The Great Chain of Being

The great chain of being was a grand, unifying idea that integrated all kinds of complicated metaphysics. It relied on the belief in all sorts of different substances acting and interacting into complicated ways. But within scholasticism there arose a school of thought which resisted this huge importation of metaphysical ideas from aristotle. This main school of thought was called nominalism rit so when people took up a word from Aristotelian philosophy they believed it referred to some real thing - whether you used the word for it or not.