The Great Chain of Being: a Study of the History of an Idea.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being: a Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb05488.0001.001. PDF.
Third: in common with what is called the study of compara-tive literature, the history of ideas expresses a protest againstthe consequences which have often resulted from the conven-tional! division of literary and some other historical studies by nationalities or languages.
Man must become habitually mindful of the limitations of his mental powers, must be content with that ‘“‘relative and practical understanding” which is the only organ of knowledge that he possesses. ‘‘Men,’’ as Locke puts it in a familiar passage, ‘‘may find matter sufficient to busy their heads, and employ their minds with variety, delight and satisfaction, if they will not boldly quarrel with their own constitution, and throw away the blessings their hands are filled with, because they are not big enough to grasp everything.”
‘‘the chain of being’’ implied that it is, provided the chief basis for most of the more serious attempts to solve the problem of evil and to show that the scheme of things is an intelligible and rational one; and that the same belief about the structure of nature lay in the background of much early modern science, and therefore influenced the formation of scientific hypotheses in various ways...
The possession of a power is sufficientwithout the exercise of it —— a strange proposition, but one towhich Fénelon was driven as the only escape from Spinoza’sargument that an omnipotent being must also of necessity beomnificent. This theological paradox was apparently ren-dered more plausible to Fénelon by the undeniable truth that,though the gift of speech presumably makes human beings“more perfect,” their perfection is not necessarily proportionalto their use of that faculty: “il arrive méme souvent que je soisplus parfait de me taire que de parler.”’