Abstract
The frontispiece of Ralph Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe presents in visual summary, the classification of ancient philosophers into theists and atheists which occupies the book’s nine hundred pages. The theists are represented by Pythagoras, Aristotle and Socrates, grouped on the left, with their eyes or hands directed heavenwards. The atheists represented by Anaximander, Epicurus and Strato are ranged on the right-hand side, with their attention on anything but heaven. To this day Cudworth’s repetitious and forbiddingly learned tome is remembered for its arguments against atheism. The True Intellectual System exemplifies rational religious apologetics in action: the erudite fashioning of arguments drawn from the whole of history, including antique atheism and contemporary natural philosophy to beat the unbeliever ‘at his own weapon’.1 The title of the abbreviated re-issue of the work by Thomas Wise in 1706 underlines the work’ s apologetic character: A Confutation of the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism.
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Notes
Full title: True Intellectual System of the Universe wherein all the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism is Confuted and its Impossibility Demonstrated (London, 1672), (hereafter TIS). Although he was the most philosophical of the Cambridge Platonists, Cudworth remains relatively neglected by historians of philosophy. There has been no major study of him since J.A. Passmore, Ralph Cudworth. An Interpretation (Cambridge: CUP, 1951). On his use of classical philosophy see Gunnar Aspelin, `Ralph Cudworth’s Interpretation of Greek Philosophy“, Göteborg’s Högskolas Arsskrift, 49 (1943), pp.1–47.
See M.H. Nicolson, “Christ’s College and the Latitude Men”, Modern Philology, 27 (1929), pp.35–53. Cudworth was the friend and confidante of John Thurloe, Secretary of State to both Oliver and Richard Cromwell.
Cudworth to Limborch, 16 March 1675, “Utique in hac nostra Ecclesia Anglicana, tanquam in Arca Noachi, omne genus Animalium, (si ita loqui liceat) Protestantium; Calviniani, Remonstrantes, et credo etiam Sociniani, una cohabitant; conspirates sine ulla aperta Discordia, in unam et eandem Extemam Communionem”. Amsterdam, Universiteits Bibliotheek, MS M. 21. c.
On Cudworth and Descartes see D.B. Sailor, “Cudworth and Descartes”, JHI, 23 (1962), pp.133–40; L.A. Gysi, Platonism and Cartesiansm in the Philosophy of Ralph Cudworth (Bern, 1962); A. Pacchi, Cartesio in Inghilterra (Florence, 1971).
Hereafter ElM. I have used the edition appended to J.J. Harrison’s 3 volume edition of The True Intellectual System (London 1845), vol. III. See also the new edition by S. Hutton (Cambridge, 1996).
n voluntarist and necessitarian theology see Francis Oakley, Omnipotence,Covenant and Order (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), A. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1986), E.M. Klaren, Religious Origins of Modern Science (Grand Rapids, 1977), J.H. Brooke, Science and Religion. Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), John Henry, “Henry More versus Robert Boyle” in Henry More (1614–1687). Tercentenary Studies edited by S. Hutton (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), J.E. Macguire, “Force, Active Principles and Newton’s Invisible Realm”, Ambix 15 (1968), pp.154–208; Francis Oakley, “Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science: the Rise of the Concept of Laws of Nature”, Church History, 30 (1961), pp.433–57. Also, M. Osier, “Providence and Divine Will in Gassendi’s Views on Scientific Knowledge”, JHI, 44 (1968), pp.549–60; eadem, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), and “Triangulating the divine will. Henry More, Robert Boyle and Descartes on God’s Relation to the Creation”, in `Mind Senior to the World’. Stoicismo e origenismo nella filosofia platonica del seicento inglese edited by M.-L. Baldi (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1996), pp. 75–87.
Cudworth to Limborch, 10 February 1668 (stylo vetero), Amsterdam, Universiteits Bibliotheek, MS. M. 21. a.
TIS, sig. (A3).
bid., p. 647.
Ibid., p.717. Compare EIM, p. 539: “Now it is certain, that if the natures and essences of all things, as to their being such or such, do depend upon a will of God that is essentially arbitrary, there can be no such thing as science or demonstration, nor the truth of any mathematical or metaphysical proposition be known any otherwise, than by some revelation of the will of God…Truth and falsehood would be only names. Neither would there be any more certainty in the knowledge of God himself, since it must wholly depend upon the mutability of a will in him essentially indifferent and undetermined”.
TIS, pp.202 and 203.
lbid. p.873.
