Description
Book SynopsisFrom later antiquity to the close of the 18th century, most educated men accepted without question a traditional view of the plan and structure of the world. In this volume, Lovejoy copiously illustrates the influence of this conception, and of the ideas out of which it was compounded, upon the imagination and feelings as expressed in literature.
Trade ReviewThe Great Chain of Being, employed as a title, would have suggested…what was 'probably the most widely familiar conception of the general scheme of things'—the idea of a world in which every being was related to every other in a continuously graded scale, with no possible form of diversity missing. Pursuing the biography of this idea through more than two thousand years, the distinguished author of these lectures makes clear its amazing influence on the thought and history of the Western World… Intellectual vigor, critical precision and an amazing knowledge of what mankind has thought and desired in other ages distinguishes this book. No student of the history of literature, science, or philosophy may well neglect it. -- Clifford Barrett * New York Times Book Review *
One of the great books of our generation. -- Marjorie Nicolson * American Scholar *
A fascinating and moving book… Everyone interested in the larger ironies of human history should read [it]. -- Ernest Nagel * New Republic *
Men are galvanized by ideas and act as vehicles for them… Such a ruling idea is that of
the great chain of being. Prof. Lovejoy's study records the birth, the growth, the vicissitudes, transformations, and finally the senility, and perhaps the death of this idea. The study is as fascinating as that of the rise and decay of an empire, and, in fact, it is the study of the empire of an idea over human minds throughout many centuries… Prof. Lovejoy's approach is fresh and different… The learning exhibited in this book is vast. -- Raphael Demos * Modern Language Notes *
Table of Contents1. Introduction: the Study of the History of Ideas 2. The Genesis of the Idea in Greek Philosophy: the Three Principles 3. The Chain of Being and Some Internal Conflicts in Medieval Thought 4. The Principle of Plenitude and New Cosmography 5. Plenitude and Sufficient Reason in Leibniz and Spinoza 6. The Chain of Being in Eighteenth-Century Thought, and Man's Place and Rocle in Nature 7. The Principle of Plenitude and Eighteenth-Century Optimism 8. The Chain of Being and Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Biology 9. The Temporalizing of the Chain of Being 10. Romanticism and the Principle of Plenitude 11. The Outcome of the History and Its Moral Notes Index of Names and Subjects
