Also 7 cosmus, 9 kosmos. [a. Gr. κόσμος order, ornament, world or universe (so called by Pythagoras or his disciples ‘from its perfect order and arrangement’).]
1. The world or universe as an ordered and harmonious system.
1650. Bulwer, Anthropomet., xv. 149. As the greater World is called Cosmus from the beauty thereof.
1848. trans. Humboldt’s Cosmos (Bohn), I. 53. In this work I use the word Cosmos … [as] the assemblage of all things in heaven and earth, the universality of created things, constituting the perceptible world.
1865. Grote, Plato, I. i. 12. The Pythagoreans conceived the Kosmos, or the universe, as one single system, generated out of numbers.
1869. Phillips, Vesuvius, xii. 324. A complete theory of volcanos should … be in harmony with the general history of the cosmos.
1874. Blackie, Self-Cult., 11. Were it not for the indwelling reason the world would be a chaos and not a cosmos.
b. transf. An ordered and harmonious system (of ideas, existences, etc.), e.g., that which constitutes the sum-total of ‘experience.’
1882. T. H. Green, Proleg. Ethics, § 145. Sensations which do not amount to perceptions, make no lodgment in the cosmos of our experience, add nothing to our knowledge.
1885. Clodd, Myths & Dr., II. ii. 155. The confusion which reigns in his [man’s] cosmos extends to his notion of what is in the mind and what is out of it.
2. Order, harmony: the opposite of chaos.
1858. Carlyle, Fredk. Gt., II. i. Hail, brave Henry … still visible as a valiant Son of Cosmos and Son of Heaven.
1872. Minto, Eng. Prose Lit., I. iii. 187. Work, the panacea which alone brings order out of confusion, cosmos out of chaos.
