Metaphysical poets still young, introducing into it a string of Metaphysical conceits in the lines beginning “Most souls, ‘tis true, but peep out once an age” which in part echo a passage from Donne's “Second Anniversary”. By the time Pope wrote this, the vogue for the Metaphysical style was over and a new orthodoxy had taken its place, of which the rewriting of Donne's satires was one expression. Nevertheless, Johnson's dismissal of the ‘school’ was still in the future and at the start of the 18th century allusions to their work struck an answering chord in readers. During the course of the
Metaphysical nihilism Metaphysical nihilism Metaphysical nihilism is the philosophical theory that there "might" have been no objects at all—that is, that there is a possible world in which there are no objects at all; or at least that there might have been no "concrete" objects at all, so that even if every possible world contains some objects, there is at least one that contains only abstract objects. To understand metaphysical nihilism, one can look to the subtraction theory in its simplest form, proposed by Thomas Baldwin. The idea is that there is a possible world with finitely many things. One can thus