Like the notion of “liberty” which is that of “being able to be yourself,” the notion of nature, which is that of “coming to be of yourself, or of itself,” has always, however imperfectly apprehended, exercised immense power over the mind. It is felt that you have touch with reality when you have found something which can grow of itself. But again, like the notion of liberty, the notion of nature is apt to be apprehended in a form so partial as to be practically negative, and in this form, to be given a hostile bearing against what are, in fact, completer phases of the same idea.
That which is natural, or by nature, in the most obvious sense—what most plainly appears to have “come of itself”—is what comes first in time, and what comes with the least putting together the primitive and the simple as against the late and the complex. And so in the theoretical inquiry after what is solid and can be relied upon, there constantly recurs in all ages the tendency to story-telling; to the narration of what is supposed to have come first, as the simple {129} spontaneous beginning out of which the world as we know it has emerged with greatly altered attributes. The note of story-telling is unmistakable in this naïve theory, whether we find it in poets who portray the Golden Age, from Hesiod downwards, [1] or represented as a fallacy of social compact by Plato in the second book of the Republic [2] or adopted as a juristic theory by Tacitus [3] and the writers who relied on the idea of a “state of nature,” down to Rousseau.
[1] The resemblance between Hesiod’s dream of the Golden Age and modern doctrines of intensive culture is startling, and there is probably a true historical continuity between them. This does not involve the assertion that there can be no truth in the latter, but it does suggest that the disproportionate emphasis laid upon it (e.g. by Fourier and in Merrie England) indicates an element of the old “Nature” fallacy.
[2] Rep., 358 E.
[3] Annals, iii. 26; cf. Germania, ch. xix. 20, “Neque corrumpere et corrumpi ‘seculum’ vocatur. …” Note the identification of “our age” with corruption; cp. use of fin de siècle.
It may be observed at this point that the conception of a “law of nature” made a very valuable middle term between the conception of a purely primitive condition of the world and the ideal of a complete society. The logical reason is plain. The instinct of getting at something solid and permanent, which first reveals itself by going back to the supposed original or simple, soon attaches itself also to what is generally found to exist, understanding generality as a mark of that tendency to come of itself which it feels to attach to what is real and able to stand in its own right. But generality is a clue which leads a long way; and the mind passes from saying “Fire burns [1] by nature, {130} for it burns everywhere; but law is variable” [2] to observing that there are features of law which have their own generality, and there thus appears to be a “natural” element in law, which may mean the right of the strongest, [3] but may again amount to a tendency to come out of the “state of nature.” Just in the same way, the conception of Liberty has always drawn from experience a certain positive tendency to progress, and has never perhaps, even in the most fanatical theory, maintained the full demand for isolation which its negative bearing might seem to imply.
[1] Argument cited by Aristotle, Eth., v. 10.
[2] Just so, in strict science, from the Atomists downward, the primary qualities (spatial) are real, the secondary (colours) conventional (or, as we say, “subjective”); the former meaning holds good more generally than the latter.
[3] Plato, Gorgias, p. 484.
But again, the instinct which, in looking for what has power to grow or come of itself, lays hold of what is merely primitive or merely general, has in all great epochs of thought been met by a deeper insight.