Ralph Cudworth was born at Aller in Somersetshire in 1617. His father, also a learned man, died in 1624, and his mother then married Dr. Stoughton, who took the greatest pains with his stepson’s education. In 1630 he went to Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 1640, after a brilliant university career, he was presented to the Rectory of North Cadbury, Somersetshire. He was not long a parish priest, for in 1644 he was appointed Master of Clare and stopped at Cambridge, almost without break, for the remaining forty-four years of his life. He was, in 1645, appointed Regius Professor of Hebrew; in 1654, Master of Christ’s; and in 1678 Prebendary of Gloucester Cathedral. He died in 1688. Cudworth is best known by his “True Intellectual System of the Universe” (1678), and his “Treatise on Eternal and Immutable Morality” (not published till 1731). He also wrote a “Discourse concerning the true Notion of the Lord’s Supper,” a “Treatise of Free Will,” a couple of sermons, and a work on Daniel’s prophecy of the LXX weeks.

Personal

  He was a man of great conduct and prudence; upon which his enemies did very falsely accuse him of craft and dissimulation.

  Of his personal character and manners we have no description; nor is it easy to discern the familiar lineaments of the man, as he lived and moved among his friends, through all the meagre and desultory vagueness of Birch’s “Account,” or any other notices of his life which have come down to us. In his correspondence with Worthington, we have seen some trace of a slight narrowness and jealousy of temper; but this is a mere transitory ebullition, which after all may mean very little. More’s more agile and discursive spirit had outstripped him in his favourite intellectual ambition of writing a book on “Natural Ethics,” and some soreness of feeling was excusable in the circumstances. Such indications as we can gather point upon the whole to an elevated and noble character—a spirit not only free from the vulgar sectarianisms of the time, but intent upon high objects, and generous as it was lofty. His portrait conveys the same impression. If somewhat heavily lined, like that of Whichcote, and even touched with austerity in its massive and long-drawn features, it is also full of sweetness. The face is that of a severe and powerful, but also a gentle-minded and tolerantly meditative, student.

Intellectual System of the Universe, 1678

  Raised such strong objections against the being of God, and Providence, that many think he has not answered them.

  You know the common fate of those who dare to appear fair authors. What was that pious and learned man’s case, who wrote the intellectual system of the universe? I confess it was pleasant enough to consider, that though the whole world were no less satisfied with his capacity and learning, than with his sincerity in the cause of Deity; yet was he accused of giving the upperhand to the Atheists, for having only stated their reasons, and those of their adversaries, fairly together.

  The very slowest were able to unravel his secret purpose—to tell the world that he was an atheist in his heart and an Arian in his book! Would the reader know the consequence?—why the zealots inflamed the bigots?—

“’Twas the time’s plague, when madmen led the blind.”

The silly calumny was believed; the much-injured author grew disgusted; his ardour slackened; and the rest, and far greatest part, of the defence never appeared.

  Cudworth never went out of his way for the sake of paradox, never degenerated into affectations for the purpose of displaying originality, was content to be full of his subject, instead of making his subject full of himself; it was not his aim to wrap himself in the clouds of conceitedness, and to make himself obscure to the multitude, but to render himself as intelligible as the subject would admit. His object was to seek for the truth wherever it might be found, and to communicate truth to whomsoever it was desirable.

  It contains the greatest mass of learning and argument that ever was brought to bear on atheism. A thousand folio pages, full of learned quotations, and references to all heathen and sacred antiquity, demonstrate the fertility and laborious diligence of the author. And whoever wishes to know all that can be said respecting liberty and necessity, fate and free-will, eternal reason and justice, and arbitrary omnipotence, has only to digest the “Intellectual System.”

  It is this mine of recondite quotations in their original languages, most accurately translated, which has imparted such an enduring value to this treasure of the ancient theology, philosophy, and literature: for however subtle and logical was the mastermind which carried on his trains of reasoning, its abstract and abstruse nature could not fail to prove repulsive to the superficial; for few could follow the genius who led them into “the very darkest recesses of antiquity,” while his passionless sincerity was often repugnant to the narrow creed of the orthodox…. “The Intellectual System” has furnished many writers with their secondary erudition, and possibly may have given rise to that portion of “the Divine Legation” of Warburton whose ancient learning we admire for its ingenuity, while we retreat from its paradoxes; for there is this difference between this solid and that fanciful erudition,—that Warburton has proudly made his subject full of himself, while Cudworth was earnest only to be full of his subject.

  As a vast storehouse of learning, and also as a display of wonderful powers of subtle and far-reaching speculation, this celebrated work is almost unrivalled in our literature; and it is also written in a style of elastic strength and compass which places its author in a high rank among our prose classics.

