My argument will proceed in two ways. In the first part of this article, I will present Lovejoy's reading of Bruno in the 1904 essay as overtly written in the tradition of history of philosophy, and I highlight the historiographical tools employed there. In the second part, I will turn to Lovejoy's reading of Bruno in the 1936 study, asking whether he applies the same, or new, historiographical concepts. In the course of this argument, I will discuss aspects of Lovejoy's interpretations of Bruno's works, but this discussion is subordinated to the main purpose, an examination of the historiographical sources to Lovejoy's theory and practice in the history of ideas. In the conclusion, I will draw out a few consequences for his concept of unit-idea, the crucial object to be studied in the history of ideas, and for his idea of interdisciplinarity, a crucial methodological feature in the history of ideas.

This situation may be improved if we look for developments outside such discussions of the method of the history of ideas. Recent research into the history of the history of philosophy allows us to contextualize Lovejoy's methodology for the history of ideas within its immediate historical background, nineteenth-century historiography of philosophy. 13 My own work in this field has made me aware of Lovejoy's indebtedness to this tradition. In this piece I provide a fuller and more detailed contextualization of his place in that tradition. 14 Even though a few historians of ideas have pointed out this background to Lovejoy's methodology, they have not yet explored the potential of this field of research—there are still vast areas to be examined in this respect. Frank Manuel, for instance, has noticed Lovejoy's veneration for nineteenth-century Geistesgeschichte, but without tracing Lovejoy's key concepts within this tradition; Donald R. Kelley has claimed [End Page 95] that Lovejoy's methodology is primarily indebted to Victor Cousin's history of philosophy, a claim with which I disagree. 15 My intention is to identify and articulate some vital, but ignored, historiographical concepts in his methodology for the history of ideas, and to explain their sources in the historiography of nineteenth-century history of philosophy. Such an examination is important in order to get Lovejoy's method right, but also in order to endow future discussions of the methodology of history of ideas with a more adequate, disciplinary self-understanding.

The second and interrelated circumstance is that Lovejoy—in the two above-mentioned writings and in others besides—led his readers to assume that his new method for the history of ideas was free and independent of the method controlling the history of philosophy. A discussion of the methodological core concepts pertinent to the history of ideas should not be based on the historiographical framework specific to the history of philosophy, but on an alternative historiography, based on the notion of unit-ideas. 10 Lovejoy's self-proclaimed detachment from the history of philosophy has been re-affirmed by the fact that George Boas—a co-founder of The History of Ideas Club at Johns Hopkins University in 1923 who later published an article on Lovejoy—has belittled the significance of the historiography of history of philosophy. Boas, in 1948, thus made a juxtaposition, like Lovejoy had done in 1936, between history of philosophy and history of ideas, claiming that "the history of philosophy would be more profitable if it were the history of such unit-ideas [pursued by historians of ideas], rather than the successive exposition of systems [pursued by historians of philosophy]." 11 This second circumstance has resulted in an unfortunate situation where subsequent methodological discussions of the history of ideas have been focused on the linguistic phenomenon of "unit-idea," while ignoring the operative, nineteenth-century historiographical concepts in Lovejoy's 1936 work. 12 In these discussions, attention has been directed [End Page 94] towards the notion of unit-ideas, as formulated in the opening chapter of The Great Chain of Being, whereas his reluctance to use this notion in the remaining part of the book has been neglected. This lapse is especially striking in the studies focusing on Lovejoy's notion of unit-ideas, such as those of Quentin Skinner, Jaakko Hintikka, and Thomas Bredsdorff.

