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23 Moreover, might it not be the case that every culture possesses, in different degrees of sophistication, a branch of thought devoted to dominate nature as well as other oriented to marvel at it? Be that as it may, the transition from belief to reason is observable through the metaphors applied to the natural world. One is that of nature as a book wherein the divine wisdom can be 'read', an idea that the Renaissance would secularize, turn- ing nature into a text wherein we do not search for God's signals, but for nature's own secrets. Remarkably, we refer nowadays to DNA as a text or a code. A very different metaphor is the organic one, a view of nature as a living body that per- petuates a vitalist tradition of thought that runs parallel to the rationalization of the non-human world. According to this organic conception, everything in the cosmos is alive and connected. Such a cosmology is represented in a Great Chain of Being that links hierarchically every component of the universe. This representation of nature passed from the Greek philosophers to the Medieval thinkers, retaining its influence until the eighteenth century (Lovejoy 1936). It was used to depict society as well, as an entity where different social classes represented body organs, each with a function to perform (Clark 1989: 250). Yet the most important develop- ment in scholastic thinking is the separation between metaphysics and the natural sciences as different approaches to the non-human world: a physica speculativa or philosophy of nature as separated from a physica empirica or natural science (Schipperes 1978: 226). Such development is the precondition for the conception of nature brought about by the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eight- eenth centuries. Outside the linguistic realm, substantial environmental changes caused by human societies took place in the Middle Ages around the inhabited world. Agricultural land expanded, deforestation abounded, population increased: the species was changing its ways on Earth, as new findings about the workings of nature were gradually amassed. In this time, a new regulatory idea about the socio- natural relation gains weight: that human beings are the ones who must perfect it. Paracelsus believed nature to be unfinished, alchemy being in the eyes of God a tool for improving it (Eliade 1987: 151). A new legitimacy for interferring with nature thus emerges, whose traces can even be detected in some strands of mod- ern environmentalism—after all, let us better be responsible stewards than destruc- tive spoilers. Nature starts to be seen as an incomplete creation and soon would be conceived as an inert entity. This shift is supported by the rise of the mechanical arts and the applied science. All kinds of crafts and occupations are now praised. For instance, an engineer is now an architect of social progress, a harbinger of the new. Correspondingly, the Christian ideal of a vita contemplativa is slowly replaced by the mundane vita activa whose eulogy can be found in Giordano Bruno and later in Descartes and Bacon (see Rossi 2001: 21). As Schipperes has pointed out, the Arabic reception of Aristotle and the Christian scholastic amounts to the very beginning of this re-orientation, paving the way for the Scientific Revolution and even Darwinism itself: nature ceases to be a timeless, quiet entity, becoming an order that grows and changes (Schipperes 1978: 226–227). 2.3 Nature Before Darwin