But the renewed emphasis on God-the-mathematician came mostly by way of a different, stranger path. One of the seventeenth century’s most deeply held beliefs had to do with the so-called great chain of being. The central idea was that all the objects that had ever been created—grains of sand, chunks of gold, earthworms, lions, human beings, devils, angels—occupied a particular rank in a great chain that extended from the lowest of the low to the hem of God’s garment.
