Where order in variety we see,
And where, tho’ all things differ, all agree.
This appreciation of Nature’s neatness—from which we do not ourselves so easily derive poetic inspiration—is now so familiar that it is difficult for us to realize its freshness at that time. Yet this is unquestionably demonstrated by the dates at which such crucial words as arrange, category, classify, method, organize, organization, regular, regulate, regularity, system, systematic, ... or their modern meanings, appeared in the language. Only two of these are earlier than the seventeenth, and most of them are not found till the eighteenth century. Thus, arrange was a military term like array until that time, and regular was only used of monastic “orders” until the close of the sixteenth century.
It is this universal conformity to laws, then, this perfect order reigning everywhere undisturbed, which the eighteenth century seems to have had in mind when it used, and sometimes personified, the word Reason. Reason explained everything.
Let godlike Reason from her sovereign throne
Speak the commanding word—I will—and it is done,
wrote James Thomson, and Pope expressed the same idea even more slickly when he announced in his Essay on Man: “Whatever is, is right.” Thus, rapt in adoration of the radiant new lady, the poets lost all interest in dame Nature. Only when she was arranged and regulated and organized into a park or a landscape garden would they consent to have anything to do with her, and then it was chiefly as a foil to the superior attractions of her rival. She became a stage, a “pleasing” background to a sort of everlasting human boxing-match between reason and “the passions”; and the dictionary dates from this time our curious custom of describing her face as scenery. And then, after having quietly murdered her, poetry proceeded to galvanize the poor corpse into a shameful, marionette-like semblance of life by switching into it that supposititious personal sympathy with human affairs which mars so much of the verse of the eighteenth century. We can, however, mark the beginning of this practice at an earlier date.
The word conscious, like consciousness, was unknown until the seventeenth century, when its newfangledness was ridiculed by Ben Jonson. It is odd, therefore, that the first recorded uses are figurative, applying it to inanimate objects. When we find Denham writing in 1643:
Thence to the coverts and the conscious Groves,
The scenes of his past Triumphs and his Loves....