From the earliest times the star-groups known as constellations, the smaller groups (parts of constellations) known as asterisms, and also individual stars, have received names connoting some meteorological phenomena, or symbolizing religious or mythological beliefs.
Taylor's theology was distinctively infra-lapsarian; it disagreed with Samuel Hopkins and Emmons in rejecting the theory of "divine efficiency" and in arguing that man can choose the right "even if he won't" - distinguishing like Edwards between natural ability and moral inability; it distinguished sensibility or susceptibility as something different from will or understanding, without moral qualities, to which the appeal for right choice may be made; and it made selflove (a term borrowed from Dugald Stewart, connoting the innocent love of happiness and distinct from selfishness) the particular feeling appealed to by the influences of the law and gospel.
The idea of a calyculate ancestor, though by no means connoting fixation, turned men's minds in the direction of the fixed forms, simply because in them the calyx was best developed.
