(also called General Philosophy of Nature).— 1. Modern scholastic usage. The division of the philosophy of nature that studies bodies or mobile beings in general.  Some modern scholastics treated cosmology as a specific branch of metaphysics.  Often, even those who followed the Aristotelian order of the sciences would refer to the philosophy of nature as “cosmology,” in accord with ecclesiastical seminary regulation at that time. 2. Modern scientific usage. The study of the origin of the material world by modern physics.