“Nature, at once intrinsic characteristic and external environment, constituted both the given facts of the world and the world as context for facts . . . Although it could be made into a metaphor or seen to be the object of human activity, it also had the status of a prior fact, a condition for existence. Nature was thus a condition for knowledge. It crucially controlled, we might say, a relational view between whatever was taken as internal (nature) and as external (nature). (1992a: 194)”