Table of Contents

I: Introduction the Study of the History of Ideas; II: The Genesis of the Idea in Greek Philosophy; III: The Chain of Being and Some Internal Conflicts in Medieval Thought; IV: The Principle of Plenitude and the New Cosmography; V: Plenitude and Sufficient Reason in Leibniz and Spinoza; VI: The Chain of Being in Eighteenth-Century Thought, and Man’s Place and Role in Nature; VII: The Principle of Plenitude and Eighteenth-Century Optimism; VIII: The Chain of Being and Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Biology; IX: The Temporalizing of the Chain of Being; X: Romanticism and The Principle of Plenitude; XI: The Outcome of The History and Its Moral

About the Author

John W. Thibaut is professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Harold H. Kelley is professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.