Proof Copy Chapter 1 From Limits to Laws: The Construction of the Nomological Image of Nature in Early Modern Philosophy Catherine Wilson Introduction By the mid-eighteenth century, it was common to represent Nature, considered as an object of theoretical inquiry, as a collection of laws and law-governed entities. According to the Comte de Buffon: ‘La Nature est le système des lois éternels etablies par le créateur, pour l’existence des choses et pour la succession des êtres.’ 1 The identiication of knowledge of nature with knowledge of nature’s laws prompted inquiry into dependencies of the most qualitative and speculative form: laws of the union of soul and body, laws of compensation spanning the physical and moral realms, and laws of historical evolution.[Larrère]. The subsequent entrenchment of the law concept in the philosophy of science over the next two centuries was profound, even with the loosening of its deterministic connotations with the introduction of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics.  The view that scientiic explanation – including explanation in the social sciences and even in history – implied deduction from general laws gave support to a picture of scientiic inquiry as specially dedicated to the discovery of previously unknown laws of the natural and social world,  and the historiography of science relected this understanding. The representation of nature as a domain ruled by or constituted by its laws is undoubtedly related to seventeenth-century discoveries in what Thomas Kuhn has designated as the classical or mathematical sciences – astronomy, optics, statics and hydrostatics, and music, to which mechanics and dynamics were later added.  1 The naturalist G.-L.L. Buffon (1707–1788) and S.A. Tissot (1728–1797), an author of popular medical works (‘La nature est l’existence des choses soumise a des lois universelles’), are quoted prominently in Larousse Encyclopédie générale 1982: XI (2), 860, which deines Nature as ‘puissance, force active, crée ou non, qui a etabli l’ordre de l’univers, et qui le conserve en vertu de certaines lois’. For an overview of deinitions of nature and associated contests, see Leinkauf 2000.  The probabilistic revolution in a number of ields is detailed in Gigerenzer et al. 1990.  Hempel and Oppenheim (1948) proposed that to explain an occurrence was logically to deduce it from premises containing at least one law of nature.  Kuhn 1977.