Fig. 8
From: Depicting the Tree of Life: the Philosophical and Historical Roots of Evolutionary Tree Diagrams
Charles Bonnet’s famous ladder of natural beings that culminates with human beings, drawn in 1745. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/BonnetChain.jpg. In line with the philosophers and alchemists that preceded him, he includes the natural elements in his hierarchy and places them at the beginning of his scale. Although the scale does not include any supernatural beings, his scale of nature continues to have a religious undertone: the beings are hierarchically ordered in accordance to their assumed degree of perfection deduced from their type of soul. In accordance with Christian creation myths, the chain is understood to be fixed: there exists no historical or evolutionary relatedness between the elements of the chain. The ladder itself was also considered to be perfect; following Leibniz (Pombo 1987), this world was understood to be the best possible one
