Abstract
The history of cosmology since the time of the ancient Greeks has been successively dominated by three fundamental analogies concerning the general nature of the Universe:
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1.
The analogy between macrocosm and microcosm, which originated in antiquity and influenced thought down to the sixteenth century, based on the belief that ‘mind’ is the source of the orderliness in nature which makes natural science possible, the world being a kind of organism, both alive and intelligent.
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2.
The mechanistic analogy, which originated in the later middle ages and renaissance and was only finally discarded in the course of the present century, that the Universe is like a machine, being itself neither alive nor intelligent but created by an external intelligence, just as machines have been created by the agency of man.
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3.
The historical analogy, which originated in the eighteenth century, that the world is neither an organism nor a machine but more like human society, being an aggregate of individual constituents or processes with a history.
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© 1977 Plenum Press, New York
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Whitrow, G.J. (1977). The Role of Time in Cosmology. In: Yourgrau, W., Breck, A.D. (eds) Cosmology, History, and Theology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-8780-4_12
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