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In this hierarchy one member—the human—had stepped beyond its assigned place in the cosmic society and now lived in an unwitting complacency, ignoring the precarious finitude of a life being pursued by a radical judgment: “'tis nothing but [God’s] hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment: ’tis to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep: And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up.”

Like his contemporaries, the deists and religiously inclined scientists such as Newton himself, Jonathan Edwards assumed the “Newtonian world machine,” operating with the metronomic regularity of natural law. Presupposing both the science and the aristocratic social hierarchy of his day, Edward introduced anthropomorphic language to create a clash between this harmonious order and the willful self-interest of humans who dared to ignore their proper rung on the ladder of existence. As a preacher of penitence, he carried his anthropomorphic imagery to extravagant heights in order to induce a reversal of behavior in a recalcitrant town. The sermon effectively threatened the people of Enfield with what amounted to “metaphysical ostracism,” an expulsion no less thoroughgoing than the primordial ejection of Adam and Eve from the garden. The palpable effect of this imagery depended on the evocation of the natural and social orders rising up like, and yet unlike, an angry monarch to crush rebels against the cosmic commonwealth.

References
1 In the interests of clarity, I have slightly rearranged and modernized this quotation. It and all quotations from Edwards’s sermon are taken from Jonathan Edwards, Sermons and Discourses, 1739-1742, ed. Harry S. Stout and Nathan O. Hatch, with Kyle P. Farley, The Works of Jonathan Edwards 22 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 404-18.

1 Social scientific analysis of the relation between anthropomorphism and religion is summarized by Steward Elliot Guthrie, who argues “religion is anthropomorphism” in his book Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 178. The most lucid and succinct historical treatment remains Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959).

1 I have in mind such authors as John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874), and Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). For a more recent example, see Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).

1 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 270-95.

1 For a sampling of relevant recent work, see Philip Husbands, Owen Holland, and Michael Wheeler, eds., The Mechanical Mind in History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008); and Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, eds., Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Ralph Waldo Emerson made the classic American argument for the positive reciprocity between the human and the natural. This idea of mutuality takes a different turn in our contemporary situation, in which industrial and technological

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