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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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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


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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.