Great Chain of Being

Lovejoy, Arthur O. The great chain of being a study of the history of an idea. 

Benfey, Otto Th. "The Great Chain of Being" and the periodic table of the elements. JChemEduc 42 (1965) 39-41. 

Simmonds, James D. "Henry Vaughan and the Great Chain of Being." In Studies in English Renaissance literature, ed. W.F. McNair, 149-167. Baton Rouge (LA) , 1962. 

Lovejoy, A. O. The Great Chain of Being A Study of the History of An Idea. New York Torchbooks, 1960. 

Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being [1936] (New York Harper Torchbooks, i960), 227f. 

More than any other scholars Arthur Lovejoy and Jaako Hintikka have discussed whether Aristode accepted a doctrine of the plenitude of being. In his classic work, The Great Chain of Being Lovejoy articulates the doctrine as follows ... 

James Liana and David Oldroyd also detected an affinity between Lavoisier s notion of simple substances and the views of the mid-century mineralogists. H. Pott, Axel Cronstedt and Torbern Bergman, working in Germany and Sweden. Operating within the tradition of natural history, which upheld the continuity and multiplicity of the Great Chain of Being, these chemists replaced the older... 

Comparative studies—the periodic table and the great chain of being... 

Perhaps the examples given are sufficient to show the wide applicability of the six-concept analysis to particular areas of study. These analyses should be useftd for comparison purposes also, an example being the parallel analysis of the periodic classification of the chemical elements and the biological concept of the Great Chain of Being. The comparison was suggested by Lovejoy ... 

The theory of the Great Chain of Being, purely speculative and traditional though it was, had upon natural history in this period an effect somewhat similar to that which the table of the elements and their atomic weights has had upon chemical research in the past half-century (1936, 232 cf. Benfey 1965). 

On the other hand, the continuous gradations assumed within the Great Chain of Being and in the view of spontaneous variability postulated by Darwin gave way to discontinuous change in Mendel s genetic laws, and the later discovery of biological mutations. Thus, the two classifications have encountered both the discrete and the continuous parameters N/A in their development. 

Benfey, O.T. 1964.From Vital Force to Structural Formulas. Boston Houghton Mifflin Benfey, O.T. 1975. From Vital Force to Structural / br-mu/av. Washington, DC American Chemical Society Benfey, O.T. 1992. From Vital Force to Structural Formulas. Philadelphia, PA Chemical Heritage Foundation. Benfey, O.T. 1965. The Great Chain of Being and the Periodic Table. Journal of Chemical Education 42 39—41. 

Great chain of being (Aristotle again)-all living things are immutable as they were created by God. 

FIGURE 3.1 Great chain of being a powerful visual metaphor for a divinely inspired universal hierarchy ranking all forms of higher and lower life the male alone represents humans. From Didacus Valades, Rhetorica Christiana (1579). Reproduced here from Anthony Fletcher s Gender, Sex, Subordination [38]... 

Models that have been proposed to help in our understanding of Nature and the Universe and our place within have changed many times over the course of the last two thousand years. Nature was imagined once as a great chain of being, with... 

This figure looks like the medieval concept of the Great Chain of Being, in which everything was arranged in an ascendant hierarchy (Darwin himself employed its cousin the scale of nature at times). Figure 4.5 is more limited than that old idea. This concerns how much of each element dissolves in water, not the place of everything in the universe. 

---