The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea by ARTHUR O. LOVEJOY - January 1976

Harvard University Press, January 1976. Paper Back. New. The Idea: that the universe is ''composed of an immense, or...infinite number of links ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents...through every possible grade up to the...highest possible kind of creature, between which and the Absolute Being the disparity was assumed to be infinite.'' Of this chain, Alexander Pope wrote thus: ''Vast chain of being! which from God began / Natures aethereal, human, angel, man / beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see / No glass can reach; from Infinite to thee / From thee to nothing...Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroy'd / From Nature's chain whatever link you strike / Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.'' This paradigm of the chain of being pervaded poetry, philosophy, science, theology, and morality alike for centuries, and in these William James Lectures delivered in 1933, it is examined and explicated in a way that remains fresh and fascinating.