It is not merely what we are born as, or what the world begins with, that comes of itself. The most ordinary conception of growth involves maturity, and the term nature in Greek and Latin, as in English, can indicate not only what we are born as, but what we are born for, our true, or real, or complete nature. Thus the great thinkers of every age have been led to something like Aristotle’s conception, “what a thing is when its growth is completed, that is what we call its nature [1] (growth or evolution)”; and so, if we are to think of “nature” as a whole, it will not be, {131} as when we speak of “natural” science, an outward world, whether of atoms or of organisms, contrasted both with God and with Man, “for nature in Aristotle is not the outward world of created things; it is the creative force, the productive principle of the universe.” [2] To us, inclined to contrast the natural at once with the human and the divine, there is something startling in the vivid reality with which the Greek thinkers hold the three ideas together. The creative activity of the divine principle seems for Plato to be actually one with growth, or nature, or evolution. [3] It may be of interest to cite the great passage in which Plato lays his finger on the common fallacy. [4]
“Many learned men say that the elements and inorganic and organic world below man came by nature and chance, but that law and justice and man’s works and social institutions and religion are merely conventional, variable, and untrue. But we must maintain that law and religion and man’s works exist by nature, or are not lower than nature, being the products of mind according to right reason.” … “For they give the name of nature to the origin of the earliest things; [5] but if really mind is earliest of all things, then it may rightly be said to be superlatively natural.”
[1] Aristotle, Pol., i. i.
[2] Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, p. 116.
[3] Republic, x. 597.
[4] Laws, 889 ff. abridged.
[5] We are not dealing here with Platonic interpretation, but it seems necessary to point out that, literally taken, this passage accepts the principle that nature = primary genesis, and sets out to prove mind to be natural in this sense. We might rather reject the appeal to succession in Time altogether, as at bottom Plato means to. But we see how emphatically mind is for Plato the superlatively natural.
And so, as the universe is for the great thinkers {132} at once natural and divine, the same applies to human society. Not only in Aristotle’s trenchant expressions to the effect that the City State is a natural growth, but in the whole of Plato’s careful analysis of moral and social life, we find society depicted as a living and growing creature, in which man’s nature expands itself from more to more, having its own essence progressively communicated to it. And so we find that the peculiar naturalness of the primitive and the simple is only an illusion, caused by the greater difficulty of recognising the larger individuality which comes both of and to itself in the later and more complex phases of life. But whatever it was that was real and that came of itself in the primitive and simple is there to a greater degree—with more reality and as the same self, only more complete—in the later and complex. The idea of a diminution of being as we pass from the simpler to the more developed self is a fallacy of non-recognition.
Rousseau, as we saw, maintains in words the traditional opposition between the natural and the civil or moral condition of man. From the tendency of his views, however, we might have expected that in his philosophy the wheel would come full circle, and the term “nature” would revert to its Greek meaning. But this is not the case, though in Émile there is a compromise which points in some such direction. Yet a remarkable passage [1] from Burlamaqui, a Genevese jurist, the earlier contemporary of Rousseau, shows the reversion to the Greek view of social nature completed in principle.
“La liberté civile l’emporte de {133} beaucoup sur la liberté naturelle, et, par conséquent, l’état civil qui l’a produit est de tous les états de l’homme le plus parfait, et, à parler exactement, le veritable état naturel de l’homme. L’établissement d’un gouvernement et d’une puissance souveraine, ramenant les hommes à l’observation des lois naturelles, [2] et par conséquent dans la route de bonheur, les fait rentrer dans leur état naturel, duquel ils étaient sortis par le mauvais usage qu’ils faisaient de leur liberté.”