The Great Chain of Being (1936) (edit title/settings)

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• an infinite, number of links ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents, which barely escape non-existence, through 'every possible' grade up to the ens per- feclissimum - or, in a somewhat more orthodox version, to the highest possible kind of creature, between which and the Absolute Being the disparity was assumed to be infinite - every one of them differing from that immediately above and that immediately below it by the 'least possible' degree of difference.

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• The reason is that 'he was good, and in one that is good no envy of anything else ever arises. Being devoid of envy, then, he desired that everything should be so far as possible like himself.

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• Plato, it need hardly be said, is the main historic source of the indigenous strain of otherworldliness in Occidental philosophy and religion, as distinguished from the imported Oriental varieties.

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• `Ideas' and `souls.' Ideas were eternal objects of pure thought, souls were everlasting conscious and thinking beings;

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• It is true that the God of Aristotle had almost nothing in common with the God of the Sermon on the Mount - though, by one of the strangest and most momentous paradoxes in Western history, the philosophical theology of Christendom identified them, and defined the chief end of man as the imitation of both.

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• (t) There are, first, implicit or incompletely explicit assumptions, or more or less unconscious mental habits, operating in the thought of an individual or a generation.

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• the ruling modes of thought of our own age, which some among us are prone to regard as clear and coherent and firmly grounded and final, are unlikely to appear in the eyes of posterity to have any of those attributes.

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• There is perhaps nothing so favorable to success in this world's business as a high degree of emotional detachment from it.

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• Akin to this is the pathos of the esoteric. How exciting and how welcome is the sense of initiation into hidden mysteries !

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• Why is there any World of Becoming, in addition to the eternal \\Vorld of Ideas, or, indeed, to the one supreme Idea? The second is an answer to the question: What principle determines the number of kinds of being that make up the sensible and temporal world?

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Series & Lists edit see section history

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Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Arthur O. Lovejoy (Author)

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• Dewey: 119

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• Books › Nonfiction › Philosophy › Metaphysics
• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences › Sociology

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