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Updated: June 6, 2025
In philosophy, Hobbes now uttered his defiance to constitutional freedom and ecclesiastical independence; Henry More expounded his platonic dreams in the cloisters of Cambridge; and Cudworth vindicated the belief in the being of the Almighty and in the foundations of moral distinctions.
Cudworth was one of those who attended the Whitehall Conference, summoned by Cromwell in 1655 to discuss the readmission of the Jews to England. Platonic influence was always prevalent in mystical thought. The Cabbala has intimate relations with neo-Platonism. The question raised as to the preservation of Yiddish is not unimportant at this juncture.
Cudworth has so zealously collected, with the view of proving "the naturality of the idea of God," must be interpreted, at least in many instances, in a Pantheistic sense, and that they imply nothing more than the recognition of one parent Substance, from which all other beings have been successively developed. We find some lingering remains of Pantheism in the writings of the middle age.
The only other ethical determinations made by Cudworth may thus be summarized: Things called naturally Good and Due are such as the intellectual nature obliges to immediately, absolutely, and perpetually, and upon no condition of any voluntary action done or omitted intervening; things positively Good and Due are such as are in themselves indifferent, but the intellectual nature obliges to them accidentally or hypothetically, upon condition, in the case of a command, of some voluntary act of another person invested with lawful authority, or of one's self, in the case of a specific promise.
Gregory Nyssen, Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus and Damascen were charged with "a kind of Tritheism" by Petavius and Dr. Cudworth, who, according to Sherlock, have "mistaken their meaning." See pp. 106-9, of this "Vindication." Ib. p. 117. Is not God conscious to all my thoughts, though I am not conscious of God's?
Hickes, and others upon the same subject. It might have been well if the works of such men as H. More and Cudworth, J. Smith and Norris, had made a deeper impression on eighteenth-century thought. Their exalted but restrained mysticism and their lofty system of morality was the very corrective which the tone of the age most needed.
Cudworth, in his intellectual system, is wholly of the same opinion: "All the books and writings which we converse with, they can but represent spiritual objects to our understanding, which yet we can never see in their own true figure, colour, and proportion, until we have a divine light within to irradiate and shine upon them.
Cudworth, at all events, held this view. Engaged as he was, during a lengthened period of intellectual activity, in combating a philosophical system which, alike in theology, morals, and politics, appeared to him to sap the foundations of every higher principle in human nature, he was led by the whole tenour of his mind to dwell upon the existence in the soul of perceptions not derivable from the senses, and to expatiate on the immutable distinctions of right and wrong.
Professor Flint as against Cudworth, Ebrard, Gladstone, and others, maintains that the Egyptian religion at the very dawn of its history had "certain great gods," though he adds that "there were not so many as in later times." "Ancestor worship, but not so developed as in later times, and animal worship, but very little of it compared with later times."
Demonstrations of this kind were the characteristics of the period. Des Cartes had set the example of constructing them, and was followed by Cudworth, Clarke, Berkeley, and many others besides Spinoza.
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