  Homogeneous nucleation is formulated within the context of fluctuating
hydrodynamics. It is shown that for a colloidal or macromolecular system in the
strong damping limit the most likely path for nucleation can be determined by
gradient descent in density space governed by a nontrivial metric fixed by the
dynamics. The theory provides a justification and extension of more heuristic
equilibrium approaches based solely on the free energy. It is illustrated by
application to liquid-vapor nucleation where it is shown that, in contrast to
most free energy-based studies, the smallest clusters correspond to long
wavelength, small amplitude perturbations.
