Analysis Of Conversation On The Nature Of Things By Fontenelle

The Imagination before Science (Final) In Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, Fontenelle creates a universe that is both interesting and factual, while still holding the beauty and magic that a lot of people during that time period needed to be content with such theories about the universe. In Lucretius work On the Nature of Things, he constructed a world that was logically sound using real world observations and making inferences to how the universe worked. While Fontenelle uses a majority of Lucretius theories and ideas of logic and observations, Fontenelle furthers Lucretius’s work by allowing the absurd, at the time, to be possible and also beautiful.

Lucretius begins On the Nature of Things, by telling the audience exactly what

This is in contention with the beliefs of his time where the universe was beautiful because there was a sense of mystery and “magic”. That the mystery behind the workings of the universe made it beautiful and if that mystery was destroyed than the universe would lose all magic. Fontanelle contends that the universe is beautiful because it is mechanical. This furthers Fontenelle from Lucretius because in On the Nature of Things Lucretius never challenges the dichotomy of mechanical things cannot be beautiful. Fontenelle states “they want the world on large scale, as a watch is on a small scale, so that everything goes by regular movements based on the organization of its parts” this statement is exactly how Lucretius presents his universe, working according to the order of “parts”. Fontenelle in contrast to Lucretius delves into why he finds the mechanical beautiful “now that I know it’s like a watch; it’s superb that, wonderful as it is, the whole order of nature is based upon such simple things” (Fontenelle 12). In the “First Evening” of Fontenelles work he completely gives reason to believe and hold true to what he is claiming. He gives the reader reason to believe in his work by showing its beauty by expanding the concept of beauty at the time from complicated and shrouded in mystery to simple and mechanical. The exploration of beauty and science is what lacks in the work of Lucretius, because it gives no reason to believe in his