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.
- ISBN10 0674040333
- ISBN13 9780674040335
- Publish Date 1 July 2009 (first published 1 January 1936)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Harvard University Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 400
- Language English