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24 2 What Is nature? And yet, this is the time during which nature was most rigidly conceived. Far from the vitalist tradition, the mechanical philosophy associated with Descartes (2005) and Bacon (2009) refused to see nature as a living entity, suggesting instead that it should be understood as inert matter acted upon by stable physical laws. To Merchant (1980), this is tantamount to the "death of nature". The cor- responding metaphor is that of a machine, human beings conveniently possessing a soul that distinguish them from soul-less animals. Arguably, the human-nature dualism as we know it begins here. It is not a merely descriptive dichotomy, but a hierarchical one: human beings stand above nature, which in turn is composed of objects metaphysically separated from us (Plumwood 1993: 111; Pepper 1996: 140). The world was being emptied out. Moreover, according to the Baconian creed, knowledge of nature means power over nature. A rising capitalism provided an additional impulse to this scientific agenda. All in all, time was ripe for the con- quest of nature, i.e. for a more sophisticated, accomplished dominion of it. This is a rather interesting path. The mechanical philosophy was a logi- cal step in the process of discovering the inner workings of nature. As Cassirer (2009) noted, nature has to be conceived first as an order, namely, as a body of laws that humans can discover and take advantage of. It is an order detached from any guiding divinity, although the philosophers of the Enlightenment were often deistic, thus accepting the possibility of a godly creation of reality. La Mettrie (1996) would not distinguish any morality or consciousness in the functioning of both human and natural machines. Yet mechanism was also contested within the Enlightenment. Kant himself pointed out how mechanism was unable to explain movement in nature, i.e. it could not explain the signs of life in the machine (see Kant 2008: 202). Such flaw was noted by physiologists, who actually became phe- nomenologists in their experimental approaches to natural events (Hankins 1985: 115). A certain vitalism thus takes shape, breathing new life into nature. In turn, this involves the acceptance that nature has a history, that it unfolds and develops, thus breaking some ground for Darwin's evolutionism. Actually, a new conception of nature slowly emerges in that time, foreshad- owing ecology. Breaking with mechanism, it emphasizes diversity over unity, heterogeneity over homogeneity, the whole over the parts. Diderot's Pensées sur l'interpretation de la nature, published in 1753, are an important landmark of this new thinking. The French philosophe warns about the human unability to grasp the complexity of the natural order he marvels at—an attitude later repro- duced by many environmental philosophers (Diderot 2000). Likewise, German idealism—from Goethe to Herder and Humboldt—see nature as a whole, a total- ity, thus pointing to the very underside of the Enlightenment: Romanticism. The Romantic nature, expressed as much in philosophical writings as in poems and novels, is dynamic and vital, aesthetically reach and emotionally moving. It can- not be reduced to the sum of its parts, and possesses a number of intrinsic qualities whose meaning and value are independent from human evaluations (see Pepper 1984: 79). According to this view, nature should not be rationalized too much, nor instrumentalized by human beings.