Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Lovejoy went on to trace the vicissitudes of this idea, in particular in the medieval world, the Renaissance and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He showed, for instance that Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium, which introduced the idea that the earth went round the sun, rather than vice versa, was understood by many of the time as a new way to contemplate the heavens as ‘the highest good’, as closer to what God intended mankind’s understanding to be.³¹ For example, Cardinal Bellarmino, whom we shall meet in Chapter 25 as the leader of the Catholic Church’s resistance to Copernicus, also said: ‘God wills that man should in some measure know him through his creatures, and because no single created thing could fitly represent the infinite perfection of the Creator, he multiplied creatures, and bestowed on each a certain degree of goodness and perfection, that from these we might form some idea of the goodness and perfection of the Creator, who, in one most simple and perfect essence, contains infinite perfections.’³² On this reading, Copernicus’ breakthrough was an infinitesimal increase in man’s ascent to God.

Rousseau, in Émile, said: ‘O Man! Confine thine existence within thyself, and thou wilt no longer be miserable. Remain in the place which Nature has assigned to Thee in the chain of beings . . .’³³ For Pope: ‘Know thy own point; this kind, this due degree, / Of Blindness, weakness, Heaven bestows on thee.’³⁴ The writers of the Encyclopédie, in France in the eighteenth century, thought this approach would advance knowledge: ‘Since “everything in nature is linked together”, since “beings are connected with one another by a chain of which we perceive some parts as continuous, though in the greater number of points the continuity escapes us”, the “art of the philosopher consists in adding new links to the separated parts, in order to reduce the distance between them as much as possible”.’³⁵ Even Kant spoke of ‘the famous law of the continuous scale of created beings . . .’³⁶

Influential though it was, Lovejoy felt that the idea of the great chain had failed. In fact, he said, it had to fail: it implied a static universe. But that had little to do with its influence.¹

Lovejoy was by all accounts an impressive man. He read English, German, French, Greek, Latin, Italian and Spanish and his students joked that on his sabbatical year from Johns Hopkins he occupied himself by ‘reading the few books in the British Museum Library that he had not yet read’.³⁸ Nonetheless, he was criticised for treating ideas as ‘units’ – underlying and unchanging entities, like the elements in chemistry – whereas his critics saw them as far more fluid.³⁹

But Lovejoy certainly started the ball rolling in that he became the first editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas, founded in 1940. (Among the contributors to that volume were Bertrand Russell and Paul O. Kristeller.) In the first issue, Lovejoy set out the Journal’s aims as: to explore the influence of classical ideas on modern thought, the influence of European ideas on American thought, the influence of science on ‘standards of taste and morality and educational theories and models’ and the influence of certain ‘pervasive and widely ramifying ideas or doctrines’, such as evolution, progress, primitivism, determinism, individualism, collectivism, nationalism and racism. He argued that the history of thought is not ‘an exclusively logical progress in which objective truth progressively unfolds itself in a rational order’. Instead, he said, it revealed a sort of ‘oscillation’ between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, between romanticism and enlightenment, arising from non-rational factors. This, he thought, was an alternative model to ‘progress’. In an essay elsewhere, he identified the subject matter of a history of ideas as: the history of philosophy, of science, of religion and theology, of the arts, of education, of sociology, of language, of folklore and ethnography, of economics and politics, of literature, of societies.