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How does An Essay on Man describe the hierarchy of living things?
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Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope, portrait by Thomas Hudson, c. 1739; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
In his philosophical poem An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope describes the universe as a God-ordained, perfectly ordered, and all-inclusive hierarchy known as the Great Chain of Being.12
This concept organizes all created things into a continuous, graded scale of existence. Within this framework, Pope positions humans above animals and plants specifically due to their capacity for reason. The poem serves as a systematic defense of this universal order, reflecting the 18th-century philosophical belief that the universe is a complete and interconnected series of forms ranging from the simplest existence to the divine.312