Scale of Animal Being by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In the very lowest link in the vast and mysterious chain of Being, there is / an effort, although scarcely apparent, at individualization; but it is / almost lost in the mere nature. A little higher up, the individual is / apparent and separate, but subordinate to any thing in man. At length, the / animal rises to be on a par with the lowest power of the human nature. / There are some of our natural desires which only remain in our most perfect / state on earth as means of the higher powers' acting.[1]

[Footnote 1: / These remarks seem to call for a citation of that wonderful passage, / transcendant alike in eloquence and philosophic depth, which the readers of / the Aids to Reflection have long since laid up in cedar: -- / "Every rank of creatures, as it ascends in the scale of creation, leaves / death behind it or under it. The metal at its height of being seems a mute / prophecy of the coming vegetation, into a mimic semblance of which it / crystallizes. The blossom and flower, the acme of vegetable life, divides / into correspondent organs with reciprocal functions, and by instinctive / motions and approximations seems impatient of that fixture, by which it is / differenced in kind from the flower-shaped Psyche that flutters with free / wing above it. And wonderfully in the insect realm doth the irritability, / the proper seat of instinct, while yet the nascent sensibility is / subordinate thereto, -- most wonderfully, I say, doth the muscular life in / the insect, and the musculo-arterial in the bird, imitate and typically / rehearse the adaptive understanding, yea, and the moral affections and / charities of man. Let us carry ourselves back, in spirit, to the mysterious / week, the teeming work-days of the Creator, as they rose in vision before / the eye of the inspired historian "of the generations of the heaven and / earth, in the days that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. " And / who that hath watched their ways with an understanding heart, could, as the / vision evolving still advanced towards him, contemplate the filial and / loyal bee; the home building, wedded, and divorceless swallow; and, above / all, the manifoldly intelligent ant tribes, with their commonwealth and / confederacies, their warriors and miners, the husband-folk, that fold in / their tiny flocks on the honied leaf, and the virgin sisters with the holy / instincts of maternal love, detached and in selfless purity, and not say to / himself, Behold the shadow of approaching Humanity, the sun rising from / behind, in the kindling morn of creation! Thus all lower natures find their / highest good in semblances and seekings of that which is higher and better. / All things strive to ascend, and ascend in their striving. And shall man / alone stoop? Shall his pursuits and desires, the reflections of his inward / life, be like the reflected image of a tree on the edge of a pool, that / grows downward, and seeks a mock heaven in the unstable element beneath it, / in neighbourhood with the slim water-weeds and oozy bottom-grass that are / yet better than itself and more noble, in as far as substances that appear / as shadows are preferable to shadows mistaken for substance? No! it must be / a higher good to make you happy. While you labour for any thing below your / proper humanity, you seek a happy life in the region of death. Well saith / the moral poet: -- / 'Unless above himself he can / Erect himself, how mean a thing is man!"