Definitions

Blind Nature

The Phrase ‘Blind Nature’:

As a matter of related interest: whilst blind nature is unintelligent it is not necessarily haphazard, arbitrary ... it, being cause-and-effect based, is pragmatic (as opposed to principled) in an adventitious way. The evolutionists’ phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ means those best fitted to the environment survive to propagate the species and does not necessarily mean survival of the most muscular (as it is sometimes taken to mean).
And because intelligence, which is the ability to think, reflect, compare, evaluate and implement considered action for beneficial reasons, has developed in the human animal it may very well be the best-fitted of all ... especially now that blind nature’s legacy can be safely dispensed with.

Blind Nature:

[David Hume; 1711-1776]; “Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organised, sensible and active! (...). How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! (...). The whole presents nothing but the idea of a *blind nature*, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children!” [emphasis added]. ~ (from Part Two, “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion”; 1779).

Blind Nature’s Instinctual Survival Passions:

These are instinctual passions such as fear and aggression and nurture and desire, as well as a primeval attraction-aversion reflex – feelings of delect⁽⁰¹⁾ or disgust – in conjunction with the pathematic⁽⁰²⁾ territoriality⁽⁰³⁾ and gregarity⁽⁰⁴⁾ of pre-antediluvian hunter-gatherer lore and legend (i.e., both pre-agrarian and prior to animal-husbandry⁽⁰⁵⁾). Hereditarily bequeathed unto all sentient creatures by blind nature⁽⁰⁶⁾, as a rough-and-ready survival package, these passions – which are both savage (fear and aggression) and tender (nurture and desire) – infiltrate the thought processes and subvert reason and rationality with passionate beliefs, emotional partiality and calentural⁽⁰⁷⁾ imagininings.

Footnotes:

⁽⁰¹⁾delect (v.; rare): to delight or take pleasure in something; also, to be a source of pleasure or delight; in later use also with object (reflexive): to gratify oneself. ~ (Oxford English Dictionary).

⁽⁰²⁾pathematic (adj.): of, pertaining to, or designating, emotion or suffering. ~ (Webster’s 1913 Dictionary).

⁽⁰³⁾territoriality (n.): 1. territorial quality, condition, or status; 2. the behaviour of an animal in defining and defending its territory; 3. attachment to or protection of a territory or domain. [1890-95; from late Middle English from Latin territōrium, ‘land round a town’, ‘district’, from terr(a), ‘earth’, ‘land’ + -ial, adjectival suffix + -ity]. ~ (Webster’s College Dictionary).

⁽⁰⁴⁾gregarity (n.): the quality of being gregarious; having a dislike of being alone; sociability, sociableness (=‘the relative tendency or disposition to be sociable or associate with one’s fellows’); (adv.): gregariously; (n.): gregariousness, gregarian. [Latin gregārius, ‘belonging to a flock’, from grex, greg-, ‘flock’]. ~ (Online Neoteric Dictionary).

⁽⁰⁵⁾animal husbandry: the aspect of agriculture concerned with the care and breeding of domestic animals such as cattle, goats, sheep, hogs, and horses. *Domestication of wild animal species was a crucial achievement in the prehistoric transition of human civilisation from hunting-and-gathering to agriculture*. The first domesticated livestock animal may have been the sheep, which was tamed around 9000 BCE in northern Iraq. By about 7000 BCE (and perhaps much earlier) the pig was domesticated in Anatolia; around 6500 BCE domestic goats were kept in Mesopotamia; by 5900 BCE (and perhaps 3,000 years earlier) there were domesticated cattle in Chad, while independently about 5500 BCE there were domesticated cattle in south-western Iran; and around 3500 BCE the horse was domesticated on the Eurasian steppes. Nothing is known of the early development of husbandry; selective breeding for the improvement of livestock was already practiced in Roman times. Continuing systematic development and improvement of domestic livestock breeds, established in England following 1760 by Robert Bakewell and others, has been paralleled by advances in animal nutrition and veterinary medicine. [emphasis added]. ~ (Columbia Electronic Encyclopaedia).

⁽⁰⁶⁾[Edward Young; 1683-1765]: “Faith builds a bridge across the gulf of Death, | To break the shock *blind nature* cannot shun, | And lands Thought smoothly on the farther shore”. [emphasis added]. ~ (lines 722-724, “Night-Thoughts on Life, Death & Immortality”).

⁽⁰⁷⁾calenture (n.): 1. a kind of delirium sometimes caused, especially within the tropics, by exposure to excessive heat, particularly on board ship; 2. (figuratively): fever; burning passion or zeal; heat: as, ‘the calenture of primitive devotion’, ‘the calentures of baneful lust’. ~ (Century Dictionary and Cyclopaedia).

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