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.
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