Departing in some measure from critical views that invoke similar contextual materials, this essay argues for a reevaluation of Hopkins’s debt to scientific thinking in his poetry and poetics. Hovering between competing conceptions of nature’s structure and purpose—evolutionary theory, energy physics, natural theology—Hopkins develops a poetics of order that emphasizes the subjective capture of patterned experience, what, following Augustine, could be seen as the ordo behind surface disarray. Registering at different felt and formal levels, this phenomenology of order reveals Hopkins mining opposing views and traditions, framing ideas drawn from the ambient scientific discourse with kindred notions in a longer literary and philosophical purview, and freighting natural theology arguments with images that have the novel feel of scientific thinking.