TIS, p.718.
EIM, p.601.
Ibid., p.507.
Derived ultimately from the Platonic anima mundi, the ‘Plastic Nature’ is a spiritual agent of God, the chief instrument of His government of the physical universe. See W.B. Hunter, “The Seventeenth-century Doctrine of Plastic Nature”, Harvard Theological Review, 43 (1950), pp.197–213; A. Jacob, “The Neoplatonic Conception of Nature in More, Cudworth, and Berkeley”, in The Uses of Antiquity edited by S. Gaukroger (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991); A. Petit, “Ralph Cudworth: un platonisme paradoxal, la nature dans la Digression concerning the Plastick Nature”, in. The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context edited by G.A.J. Rogers et al (Dordrecht, 1997).
TIS, p.150.
lbid, pp.154–5.
Ibid, p.35. For Cudworth on atomism and the mechanical philosophy see T. Gregory, “Studi sull’atomismo del seicento, III: Cudworth e l’atomismo”, Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 46 (1967), pp.558–541; A. Gabbey, “Cudworth, More and the Mechanical Analogy”, in Philosophy,Science and Religion in England, 1640–1700, edited by R. Kroll et al. (Cambridge: CUP, 1992).
TIS, p.36.
lbid., p.680.
lbid., p.36.
lbid., p.36.
Ibid., p.671. G. Giglioni, “Automata compared: Boyle, Leibniz and the Debate on the Notion of Life and Mind”, Brithish Journal of the History of Philosophy 3 (1995), pp. 24978.
E/M, p.592, 596.
lbid., p.597.
Ibid., p.594.
T/S, p.154.
With mathematics as his model he argues that the more abstract knowledge is, the closer it is to truth and that “scientifical knowledge is best acquired by the soul’s abstracting itself from outward objects of sense and retiring into itself, that so it may better attend to its own inward notions and ideas”. EIM, p.581.
TIS p.858.
E/M, pp.584–6, 603–5.
Ibid., p.587.
Ibid., p.587.
Ibid., p.588.
Ibid.
Ibid., p.592.
lbid., p.594.
ibid., p.594–5.
bid., p.595. The perception of beauty corresponds to the process of cognition, or, to be more exact, derives from it. We would be unable to recognise beauty if the mind could not form `ideas of regular, proportionate, and symmetrical figures within itself. The `active power of the soul’ compares external objects, deriving pleasure from them. Sense impressions alone produce passive and indifferent effects. `Pulchritude’ as Cudworth calls beauty, is innate `not merely artificial, from institution or instruction, or taught of things, but such as springs from nature itself. Thus it is the mental character of beauty which makes it natural, not the (natural) objects which are perceived as beautiful.
lbid., p.572.
bid., p.581.
Ibid., p.581. cf. TIS, p. 638.
Ibid., p.601.
The epistemological underpinning of this is thoroughly Neoplatonic. The process whereby the observer infers that the universe must have a creator is a process of ascent from corporeal to spiritual, “’he most natural scale by which the intellectual mind in the contemplation of corporeal things ascends to God”. (EIM, pp. 595–6). Several times in the TIS he criticises atheists for disregarding the scale of nature, whereby one ascends from less perfect beings towards more perfect ones and so, ultimately to God. e.g. TIS, p. 858.
E/M, p.597. Cudworth also uses the analogy of speech: to the senses words are just air or dumb signs. To the intellect they signify ideas and cogitations. There is no intrinsic likeness between the sounds of words and their meaning, only what the mind brings to them when it hears particular sounds. EIM, pp.612–3.
Ibid., p. 597.
Ibid., p. 594.
Ibid.
On Cudworth and Hobbes, see S.I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan (Cambridge, 1962).
E1M, p. 683.
Ibid., p. 644.
lbid.
Ibid., p. 644.
See above.
On Henry More and Descartes, see Alan Gabbey, “Philosophia cartesiana triumphata: Henry More and Descartes, 1646–71”, in Problems in Cartesianism edited by T.M. Lennon, J.M. Nicholas and J.W. Davis (Kingston and Montreal, 1982), pp. 171–249.
TS, pp.228 and 516.
Ibid., p.683.
Ibid., p.684.
Ibid., p.683.
TIS, p. 646.
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Hutton, S. (2001). Ralph Cudworth, God, Mind and Nature. In: Crocker, R. (eds) Religion, Reason and Nature in Early Modern Europe. Archives Internationales d’histoire des Idées / International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 180. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9777-7_4
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