Species

52 Species

The Great Chain view consisted of several related theses held in varying ways

by its adherents. One of these, named by Lovejoy the principle of plenitude, has

it that the world is as full of all the things as it could be, or, as Lovejoy himself

stated it,

... the universe is a plenum formarum in which the range of conceivable diversity

of kinds of living things is exhaustively exemplied, but also any other deductions

from the assumption that no genuine potentiality of being can remain unfullled, that

the extent and abundance of the creation must be as great as the possibility of exis-

tence and commensurate with the productive capacity of a ‘perfect’ and inexhaustible

Source, and that the world is better, the more things it contains.^20

(^20) Lovejoy 1936, 52.
B
FIGURE 3.1 (CONTINUED) Representations of the Great Chain. B. Following Lull,
Bovillus (Charles de Bovelles) illustrated a slightly simpler, and more morally directed, scale:
as one adds predicates (being, vitality, sensibility, rationality) one ascends the scale from
minerals, vegetables, sensible animals, and rational beings. Humans can morally decline
down that scale too, as they lose their intellectual function (virtue), their sensibility (luxury),
their life (appetite), and motion, leaving only bare existence. The properties here answer to
Aristotle’s “souls.”