Arthur O. Lovejoy taught philosophy for nearly forty years at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of numerous works, including Essays in the History of Ideas and Revolt against Dualism.

• 1. 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

The 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.