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Updated: June 6, 2025
Doctor Cudworth, in his Intellectual System, reckons four species of atheists among the ancients. First. The disciples of Anaximander, called Hylopathians, who attributed every thing to matter destitute of feeling.
When once the genius of Locke was in the ascendant, more spiritual forms of philosophy fell into disrepute. Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz were considered almost obsolete; More and Cudworth were out of favour: and there was but scanty tolerance for any writer who could possibly incur the charge of transcendentalism or mysticism.
At times he chuckles and rubs his hands, and his slant little black eyes twinkle merrily at the thought of the funny world. For out of all his living and philosophizing, that remains to him the conviction that it is a very funny world. "You cannot escape liking the climate," Cudworth said, in reply to my panegyric on the Kona coast.
We know the books which Turgot and his friends devoured with ardour. Locke, Bayle, Voltaire, Buffon, relieved Clarke, Leibnitz, Spinosa, Cudworth; and constant discussions among themselves both cleared up and enlarged what they read.
Not with John Hales, Cudworth, Whichcote, Nicholas Bernard, Meric Casaubon, nor with any of the men of letters who were churchmen, do we find Milton in correspondence. The interest of religion was more powerful than the interest of knowledge; and the author of Eikonoklastes must have been held in special abhorrence by the loyal clergy.
The second, which is described as a species of Divine or Theistic Fate, is that which admits the existence and agency of God, but teaches that He both decrees and does, purposes and performs all things, whether good or evil, as if He were the only real agent in the universe, or as if He had no moral character, and were, as Cudworth graphically expresses it, "mere arbitrary will omnipotent:" this he describes as a "Divine Fate immoral and violent."
The "phantastical power" which Cudworth talks about clearly includes something besides. It is an erroneous supposition that when we are dreaming there is a complete suspension of the voluntary powers, and consequently an absence of all direction of the intellectual processes.
He must have had as his allies there Cudworth and Whichcote, men of his own age, and one younger, Stillingfleet, the Latitudinarians, from whom our Broad Churchmen are theologically descended. The evil days came soon: despite the petition of the Fellows who wished to keep him, he was ejected from the Mastership when the King came back.
He had learnt much from the sublime Christian philosophy of his eminent instructors at Cambridge, Cudworth and Henry More, John Smith and Whichcote, under whom his heart and intellect had attained a far wider reach than they could ever have gained in the school of Calvin.
The laws for which he contends must have had no author to establish, and can have no superior will to control them; they had no beginning, and can have no end; they cannot be reversed, suspended, or interfered with; they are necessary, immutable, and eternal, not subordinate to God, but independent of Him; they are, in short, nothing less than Destiny or Fate, the same that Cudworth describes as the Democritic, Physiological, or Atheistic Fate, which consists in "the material necessity of all things without a God."
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