The chain starts from God and progresses downward to angels, demons, stars, moon, kings, princes, nobles, commoners, animals, trees, other plants, precious stones, precious metals, and other minerals (Tillyard, 2011). The Chain of Being was a strict, religious hierarchical structure of all matter and life, believed to have been decreed by God. This dominant concept during the Middle Ages, the Scala Naturae, the “stair-way or ladder of nature,” is a concept originating with Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Proclus and further developed during the Middle Ages, reaching its full early modern Neoplatonism during the Renaissance. In the latter paradigm, the one in which Ramon Lull worked under, the universe was finite and a living organism where everything had its place as ruled by the natural law of the Great Chain of Being (Lovejoy, 2011). The Scientific Revolution was a pivotal period in Western history when a new paradigm, the Newtonian paradigm, the universal frame of reference that still rules today, replaced the old feudal, medieval Aristotelian paradigm.
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