Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688)

Member of seventeenth century school of philosophers known as the "Cambridge Platonists"; b. at Aller, in Somersetshire (12 m. s.w. of. Wells), 1617; d. at Cambridge June 26, 1688. He entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1632, and, after taking his M.A. degree in 1639, became fellow and tutor of the college. In 1642 he entered the lists against the Catholic party with his first published work, A Discourse concerning the True Nature of the Lord's Supper, which he considers to be that of a "feast upon a sacrifice," analogous to the feasts which followed the legal sacrifices among the Jews; not itself sacrificium, but, in Tertullian's language, participatio sacrificii. Soon after he published The Union of Christ and the Church; in a Shadow, in which he attempted to vindicate what he thought Protestants had too much lost sight of, the higher meaning of marriage. Young as he was, he had already mastered all the main sources of philosophy, medieval as well as classical, and quotes freely from the Neoplatonists and Cabalists, as well as from such modern Platonists as Vives and Pico della Mirandola . In 1644 he was appointed master of Clare Hall by the Parliamentary visitors, and a year later was made regius professor of Hebrew, a position which his knowledge of Jewish literature and antiquities made congenial to him. It seems that he thought of leaving Cambridge in 1651, but the election to the mastership of Christ's College in 1654 settled him there anew. In spite of his close relations with the Commonwealth government, he was undisturbed at the Restoration, and was even presented in 1662 to the rectory of Ashwell in Herefordshire by Sheldon, archbishop of Canterbury, and made a prebendary of Gloucester in 1678. Academic and philosophic labors occupied the remainder of his life. Alarmed by the tendencies of the irreligious and deistic writers of the time, especially Hobbes, he essayed to meet them by a counter-philosophy which should go to the depth of human thought and belief. The most important part of what in his conception was intended to constitute one great whole was The True Intellectual System of the Universe, finished in 1671 but not published until 1678. Its full importance was not recognized until after its author's death; Le Clerc published extracts from it in 1703, and attracted to it the attention of Continental thinkers; in 1706 an abridged edition was published in London by Wise; and in 1733 a Latin version appeared with notes of his own, reproduced in the London edition of 1845. In this great treatise Cudworth combated the atheistic hypothesis.

He planned to set forth, against various forms of fatalism which appeared to him inconsistent with the true order of the universe, three great principles which should sum up religious and moral truth. These were (1) the reality of a supreme divine intelligence and a spiritual world, against the atomistic materialism of Democritus and Epicurus; (2) the eternal reality of moral ideas against the medieval Nominalists and their successors; and (3) the reality of moral freedom and responsibility in man against all pantheistic naturalism and stoicism. Of these the Intellectual System deals formally with the first only. To the later parts belong the Treatise on Eternal and Immutable Morality, posthumously published by Bishop Chandler in 1731, and the Treatise on Free Will, ed. Allen, 1838, as well as some two thousand folio pages of manuscript still lying in the British Museum. As a philosopher he was not a pure Platonist; in metaphysics, indeed, he followed Plato and the Neoplatonists, but in natural philosophy the Atomists, and in that of religion Lord Herbert of Cherbury. His theological standpoint was determined partly by his philosophy, partly by the circumstances of his time. He asserted the necessity of revealed religion, but saw in philosophy a divine illumination. Averse from partisan strife, he held a middle course between the rigid High-churchmanship of the school of Laud and Independent fanaticism, combining the recognition, with the former, of the rightfulness of an ecclesiastical constitution and an order of worship, and with the latter of the necessity of inner light and an unswerving devotion to ethical ideals.