“Nature”

What has also to be noticed in the relation between sense (i) and senses (ii) and (iii) is, more generally, that sense (i), by definition, is a specific singular – the nature of something, whereas senses (ii) and (iii), in almost all their uses, are abstract singulars – the nature of all things having become singular nature or Nature. The abstract singular is of course now conventional, but it has a precise history. Sense (ii) developed from sense (i), and became abstract, because what was being sought was a single universal ‘essential quality or character’. This is structurally and historically cognate with the emergence of God from a god or the gods. Abstract Nature, the essential inherent force, was thus formed by the assumption of a single prime cause, even when it was counterposed, in controversy, to the more explicitly abstract singular cause or force God. This has its effect as far as sense (iii), when reference to the whole material world, and therefore to a multiplicity of things and creatures, can carry an assumption of something common to all of them: either (a) the bare fact of their existence, which is neutral, or, at least as commonly, (b) the generalization of a common quality which is drawn upon for statements of the type, usually explicitly sense (iii), ‘Nature shows us that . . . this reduction of a multiplicity to a singularity, by the structure and history of the critical word, is then, curiously, compatible either with the assertion of a common quality, which the singular sense suits, or with the general or specific demonstration of differences, including the implicit or explicit denial of a common effective quality, which the singular form yet often manages to contain.’