Revolt against the biosphere may be a futile gesture, but its influence on the mind can be mitigated, and the sense of human helplessness tempered, through the implementation of an internal order. The dominant Western mode of ordering, which held strong until the eighteenth century, was derived from Aristotle's comments in his biological works. These writings yielded a schema of animal and plant life, a linear series of increasing perfection with man at the head. This table, the scala naturae, later dubbed the ‘great chain of being’, established the hierarchy of species. After man came (other) mammals, then cetaceans, reptiles and birds, all the way down to sponges, the lowest of animal forms.