Nature

Nature in the eighteenth-century vocabulary is a many-meaninged word (as many as sixty distinct senses have been counted) which, rightly understood in its historical context, provides the key to most metaphysical, religious, ethical, and esthetic thought of the age. Below are the chief ideas represented by "nature." All but the last have the attributes of eternality, universality, uniformity, immutability, simplicity, and immediate and total clarity when examined by the pure (i.e., uncorrupted) reason.

The order and laws of the universe (physical science)
In the eighteenth century, this use specifically referred to Newton's use. (Pope: "nature and Nature9s laws lay hid in night:/ God said, Let Newton be: and all was light!") In deistic terms, this is the watch God set running.

The spirit of the universe (theology)
Anima mundi the divine energy that activates the laws of motion, etc.

The underlying laws of human thought and conduct (moral philosophy)
Newtonian physics and the anima mundi applied to morality; material laws translated into ethical norms, God--given universals recognized by all reasonable men. Man is a microcosm of the greater world and subject to the same order.

The underlying order and laws of society (political philosophy)
Men in society are subject to the same laws as are the physical universe and individual human beings.

The norms and laws of art, especially poetry (critical theory)
Art, too, is a microcosm of the universal order and subject to comparable laws (in literature, the "rules"). The sole criterion of true art is universal appeal, irrespective of age, nation, social circumstance, etc. (In practice, this meant appeal to educated 18th-century Englishmen.) The signs of false art are particularity, temporality, excess, violation of the laws of decorum.

The landscape and external creation, both animate and inanimate (esthetics)
The simple world around us, often invested with religious and moral overtones.

Taking into consideration these varied meanings for the word "nature," consider Alexander Pope's thoughts in An Essay on Criticism (1711):

First follow NATURE, and your Judgment frame
By her just Standard, which is still the same:
Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchang'd, and Universal Light,
Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart,
At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art. (68-73)

Maynard Mack, in his Alexander Pope: A Life (Norton, 1985), notes that here "Nature" is the common source for both criticism and literature, implying "the creative operations of a quasi-divine agency that made for order, universality, and permanence, alike in man, in art, and in the cosmos" (173). Pope's ideas, capturing the essence of England's Augustan or Neoclassical consensus, provide a backdrop against which we can more clearly understand the various emerging tendencies that ultimately led to what we now call Romanticism.