In his Abolition of Man (1955), C. S. Lewis attacked those who thought that humankind had finally reached a stage where the ancient dream of conquering nature might actually come true to such an extent that even our own human nature could be controlled and changed at will. Lewis was, for various reasons that we do not need to discuss here, opposed to the idea of changing what we are, but he also thought that it was actually logically impossible to gain complete control over nature and that the underlying attitude of mastery was eventually self-defeating. What is usually called nature is in fact anything and everything that limits, or threatens to limit, our freedom of choice. In other words, the term “nature” signifies the absence of human autonomy. Thus “nature” always begins where human control ends. The word refers to something we have not yet been able to control and that, consequently, to a certain extent controls us. But, as Lewis pointed out, at the very moment we rid ourselves of nature entirely and thus became totally autonomous, there would be nothing left that could guide us in our decisions, so everything we did from then on would no longer be grounded in our particular being and would thus be completely arbitrary. The question “Why should we choose this rather than that?” would no longer be answerable.