66 overcoming the world
natural history: the coevolution of the phenomena and of the laws of
nature governing them. It is only by sheer dogma, without consequence
for the practice of scientifi c explanation, that we can, for example, sup-
pose that the regularities governing life preexisted its emergence.
We now have reason to believe that these principles, rather than be-
ing restricted to the phenomena addressed by the earth and life sci-
ences, apply to the universe as a whole. Th e most important discovery
of the cosmology of the twentieth century is that the universe has a
history. Th e best interpretation of this history is that there was once a
time when the rudimentary constituents of nature, as they are now de-
scribed by particle physics, did not yet exist.
In the very early history of the present universe, nature may not have
presented itself as a diff erentiated structure. Th ere may not have been a
clear contrast between states of aff airs and laws of nature governing
them. Susceptibility to change and the range of the adjacent possible
may have been larger than that susceptibility and this range subsequent ly
became in the cooled- down universe studied by the physics that Gali-
leo and Newton inaugurated. It is only thanks to an anachronism,
amounting to a cosmological fallacy, that we suppose nature to wear no
disguises other than those that it exhibits in the universe as we observe
it now, long aft er its fi ery beginnings.
Th is reasoning may at fi rst suggest that the intransigent form of the
metaphysic of the overcoming of the world, rather than being a philo-
sophical fantasy, fi nds support in the revelations of science. Th e specifi c
forms of being are evanescent; this metaphysic teaches that it is only
being itself that remains. As soon, however, as we introduce into our
thinking the idea of the inclusive reality of time, we fi nd that this ap-
parent affi nity between the course of modern science and the radical
metaphysic of the overcoming of the world starts to vanish.
It is not just the typology of natural kinds that changes in the course
of the history of the universe as a whole, as well as in the course of the
history of the earth and of life. Change also changes. Th e ways in which
things are transformed into other things are themselves subject to trans-
formation. Th is susceptibility to uneven and discontinuous change,
including to the change of change, is what we call time. If time is not
only real but also inclusive, nothing can be beyond its reach, not even
the laws, symmetries, and supposed constants of nature. Th ey, too,