The Great Chain of Being: Evolution of an Idea

Ancient Greece: Emanation and Order of Nature

The Mind of God

Literal

Metaphor

Worlds

Sun

Platonic Forms or Ideals

The World of the Mind/Soul

Tree

Philosophical Ideas

Reflection of Tree

Abstract Concepts

Fire

Sun

The World of the Senses

Artificial Constructs

(The puppets)

Objects, People, All

Things in the Visible World

Shadows

Image

Man outside of

cave

The Philosopher

Slaves

The Unenlightened

Plato's Allegory of the Cave (4th c. BC)

 

Aristotle's Scala Naturae (ladder of nature) (4th c. BC)

 

Medieval Europe: The Natural Order

Thomas Aquinas's Great Chain of Being (13th century, Summa Theologica); from http://rocket.csusb.edu/~tmoody/W08 191 Aquinas.html

 

Elizabethan Age: Divine Order

Elizabethan wood cut (16th c.)

Enlightenment and beyond: Temporalization

Carl Linnaeus' Taxonomy: The Animal Kingdom (1735)

Ernst Haeckel, 1874.