He conceived of nature as governed throughout by laws statable with mathematical precision; the book of nature, he said, is "written in mathematical form".
The man who conceived the nature stunt, a newspaper reporter, shared Joe's quarters, wrote the reports for the Post.
The general framework of this understanding of the relationship between God and humankind is clearly different from the view that became dominant in the Christian West i.e., the view that conceived of "nature" as distinct from "grace" and that understood original sin as an inherited guilt rather than as a deprivation of freedom.
(DJN VI.1.11,18) It is important to recall in this context the difference between modern and medieval natural law, and that Pufendorf does not conceive human nature in essentialist terms but rather generalizes (rightly or wrongly) from experience.
Indeed, once we conceive of nature as an organic whole, constantly becoming and transforming itself, then Schlegel's paradoxical determination "art should imitate nature" (SW III, 306) becomes quite coherent.
How, in the end, one answers these questions depends crucially on how one conceives the nature, identity and authority of constitutions.
The notebooks and letters and earlier drafts show that analogies — not least the very idea of "selection," nature conceived as breeder — were powerful tools for him, as for anyone else; but it was part of his shrewdness to use them parsimoniously in his exposition.
His own image of the book of nature, conceived as a living and organic entity, was far from Galileo's picture of a book written in mathematical characters.
As such, the knowledge that underpins a rational action is of a causal nature conceived in terms of means-ends relationships, aspiring towards a systematic, logically interconnected whole.
It is not clear how Pythagoras conceived of the nature of the transmigrating soul but a few tentative conjectures can be made (Huffman 2009).