In this essay I argue that a comparison of his early historiographical practice, as exemplified in his Bruno and Spinoza essay of 1904, with his mature historiographical practice, embodied in The Great Chain of Being of 1936, reveals two points of interest in Lovejoy's methodology. The first is that he transposed important historiographical concepts from nineteenth-century history of philosophy to the history of ideas, although his own [End Page 93] programmatic statement at the first page of The Great Chain of Being seems to deny such a move. Daniel J. Wilson has analyzed the thematic continuity between Lovejoy's essay of 1904 and his work of 1936, but not the continuity of historiographical tools employed. 9

Although Lovejoy explained this uneven use of historiographical concepts in the opening chapter, he leaves the reader with the impression that unit-idea is a new and distinct notion in his new approach to the past. This discrepancy between precept ("unit-ideas") and practice ("principles," "systems of philosophy") begs the question whether the methodological statement cited on page 92 above was more of a rhetorical declaration—intended to produce the conviction in the minds of his readers that history of ideas was distinct from history of philosophy and thus deserved institutional independence—than an adequate description of the method actually practiced. It certainly did the trick as a rhetorical device.

The type of "idea" with which we shall be concerned is, however, more definite and explicit, and therefore easier to isolate and identify with confidence, than those of which I have been hitherto speaking. It consists in a single specific proposition or "principle" expressly enunciated by the most influential of early European philosophers, together with some further propositions which are, or have been supposed to be, its corollaries. . . . The character of this type of ideas, and of the processes which constitute their history, need not be further described in general terms since all that follows will illustrate it. 8

In this passage Lovejoy placed the concept of unit-idea at the center of his method for the history of ideas, and he referred to this notion repeatedly in the remaining part of the introductory chapter. 5 However, in the remaining part of the book, which exemplified the new method for the history of ideas, he did not use the term "unit-idea" at all. 6 Instead, Lovejoy employed historiographical terms traditionally used in nineteenth-century history of philosophy, namely "principles" and "systems of philosophy." 7 Lovejoy [End Page 92] himself resolved this apparent conflict between precept and practice in his opening chapter by explaining that the term "unit-idea" may have different senses, but that in this work it meant "principle":

By the history of ideas I mean something at once more specific and less restricted than the history of philosophy. It is differentiated primarily by the character of the units with which it concerns itself. Though it deals in great part with the same material as the other branches of the history of thought and depends greatly upon their prior labors, it divides that material in a special way, brings the parts of it into new groupings and relations, views it from the standpoint of a distinctive purpose. Its initial procedure may be said—though the parallel has its dangers—to be somewhat analogous to that of analytic chemistry. In dealing with the history of philosophical doctrines, for example, it cuts into the hard-and-fast individual systems and, for its own purposes, breaks them up into their component elements, into what may be called their unit-ideas. 4

Lovejoy's readings of Bruno in these two studies introduced a paradox. On the one hand, he presented The Great Chain as an example of a new discipline, the history of ideas, and he emphasized the methodological innovation of this new discipline as compared to the history of philosophy. On [End Page 91] the other hand, we can observe a high degree of continuity in Lovejoy's practice in these two works. He continued to use the same historiographical terms, in particular, "principles," "deductions" from these "principles," and "system of philosophy," a body of philosophical doctrines so established. Such terms were all conventional historiographical tools in nineteenth-century history of philosophy.

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy (1873–1962) dedicated a considerable amount of work to the Italian Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). His first publication on Bruno was an essay published in 1904, "The Dialectic of Bruno and Spinoza." 1 It appeared only a few years after Lovejoy had finished his philosophical training at the University of California (1891–95) and Harvard University (1895–99). 2 More than thirty years later, in 1936, he returned to Bruno in his famous work illustrating his methodology for the history of ideas, The Great Chain of Being. 3

