognitive dissonance, restoring a sense of the normal way of things.
