See great chain of being on Wiktionary
Download JSON data for great chain of being meaning in All languages combined (3.3kB)
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"ref": "1903 [1820], Daniel Webster, “First Settlement of New England”, in A. J. George, editor, Select Speeches of Daniel Webster 1817–1845",
"text": "[…]; ourselves being but links in the great chain of being, which begins with the origin of our race, runs onward through its successive generations, binding together the past, the present, and the future, and terminating at last, with the consummation of all things earthly, at the throne of God.",
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{
"ref": "1936, A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea, Harvard University Press, page 205",
"text": "There was more than one way, however, in which the principles embodied in the cosmological conception of the Chain of Being could be used as weapons against social discontent and especially against all equalitarian movements.",
"type": "quotation"
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{
"ref": "1996, David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous",
"text": "In Descartes’s hands, two thousand years later, this hierarchical continuum of living forms, commonly called “the Great Chain of Being,” was polarized into a thorough dichotomy between mechanical, unthinking matter (including all minerals, plants, and animals, as well as the human body) and pure, thinking mind (the exclusive province of humans and God).",
"type": "quotation"
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{
"ref": "2012, Lydia Pyne, Stephen J. Pyne, chapter 5, in The Last Lost World, Penguin",
"text": "Far from being a radical innovation without precedent, Darwinian evolution had itself evolved by fits and starts out of one of the hoariest concepts in Western civilization, the Great Chain of Being.",
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"A hierarchical structure of all matter and life, descending from God through angels, humans, animals and plants to minerals, and thought in medieval times to have been decreed by God."
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"(Christianity, historical) A hierarchical structure of all matter and life, descending from God through angels, humans, animals and plants to minerals, and thought in medieval times to have been decreed by God."
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"word": "Great Chain of Being"
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"ref": "1903 [1820], Daniel Webster, “First Settlement of New England”, in A. J. George, editor, Select Speeches of Daniel Webster 1817–1845",
"text": "[…]; ourselves being but links in the great chain of being, which begins with the origin of our race, runs onward through its successive generations, binding together the past, the present, and the future, and terminating at last, with the consummation of all things earthly, at the throne of God.",
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{
"ref": "1936, A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea, Harvard University Press, page 205",
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"type": "quotation"
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{
"ref": "1996, David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous",
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"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2012, Lydia Pyne, Stephen J. Pyne, chapter 5, in The Last Lost World, Penguin",
"text": "Far from being a radical innovation without precedent, Darwinian evolution had itself evolved by fits and starts out of one of the hoariest concepts in Western civilization, the Great Chain of Being.",
"type": "quotation"
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"(Christianity, historical) A hierarchical structure of all matter and life, descending from God through angels, humans, animals and plants to minerals, and thought in medieval times to have been decreed by God."
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"word": "Great Chain of Being"
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-10 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (a644e18 and edd475d). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
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