Species

50 Species

which is the species that is purely of the genus, with no dening essences other than
those of the genus.^15 God is, of course, the primum of the genus Being, and from him
all being ows, in the standard neo-Platonic way. Things do what they do because
they share the limits of their species and are constrained by the end of that genus.
The primum does it best of all.
With elements, plants, and “brutes,” Ficino gives the Aristotelian accounts—the
elements have heaviness and so they fall. Plants and animals have a nutritional and
generative power (compare Aristotle’s nutritive faculty, De Anima 413a20−33, and
the discussion of reproduction in De generatione animalium). Species are perpetu-
ated because they have an end, or rather, because to be a species is to have an end.
Ficino presents this as a prelude to discussions of the mind that do not concern
us here.

The Great Chain of Being

That the philosophical view deriving from the neo-Platonists had reached popular

culture by the eighteenth century is evidenced in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man

(1733), section VII:

Vast chain of being! Which from God began;

Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,

Beast, bird, sh, insect, who no eye can see,

No glass can reach; from innite to thee;

From thee to nothing.—On superior powers

Were we to press, inferior might on ours;

Or in the full creation leave a void,

Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroy’d:

From Nature’s chain whatever link you like,

Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.

This view is known as the Great Chain of Being, and it has a history that arises
from Aristotelian concepts, through the neo-Platonists, into the Middle Ages and
the revival of Aristotle in the fourteenth through to the sixteenth centuries.^16 The
predicables that dened organic species were an ascending scale of increasingly
“perfect” features: from being, to growth, to animation, to rationality. Raymond
Lull (1232–1316) is perhaps the exemplar of this view.^17 In his view, the chain
of being was a series of steps in a staircase to heaven (Figure 3.1A).^18 Bovillius
(Charles de Bouvelles, 1479–1553) illustrated the moral dimension in a 1510 woodcut
(Figure 3.1B).^19

(^15) Cassirer, Kristeller, and Randall 1948, 189.
(^16) Lovejoy 1936, Kuntz and Kuntz 1988.
(^17) Rossi 2000, Ragan 2009.
(^18) Ragan says that the woodcut was added to the 1512 print of Liber de ascensu et decensu intellectus
(written in 1304) [Llull 1512]. Gontier 2011 assigns the woodcut to Alonso de Proaza.
(^19) Bovelles 1510, 119, Ferrari 2011. Figures from Archive.org.