Lovejoy's "Parallel" Reconsidered

THAT GREAT HISTORIAN OF IDEAS and of the eighteenth century, Arthur 0. Lovejoy, read the paper Parallel of Deism and Classicism in 1930; it was first printed in Modern Philology in 1932 and then reprinted in Essays in the History of Ideas (1948), which contains Lovejoy's most celebrated pieces and has not since been out of print. The paper asserted an essential unity in Enlightenment rationalism, declaring it to be no formal creed but the spirit of the age, a set of assumptions and preconceptions-a cultural product, though Lovejoy said nothing here about its historical origins. Lovejoy is often associated with quite a different position. The author of On the Discrimination of Romanticisms, who elsewhere found thirteen kinds of pragmatism and at least eighteen definitions of nature, seemed to display a nominalist scepticism about such large generalizations. (There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that upon his becoming a regent of the University of Maryland, legislators inquired about his religious orthodoxy; he confounded them by asking which of the thirty or so meanings of God they had in mind.) But he later found more unity in Romanticism, as readers of The Great Chain of Being know, and the program he puts forth for the study of ideas 1 includes not only analyzing complex ideas into their components, but also synthesizing them, through drawing together studies from the different disciplines, to form the picture of a whole. Lovejoy evidently believed strongly in the exis

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