Religion begins with the fear of the Lord and ends in the love of Man.[84]
ET me devote this concluding Note to a few general remarks. The meanings and definitions of certain words given below are somewhat arbitrary, but I trust they will enable you to understand and remember certain abstruse matters.
I.
(a) Take the word "thing" to mean any object of thought, such as, for example, a house, a labourer, redness, distance, home, charity, eloquence, or the British Constitution. All these are things which you can think of.
(b) You may then define a "fact" as a known or knowable thing or relation between things; in other words, a fact is any thing or relation, which you know or can know if you take the necessary trouble.
(c) The word "Nature", with a capital N, is but a name for the sum-total of all facts known and knowable. Poets, philosophers, and even some men of Science, personify this sum-total of facts known and knowable, i.e., Nature and refer to it as "she" or "her". It is but a convenient way of saying, by implication, that there is the same uniformity, continuity and unity in Nature as in our idea of a person.
Now, all thinking men of all ages of history have ever tried to understand Nature as a whole and to answer regarding her three important questions represented by three interrogatives, what? how? and why?
(1) What is Nature? = What are the facts which constitute Nature. (Knowledge of Nature).
(2) How has Nature come to be what she is? = How is it that facts constituting Nature have become as we perceive them? (Explanation of Nature).