ABSTRACT
PUTTING NATURE IN HER PLACE Was Aristotle right to encourage wonder, awe and reverence towards the physical world? It is one of the points that the founders of modern science held against him. Thus Descartes wrote, ‘Know that by nature I do not mean some goddess or some sort of imaginary power. I employ this word to signify matter itself.’1 Similarly, Robert Boyle, in his Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, complained that
Accordingly, Boyle complained, ‘the veneration wherewith men are imbued for what they call nature, has been a discouraging impediment to the empire of man over the inferior creatures of God’.3
