2. Gradation in Nature and in the Sciences,
(“scala
naturae” and
“scala scientiarum”). If the ascending
way
is placed before the Christian as an itinerary of
moral edification, the
same way is also, until the Ren-
aissance,
the route that science must follow in recon-
structing that universal plan expressed precisely in the
Chain
of Being. This methodical ideal of an upward
orientation is very evident, for example, in Raymond
Lully's
(or Lull) construction of the tree of knowl-
edge—hence it was transmitted, thanks to the con-
tinuity of tradition set by Lully, to
Renaissance ency-
clopedism, and to the
pansophic ideal of the first half
of the seventeenth century.
“The likenesses to the divine nature,” writes Lully
in
his Compendium artis..., (in Opera, Mainz,
[1721-24], III, 74), “are imprinted upon
every creature
according to that creature's receptive capacities,
greater or less in each case... thus every creature
carries, more or less,
the sign of its Maker.” Whence
the ideal of a way of knowing
that proceeds by signs
(per vestigias)
towards the reconstruction of the scale
of beings, of the hierarchies of
the cosmos: from stone
to plant, to animal, to man, to the heavens, to
the
angels, to God (cf. Liber de ascensu et descensu
intel-
lectus [1304]).
Whence also, the full construction of
the “trees” of
an encyclopedic knowledge that com-
prehends, in one organic picture of the universe, not
only sensible
nature but also the ethico-political life
of man, the structure of the
heavens, the divine hier-
archies, all the
way to the arbor divinalis, which is
the
culmination of the cosmic hierarchy. All things are
contained in Lully's
sixteen trees; and in them, taken
together, we have another example of the
continuity
of the Scale of Being—for every tree participates
in
the nature of all the preceding ones, so that each is
a kind of
compendium of the natures below it, and
contiguity is established between
preceding and suc-
ceeding orders.
This ideal of knowledge as an ascent through the
grades of perfection of
creatures is kept alive, and is
even renewed, through all of the
Renaissance. For
example, Giordano Bruno, in the De
umbris (1582), says
that all things have an orderly and
connected structure,
and for that reason man should keep this scale of
nature
clearly before his eyes, and make the effort to climb
from
multiplicity to unity. It is this ideal that animates
all Renaissance
encyclopedism, and is still quite alive
at the birth of the new
science—as the ideal of a
reconstruction of the universe that
shall exhibit the
qualities of comprehensiveness, gradation, and conti-
nuity—alongside the
experimental method and its col-
lection of
more or less unconnected and scattered
scraps of information. The program
of the Royal Soci-
ety, for example, as
formulated in 1669 by Thomas
Sprat (History of the Royal
Society, p. 110), is witness
to this symbiosis of the techniques
of experimental
research and the idea of a full and hierarchical uni-
verse. It is precisely the task of science
to retrace the
steps of this universe: the program proposed “to
follow
all the links of this chain [of the diverse orders of
creatures], till all their secrets are open to our minds.
...” The pages of the Philosophical
Transactions are
a body of minute experimental data, offered to
the
attention of men of science for no more than what
they are worth
as disparate experimental findings; and
yet, for example, the various
universal language plans
drawn up by certain eminent members of the
Society
(John Wilkins being among the most notable) are based
precisely on the notion of a hierarchical classification
that holds good
both ontologically and logically—for
nature as well as for
science.
