Abstract
Historically, starting with an Aristotelian view where heaven had been clearly distinguished from earth, a human outlook on nature reached a Newtonian one which unified both of them through the Kepler's law for planets and the Galilei's law for falling bodies. How do the modern people recognize nature? In order to investigate the steps of the recognition of nature, a question concerned with universal gravitation was asked every year to about two hundred sophomores during the past four years. It was found from an analysis of answers to the question that the recognition of nature was classified into ten types, and the following six steps were obtained by arranging these types: (1) story recognition (2) qualitative recognition (3) quantitative recognition (4) static recognition (5) dynamic re- cognition (6) unified recognition.