II. Lovejoy's Historiographical Practice in His Study of 1904

When Lovejoy published "The Dialectic of Bruno and Spinoza" in 1904, he had just turned thirty, and only five years had passed since he had completed his education in philosophy at Harvard University. At Harvard, he had attended William James's lectures on Kant, and George Santayana's lectures on Greek philosophy, including that of Plato.16 This early introduction to the history of philosophy may have stimulated the young Lovejoy to work on historical themes later on. In 1899, when Lovejoy finished his studies at Harvard and was appointed to a position in philosophy at Stanford [End Page 96] University, he sketched a proposal for instruction in philosophy, in which he wrote: "a thorough course in the History of Philosophy should be the basis of all work in the department."17 Precisely which histories of philosophy he had read as a student at Harvard is unknown, just as it is unclear what kind of history of philosophy he intended to teach at Stanford. However, it is evident that at this early stage of his career he had already been initiated into the discipline of history of philosophy and thought highly of it. If we look at his essay of 1904, we find clues that help to clarify these uncertainties. In this piece, he referred to the following historians of philosophy, all writers of general histories: Johann Eduard Erdmann (1805–92), a German historian of philosophy with a Hegelian bent18; Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), the famous nineteenth-century German historian of ancient philosophy19; Kuno Fischer (1824–1907), another German historian of philosophy, who wrote on the history of philosophy from the Renaissance onwards20; and, finally, Harald Høffding (1843–1931), a Danish philosopher.21 In the nineteenth century, German historians of philosophy were at the forefront of international research within this field, and this is reflected in Lovejoy's references in this early essay.

The history of philosophy had been founded as a philosophical discipline by the German Jacob Brucker (1696–1770) in his Historia critica philosophiae22 [End Page 97] which had an enormous influence upon general histories of philosophy produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and, in some cases, even the twentieth century.23 The discipline, whose history we have only begun to understand recently, became increasingly important in nineteenth-century European departments of philosophy, in particular in Germany.24 Speaking in general terms, this strain of nineteenth-century intellectual life was one with which the young Lovejoy was familiar, and obviously also one which fascinated him from the outset of his career. Donald Kelley has recently argued that Lovejoy's main historiographical source was the (allegedly) eclectic history of philosophy of Victor Cousin (1792– 1867). Kelley overloooked a much wider tradition of general histories of philosophy composed in Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.25

Giordano Bruno was not just any figure in the narrative frequently told in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century general histories of philosophy. Brucker had presented Bruno as an anti-hero who had turned away from the "sectarian mode of philosophizing" characteristic, according to Brucker, of late medieval and Renaissance philosophy, especially within Aristotelianism. Bruno thereby paved the way to what Brucker called "eclecticism," that is, systems of philosophy based on principles. Bruno was thus credited with having made possible the eclecticism, as Brucker characterized it, manifest in the philosophies of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, René Descartes, and others besides. Bruno, however, was not intellectually equipped to work out a system of philosophy, according to Brucker; his [End Page 98] system was "more like a monster than an apt and rational system" (inde monstrum magis, quam aptum et rationale systema).26 The French philosopher Pierre Bayle had interpreted Bruno's philosophy as a Spinozistic system of philosophy in the 1690s.27 Brucker revised this interpretation of Bayle, pointing out Bruno's synthesis of Epicurean and Pythagorean doctrines, and determined Bruno's system of philosophy, despite its defects, as an "emanative system of philosophy" (systema emanativum), not a Spinozistic one.28 After Brucker, expositions of Bruno's life and thought became standard in general histories of philosophy.29 This frequent treatment of Bruno, and indeed the frequent comparisons with Spinoza, may have elicited the intellectual passions of the young Lovejoy well before 1904. This eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition, as well as monographs borrowing the key analytic tools from such general histories of philosophy, formed an important but hitherto unexplored background for Lovejoy's interpretations of Bruno's thought.

In addition to these nineteenth-century historians of philosophy, there was, however, one significant exegete of Bruno in the eyes of the young Lovejoy: James Lewis McIntyre. McIntyre was an American historian of philosophy whose monograph, Giordano Bruno, had been published in London and New York in 1903 and attracted international, scholarly attention. Lovejoy probably alluded to this work of McIntyre in this essay of 1904, when he made the somewhat polemical statement that:

It may be assumed that the close affinity between Bruno's system and Spinoza's is by this time well recognized by all competent students [End Page 99] of the subject; Mr. McIntyre, in his recent study of Bruno, has drawn out the lines of connection in some detail but has, I think, rather understated the case than otherwise.30

One important intention behind Lovejoy's essay of 1904 was to contribute to Bruno scholarship by refuting, heroically, one very recent and prominent interpretation of Bruno's philosophy and its influence. Which alternative conceptual connections did Lovejoy establish between Bruno and Spinoza? To what extent did he draw on traditional, nineteenth-century historiographical tools in his endeavor? Before answering these questions, I shall briefly summarize McIntyre's interpretation.

