III.5 "as an Animal is a Plant"

By the seventeenth century, the Renaissance tradition of resemblances -- of seeing God's creation as a book inscribed with hieroglyphs, legible only to the faithful man with his head held upright -- was being eroded by the new methods of experimental philosophy. Spiritual allegory no longer persuaded many thinkers who, driven by the Baconian rejection of "false Idols," emphasized direct observation in both worldly and spiritual matters. Thus whereas late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century theologians situated man within a Great Chain of Be(com)ing by which man-mirrors-plant-mirrors-God, "bring[ing] into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms, with no possible filiation"Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987): 238., mid-century thinkers transformed man into a walled garden, a closed experiment, cut off from the linkages that, earlier, nourished man's spiritual development.