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No human being has the faculty of originally creating matter, which is more than nature itself can do. But any one may avail himself of the agents offered him by nature, to invest matter with utility.
--
Book I, On Production, Chapter II, p. 65

 

Jean-Baptiste Say

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How many possibilities may arise from the image of the ‘wall’ and everything diverted from it. Separation, isolation, wailing walls, prison walls. Witnesses of the passing of time : smooth, calm, white surfaces, tortured, old, perished surfaces; signs of human intervention, traces of objects of the force of nature; impressions of battle, of exertion, of destruction, of catastrophes or of renovation, creating and balance; what is left of love, grief, aversion, chaos, romantic enchantment of silted ruins by organic matter; shapes from which one can read the rhythm of nature and the spontaneous mobility of matter. (1980, about his early wall-like paintings, fh)

 

Antoni Tapies

 

As to that which is called nature, it is no other than the laws by which motion and action of every kind, with respect to unintelligible matter, is regulated. And when we speak of looking through nature up to nature's God, we speak philosophically the same rational language as when we speak of looking through human laws up to the power that ordained them.
God is the power of first cause, nature is the law, and matter is the subject acted upon.
But infidelity by ascribing every phenomenon to properties of matter, conceives a system for which it cannot account, and yet it pretends to demonstration. It reasons from what it sees on the surface of the earth, but it does not carry itself on the solar system existing by motion. It sees upon the surface a perpetual decomposition and recomposition of matter. It sees that an oak produces an acorn, an acorn an oak, a bird an egg, an egg a bird, and so on. In things of this kind it sees something which it calls a natural cause, but none of the causes it sees is the cause of that motion which preserves the solar system.

 

Thomas Paine

 

As a Poet, Novalis is no less Idealistic than as a Philosopher. His poems are breathings of a high devout soul, feeling always that here he has no home, but looking, as in clear vision, to a 'city that hath foundations.' He loves external Nature with a singular depth; nay, we might say, he reverences her, and holds unspeakable communings with her: for Nature is no longer dead, hostile Matter, but the veil and mysterious Garment of the Unseen; as it were, the Voice with which the Deity proclaims himself to man. These two qualities, -- his pure religious temper, and heartfelt love of Nature, — bring him into true poetic relation both with the spiritual and the material World, and perhaps constitute his chief worth as a Poet; for which art he seems to have originally a genuine, but no exclusive or even very decided endowment.

 

Novalis

 

As a general matter, I believe we should be very slow to make conclusions about the nature of the cosmos based upon inner experience — no matter how profound these experiences seem.

 

Sam Harris

 

"Nature is not served by rigid laws, but by rhythmical, reciprocal processes. Nature uses none of the preconditions of the chemist or the physicist for the purposes of evolution. Nature excludes all fire, on principle, for purposes of growth; therefore all contemporary machines are unnatural and constructed according to false premises. Nature avails herself of the biodynamic form of motion through which the biological prerequisite for the emergence of life is provided. Its purpose is to ur-procreate 'higher' conditions of matter out of the originally inferior raw materials, which afford the evolutionally older, or the numerically greater rising generation, the possibility of a constant capacity to evolve, for without any growing and increasing reserves of energy there would be no evolution or development. This results first and foremost in the collapse of the so-called Law of the Conservation of Energy, and in further consequence the Law of Gravity, and all other dogmatic lose any rational or practical basis."

 

Viktor Schauberger