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 faiclass="underline" it implied a static universe. But that had little to do with its influence.* 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. In the years since then, the Journal of the History of Ideas has continued to explore the subtle ways in which one idea in history leads to another. Here are some recent articles: Plato's effects on Calvin, Nietzsche's admiration for Socrates, Buddhism and nineteenth-century German thought, a pre-Freudian psychologist of the unconscious (Israel Salanter, 1810-1883), the link between Newton and Adam Smith, between Emerson and Hinduism, Bayle's anticipation of Karl Popper, the parallels between late antiquity and Renaissance Florence. Perhaps the most substantial spin-off of the Journal was the Dictionary of the History of Ideas , published in 1973 and edited by Philip P. Wiener, who had followed Lovejoy as editor-in-chief. This massive work, in four volumes, of 2,600 pages, had 254 contributors, seven associate editors, including Isaiah Berlin and Ernest Nagel, and seven contributing editors, among whom were E. H. Gombrich, Paul O. Kristeller, Peter B. Medawar and Meyer Schapiro.40 The dictionary identified nine core areas-these were: ideas about the external order of nature; ideas about human nature; literature and aesthetics; ideas about history; economic, legal and political ideas and institutions; religion and philosophy; formal logical mathematical and linguistic ideas. As one reviewer remarked, 'it is a vast intellectual Golconda'. In an essay in the Journal , to mark fifty years of publication, one contributor singled out three failures worthy of note. One was the failure of historians to come up with any understanding of what one big modern idea really means-this was 'secularisation'; another was the widespread disappointment felt about 'psychohistory' when so many figures-Erasmus, Luther, Rousseau, Newton, Descartes, Vico, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche-cry out for a deep psychological understanding; and the third was the failure among both historians and scientists to get to grips with 'imagination' as a dimension in life generally and in particular so far as the production of ideas is concerned. These alleged failures are something worth bearing in mind as this history proceeds.41 In the pages of the Journal of the History of Ideas a distinction is often made between 'the history of