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 has likewise argued that there are necessarily some concrete objects. His argument runs as follows: Necessarily, there are some abstract objects, such as numbers. The only possible abstract objects are sets or universals, but both of these depend on the existence of concrete objects (for sets, their members; for universals, the things that instantiate them). Therefore, there are necessarily some concrete objects. 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