Intellectually, on the other hand, men’s minds seem to have been influenced above all things by that conception of impersonal “laws” governing the universe which, as we saw in the last chapter, was scarcely apprehended before the previous century. Poets and philosophers alike were delighted by the perfect _order_ in which they perceived the cosmos to be arranged. They sought everywhere for examples of this orderliness. Pope, for instance, praises Windsor Forest on the ground that it is a place: Not Chaos-like together crush’d and bruis’d; But, as the world, harmoniously confus’d: 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.