An orderly progression?
In this table, you can see one of the ways that the world might be seen as an ordered progression in the process of creation.
| Stone | passive existence* |
| Flame | existence and movement |
| Plant | existence, movement, and growth |
| Beast | existence, movement, growth, and will (desire) |
| Human* | existence, movement, growth, will, and reason |
| Angel | existence, movement, growth, will, reason, and understanding (i.e. a full understanding of God*) |
Footnotes
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Breeding gold?
Just to complicate things, some precious metals were thought to breed actively within the earth -- much as we use the term for "breeding" radioactive materials in nuclear reactors.
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Social order
Within human society, there was an intricate and detailed sense of order--at least theoretically.
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On God's creation
Whereas God created three sorts of living natures, to wit, angelical, rational, and brutal, giving to angels an intellectual and to beasts a sensual nature, he vouchsafed unto Man both the intellectual of angels, the sensitive of beasts, and the proper rational belonging unto man; and because in the little frame of man's body there is a representation of the universal. . . therefore was man called Microcosmos, or Little World.
(Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, 1586.)