McIntyre had introduced his readers to Bruno's philosophy by providing lengthy English translations of central passages from Bruno's various Latin and Italian works—translations, which were inserted within his exposition of Bruno's individual works and the problems discussed in them. The motivation behind this procedure was, McIntyre stated, that "Bruno's works are still comparatively unknown to the English reader."31 T. Whittaker applauded McIntyre's book in a review published in Mind in 1904, stating that "Mr. McIntyre has here provided the English reader, for the first time, with an adequate and circumstantial account of the philosophy as well as the life of Giordano Bruno."32 However, McIntyre consciously chose to sidestep the nineteenth-century tradition for exposing past philosophers' so-called systems of philosophy. As he explains: "I have sought to give not a systematic outline of Bruno's philosophy as a whole under the various familiar headings, which would prove an almost impossible task, but a sketch, as nearly as possible in Bruno's own words, of the problems which interested this mind of the sixteenth century, and of the solutions offered."33 Immediately after its publication, he received fierce criticism from reviewers orientated towards nineteenth-century historiography of philosophy, e.g., D. MacCarthy's 1905 review in the International Journal of Ethics. Although MacCarthy praised McIntyre's book as "the first philosophical biography of Bruno of any thoroughness in the English language," he deplored its reluctance to "give a systematic outline of Bruno's philosophy." MacCarthy rejected McIntyre's monograph as "a patchwork of un-reconciled quotations." He concluded, however, on a somewhat more [End Page 100] conciliatory note: "This is more Bruno's fault than his expositors'; but granted that it was impossible to make a system out of theories which Bruno taught as coherent, there was a second alternative to the merely selective method; namely to point out how badly his philosophy hung together." 34 MacCarthy, unlike McIntyre, accepted the assumption that all genuine past philosophers had produced systems of philosophy and scorned Bruno for being unable to produce such a system. He took issue with Mc-Intyre for not explaining the lack of system in Bruno's philosophy. This criticism indicates the historiographical tensions inherent in the scholarly subject with which Lovejoy dealt in 1904: Bruno and his philosophy. Lovejoy agreed with MacCarthy about one methodological assumption, that past philosophers' systems should be exposed, although Lovejoy did not agree with his evaluation of Bruno.

McIntyre noted that there were striking similarities between Bruno's notion of unity and Spinoza's notion of substance, but he nevertheless opted for a cautious line, observing the many differences between the two philosophies. Consequently, he dismissed earlier efforts to depict Bruno as a forerunner to Spinoza, on the grounds that neither internal nor external evidence supported such claims.35 Lovejoy, on the other hand, held that Bruno and Spinoza had a common source, Neoplatonism, and that their respective philosophies should be interpreted as different organizations of essentially Neoplatonic principles. Lovejoy explained that:

My thesis is that the more general and fundamental principles of Spinoza's metaphysics are in no respect original; that he is, like Bruno, a consistent Neo-Platonist of the Renaissance type; that his way of dealing with the problem of the relation of substance to its attributes is one already foreshadowed in Plotinus, fully worked out by mediaeval theologians, and much used by Bruno, and by other metaphysicians of Spinoza's century; and that the character, the historical rô le, and the typical significance of Spinoza's system can be understood only in the light of its relation to these earlier applications of a similar dialectic to a similar problem.36

The term "principle," used in the first line in the citation above, can include a variety of meanings: in particular, (a) an ontological origin, corresponding [End Page 101] to principium in Latin and archê in Greek; and (b), a hypothesis or maxim from which a logical deduction can take place. In the citation above, "principle" should be understood in the second sense. The term "system," also featured in the quote above, is the outcome of deductions from such principles.

