In any event, early modern critics of the Aristotelian philosophy of nature thought of themselves as replacing an “organic” conception of the world with what has been called a “mechanical philosophy,” a “mechanistic” conception of nature, or a “mechanization” of the world. That is to say, they took the notion of the machine rather than that of the organism to be the best model for nature in general. (Cf. Dear 2006, pp. 15-16)
