Great Chain of Being

<p>From later antiquity down to the close of the eighteenth century most philosophers and men of science and indeed most educated men accepted without question a traditional view of the plan and structure of the world. In this volume which embodies the William James lectures for 1933 Arthur O. Lovejoy points out the three principles-plenitude continuity and graduation-which were combined in this conception; analyzes their origins in the philosophies of Plato Aristotle and the Neoplatonists; traces the most important of their diverse samifications in subsequent religious thought in metaphysics in ethics and aesthetics and in astronomical and biological theories; and copiously illustrates the influence of the conception as a whole and of the ideas out of which it was compounded upon the imagination and feelings as expressed in literature.</p>