Lovejoy structured his essay according to this novel scheme of interpretation. In the first section he described the philosophy of Plotinus and what he calls the "dialectic" of Neoplatonism—that is, according to Lovejoy, the three principles constituting the Neoplatonic system—and its alleged influence in subsequent metaphysics in medieval and Renaissance philosophy. 37 He explained, in rather generic terms, that:

Here, then, we have the essence of what may be called the dialectic of Neo-Platonism: (1) the Absolute Being is conceived as transcendent of all determinate and limiting qualities and relations, and therefore simple, immutable, and capable of only negative characterization by the human intellect; (2) the same Being is conceived as necessarily inclusive of all the reality that in any sense exists, and thus as holding within itself the whole universe of concrete, manifold and temporal existences; (3) the Absolute Being is conceived as necessarily transcending itself, and therefore as the dynamic ground necessitating the coming into being of all possible realities in all possible modes and scales of being. . . .38

This assertion, stated without any documentation, served as the basis for Lovejoy's interpretation of Bruno and Spinoza in 1904, and it reappeared in a more elaborate form in 1936. In the second section of this 1904 essay, Lovejoy described Bruno's metaphysical interpretation of these three Neo-platonic principles, and in the third and last section he exposed Spinoza's interpretation of the very same Neoplatonic principles.39 Lovejoy's composition was thus much more formal than McIntyre's, since so-called principles became crucial expository devices in Lovejoy's reading. This historiographical practice is important for the present purpose, and we need not discuss the meaning of the other philosophical terms used in the quotation above.

Lovejoy determined Bruno's philosophy within this conceptual framework, though in an ambiguous manner. He claimed, on one occasion, that [End Page 102] the "principle of infinity" was the privileged principle from which Bruno "deduced" his philosophical doctrines. In Bruno's system, this principle of infinity was placed at the center, and by means of this principle he deduced the same content as that deduced from the three above-mentioned Neoplatonic principles, in particular that of the "self-sufficiency of the Absolute."40 It is not quite clear, admittedly, which of the three principles Lovejoy had in mind in this statement. On another occasion, however, Lovejoy assigned to Bruno's system a different principle, namely that of the coincidence of opposites, thereby leaving his readers in doubt as to which of the two principles was most important in Bruno's system, and why he should bother with complicated Neoplatonic principles if he could retrieve the same propositional content from his own principles, whatsoever they were.41 Kuno Fischer, a German historian of philosophy, had identified the last-mentioned principle, the coincidence of opposites, in his Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, dating from the second half of the nineteenth century.42 Other historians of philosophy might have done the same, but Fischer is of interest because Lovejoy referred explicitly to him in his essay of 1904.43 Armed with such nineteenth-century identifications of Bruno's so-called principles, [End Page 103] and, rather surprisingly, with McIntyre's English translations of Bruno's works, Lovejoy set forth a new interpretation of Bruno's philosophy in this 1904 essay.44

It is not my intention to discuss Lovejoy's actual readings of Plotinus, Bruno, and Spinoza, but to highlight the analytic tools he employed. As is fairly clear, Lovejoy's most important historiographical concepts in this early study were the concepts of principle and system of philosophy. The term "unit-idea," on the other hand, is completely absent in this early study. These historiographical concepts, principle and system of philosophy, had been given a prominent position in Brucker's historiography of the history of philosophy, and it is, with all probability, the ultimate source of these analytic tools of Lovejoy.45

Brucker had thus defined the task of the historian of philosophy as follows, using precisely these concepts:

In order to pass a sound and proper judgment on the propositions of philosophers, it is necessary to reconstruct the whole system on the basis of their writings. First of all, the general principles, which constitute the foundation underlying the entire building of doctrines, should be reconstructed; on these [general principles] the conclusions should be erected, conclusions that derive willingly from these sources [the general principles]. For since it is the main task of the philosopher to deduce the special ideas from some general principles by means of an apt connection, you [i.e., the historian of philosophy, to be distinguished from the past philosopher] should prefer, due to higher merit, the interpretation that aptly conforms with, and internally coheres with, the form and order of [End Page 104] the whole system, even though it seems to suggest something else at first sight.46

Brucker believed that all past philosophers, even such remote figures as Thales of Miletus (fl. ca. 585 BCE ) and Plato, strove to develop their philosophies according to the methodological ideal denoted by a "system of philosophy" and its deductions from general theories, the so-called "principles." In fact, this methodological ideal had been promoted in some circles at Northern European universities one hundred and fifty years before Brucker published his Historia critica philosophiae in the 1740s, but Brucker assigned the ideal to all past philosophers and, as a consequence, applied it universally as a historiographical tool. This was a distinct methodological innovation compared to his predecessors, e.g., Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (third century CE ) and Thomas Stanley's History of Philosophy (1655–62).

