These inter-articulations were in large part unselfconscious. This crept into nineteenth and early twentieth century discussions of human difference in ways that you can easily guess. The Great Chain of Being was so influential on Western thought-patterns that both popular and scientific apprehension of the theory of evolution by natural selection tended at first to express it in terms of higher and lower evolutionary forms, as if frogs were less – rather than differently – evolved than, say, cats. Of course, this putatively natural order was both a model of and a model for feudalism: king at the top, aristocrats below, peasants at the bottom – each in their appointed place in the social world just as they are in the God’s divine plan for the known natural universe. Each participates in the nature of the divine in some measure, but that measure diminishes from top to bottom. This is a hierarchical ranking of the universe with God at the top, angels below, and encompassing the whole order of existence from people down to rocks. Perhaps the most famous version of this rhetorical frame is the medieval conception of the “ Great Chain of Being ”.
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