Journal of the history of ideas. Vol. 2, No. 3 (Junt., 1941), pp.

257-278

When the student reviews the vast sequence of arguments and opinions
which fill our historical textbooks, he is likely to feel bewildered by the
multiplicity and seeming diversity of the matters presented. Even if the array
of material is simplified somewhat by the aid of conventional and largely
misleading - classifications of philosophers by schools or -isms, it still
appears extremely various and complicated; each age seems to evolve new
species of reasonings and conclusions, even though upon the same old
problems (LOVEJOY, 1936, p.3-4).

It is not, perhaps, superfluous to remark also that the doctrines or tendencies

that are designated by familiar names ending in -ismor -ity, though they
occasionally may be, usually are not, units of the sort which the historian of
ideas seeks to discriminate. […] Idealism, romanticism, rationalism,
transcendentalism, pragmatism, all these trouble-breeding and usually
thought-obscuring terms, which one sometimes wishes to see expunged from
the vocabulary of the philosopher and the historian altogether, are names of
complexes, not of simples (LOVEJOY, 1936, p.5-6).

I shall, for the sake of brevity, assume that it furnishes sufficient proof, if any were needed, that
“Romanticism” has no generally understood meaning and has therefore come to be useless.
(LOVEJOY, 1941, p.258)

Finally, it is a part of the eventual task of the history of ideas

to apply its own distinctive analytic method in the attempt to
understand how new beliefs and intellectual fashions are introduced
and diffused, to help to elucidate the psychological
character of the processes by which changes in the vogue and
influence of ideas have come about;

262

The first task of the historiographer of ideas is a task of logical analysis – the discrimination in the
texts, and the segregating out of texts, of each of what I shall call the basic or germinal ideas, the
identification of each of them so that it can be recognized wherever it appears, in differing
contexts, under labels or phrasings, an in diverse provinces of thought (LOVEJOY, 1941, p.262).
264

264

265

266
 Boas 79

The conflict between the way in which people behave and the way the “ought” to behave concerns
the historian of ideas in two ways, mainly when the conflict stimulates the formation of new ideas
of what ought to be and, secondarily, when attempts are made to demine the ruling ideas of a
period.

72

place, the pathos of sheer obscurity, the

no bottom to them. Akin to this is the pathos
of the esoteric.
eternalistic pathos –

last - the monistic or pantheistic

understanding
of that with which he deals is desirable in the historical
specialist,
a division of these studies by periods, or groups within periods; would, it might plausibly be argued,
be more appropriate than a division by countries, races, or languages.