The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea

philosopher Arthur Lovejoy, in The Great Chain of Being (1936), called the principle of plenitude. This is the idea that the best possible universe does not consist only of the highest kind of creature, the archangels, but contains a maximum richness of variety of modes of being, thus realizing…

Lovejoy’s most famous work, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1936), which was an expansion of lectures he had delivered at Harvard in 1933, traced the history of the “principle of plenitude” (i.e., that all possibilities are to be realized) from the…

Lovejoy (The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea, 1936). See also best of all possible worlds.