The problem in this procedure was that Brucker consistently conflated two distinct meanings of the Greek term for principle (in Greek, archê, in Latin, principium), namely its ontological meaning, that is, a beginning, and its logical meaning, that is, a starting point for a logical deduction. Brucker typically interpreted an ancient philosopher's statement about the beginning of the world, i.e., its principle, as a hypothesis from which propositions about the world could be deduced. For example, Brucker interpreted Thales' statement about water as the beginning of the world as a hypothesis from which Brucker deduced various philosophical theories, attributing them to Thales' so-called system of philosophy. Brucker undertook this rather distorting form of interpretation in order to force past philosophies into his axiomatic-deductive model of explanation, e.g., the philosophies of Thales, Plato, Aristotle, and Bruno.47 In the case of Bruno, Brucker identified the notion of the minimum as the privileged principle in Bruno's system, thereby confusing its ontological and logical uses in Bruno's writings, [End Page 105] and, even more importantly, institutionalizing a century-long search for the "proper" principle in Bruno's philosophy.48 The axiomatic-deductive ideal of science was articulated from time to time in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but this was not done without criticism, and one may even ask whether those who preached such a method actually practiced it. Before the seventeenth century, this methodological ideal was unknown, and after the eighteenth century it was largely given up. Hence, as historiographical tools, the notions "principle" and "system of philosophy" are of little value.

These historiographical concepts of Brucker became an integrated part of history of philosophy as a discipline, and they remained so throughout nineteenth-century histories of philosophy—these concepts even feature in twentieth-century general histories of philosophy, e.g., that of Friederick Copleston (1907–94), printed between 1946 and 1976 and reprinted numerous times subsequently.49 The historiographical statements of Erdmann, Zeller, Fischer, and Høffding, to whom Lovejoy referred in his study of 1904, can be seen within this Bruckerian model for the history of philosophy. 50 In other words, the early Lovejoy had not only learned something about past thinkers by studying the history of philosophy, he had also acquainted himself with certain historiographical tools by which this history was narrated—the concepts of principle and system of philosophy being the most important tricks of the trade.

In his 1904 essay, Lovejoy consciously posed as a historian of philosophy when refuting McIntyre's assessment of the relationship between Bruno and Spinoza, and he did so by means of a novel identification of the principles in their respective systems. In this endeavor, he employed uncritically historiographical categories commonly used in nineteenth-century histories of philosophy, i.e., principles, "deductions" from them, and systems of philosophy produced by such deductions. Although his identification of the two thinkers' principles may have been a novelty, his use of these categories [End Page 106] was certainly not. On the contrary, it even appears naive if compared with criticism levelled by prominent nineteenth-century historians of philosophy. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for instance, had complained that Brucker's axiomatic-deductive method was formalistic and ahistorical51; Zeller argued, in the second half of the nineteenth century, that historians of philosophy should not deal with their material "from above," that is, deductively, according to pre-established concepts about the grand schemes of historical development, as Hegel's notion system of development encourages one to do, but "from below," that is, inductively, on the basis of historical evidence.52 Zeller did not reject the historiographical concepts of principle and system of philosophy entirely, but he watered them down to regulative concepts, which had to accommodate historical and textual observations. Lovejoy, who otherwise treated Zeller with admiration, carried out a practice contrary to the one recommended by Zeller, since he repeatedly sought to explain the "systems" of individual philosophers on the basis of "deductions" from their "principles." When seen in this context, Lovejoy appears as a rather conservative historian of philosophy who returned to some of the more problematic and unsophisticated strains in the tradition, even though important scholars in the nineteenth century had criticized these historiographical notions.