  Cudworth, who was much superior to Hume in learning, and much inferior to him in genius, displayed, in his great work on the “Intellectual System of the Universe,” a prodigious erudition, to prove that, in the ancient world, the belief in one God was a prevailing doctrine. Hume, who never refers to Cudworth, arrives at a precisely opposite conclusion. Both quoted ancient writers; but while Cudworth drew his inferences from what he found in those writers, Hume drew his from what he found in his own mind. Cudworth, being more learned, relied on his reading; Hume, having more genius, relied on his intellect. Cudworth, trained in the school of Bacon, first collected the evidence, and then passed the judgment. Hume, formed in a school entirely different, believed that the acuteness of the judge was more important than the quantity of the evidence; that witnesses were likely to prevaricate; and that he possessed, in his own mind, the surest materials for arriving at an accurate conclusion. It is not, therefore, strange, that Cudworth and Hume, pursuing opposite methods, should have obtained opposite results, since such a discrepancy is, as I have already pointed out, unavoidable, when men investigate, according to different plans, a subject which, in the existing state of knowledge, is not amenable to scientific treatment.

  Cudworth, even with Mosheim’s help, must have left the impression upon foreign scholars that our scholarship was somewhat unwieldy. The admirers of Descartes must have thought that one who was in a certain sense his English disciple, had not caught much of this lucid method. Yet to us Cudworth can never be an unimportant person. In the days of Hobbes, in the days when the notion of Hobbes respecting the Divine Being as a mere power, was creeping into the minds of divines of various schools, was finding props in Puritanism and in anti-Puritanism, he stood forth bravely and nobly as the asserter of a moral Divinity, as the witness that wherever the idea of morality is wanting, there is potential, there will be actual, atheism.

  The series of emancipations of morality begins with the Intellectual System of Ralph Cudworth.

General

  An excellent and learned divine, of highest authority at home, and fame abroad.

  He was a good antiquary, mathematician, and philosopher; and was superior to all his contemporaries in metaphysics.

  A much more eminent and enlightened man than Gale, Ralph Cudworth, by his “Intellectual System of the Universe,” published in 1678, but written several years before, placed himself in a middle point between the declining and rising schools of philosophy: more independent of authority, and more close perhaps in argument, than the former; but more prodigal of learning, more technical in language, and less conversant with analytical and inductive processes of reasoning, than the latter. Upon the whole, however, he belongs to the school of antiquity; and probably his wish was to be classed with it. Cudworth was one of those whom Hobbes had roused by the atheistic and immoral theories of the Leviathan; nor did any antagonist perhaps of that philosopher bring a more vigorous understanding to the combat. This understanding was not so much obstructed in its own exercise by a vast erudition, as it is sometimes concealed by it from the reader. Cudworth has passed more for a recorder of ancient philosophy, than for one who might stand in a respectable class among philosophers; and his work, though long, being unfinished, as well as full of digression, its object has not been fully apprehended.

  If an ordinary sensible Englishman takes up even such a book as Cudworth’s “Immutable Morality,” it is nearly inevitable that he should put it down as mystical fancy. True as a considerable portion of the conclusions of that treatise are or may be, nevertheless the truth is commonly so put as to puzzle an Englishman, and the error so as particularly to offend him…. We do not mean that Cudworth’s style is not as good [as] or better than the style of Butler: but that the language and illustrations of the latter belong to the same world as that we live in, have a relation to practice, and recall sentiments we remember to have felt and sensations which are familiar to us; while those of Cudworth, on the contrary, seem difficult, and are strange in the ears of the common people.

  At a time when the history of philosophy was still unknown as a science, he cast his glance over all the systems of antiquity, and brought their results together, if not critically, yet with an appreciation of their difference and relations which would be in vain sought for in any other writer of the century. Immersed in Platonic and pseudo-Platonic conceptions which frequently distort his view of the opinions of others, he seldom allowed them to dominate or corrupt his own rational vision. He kept the eye of his own reason single; and it was a large, open, and discerning eye. On the one hand, he sought to purify the conceptions of the popular theology; and, on the other hand, to vindicate for man a genuine sphere of religious and moral idea, in which he could move freely yet feel securely. The rights of reason and of conscience are alike dear to him.

  He seems to have been a shy, retiring man, with something of Hooker’s disposition; like Hooker, also, an industrious and profound scholar. He was not of a controversial turn, but was pressed by his friends to take the field against Hobbes, Atheism, and every form of heterodoxy. He stated the opinions of his opponents at such length and with such candour that his sincerity was suspected; and he was so alarmed at the outcry raised by his honourable and ingenuous fashion of polemic, that he refrained from farther publication.

  In combating the atheists, he displays a prodigious amount of erudition, and that rare degree of candour which prompts a controversialist to give a full statement of the opinions and arguments which he means to refute.

  His writings might have been produced in a lonely and silent monastery, instead of amid the rage of factions and the reverberation of the Naseby guns. The hurry and passion of their age are wholly absent from them: with infinite leisure they conduct the reader to the Schools of Athens and Alexandria, and beguile him there with spacious arguments, interrupted often by a series of concentric episodes, till he forgets where he is, and is lost, except to the world of theosophic abstractions.

  Cudworth is probably the most learned, able, and sensible of his school. The book is in form as much historical as argumentative. The fourth chapter, which is more than half the book, is intended to show that a primitive monotheistic creed was implied in the ancient paganism. The rest of the book is devoted to a consideration of the various forms of atheism held by the ancient philosophers, with an elaborate reply to their arguments. Cudworth was undoubtedly aiming at Hobbes, the great contemporary advocate of materialist philosophy, but his discussion generally takes the shape of an attack upon Democritus, Strabo, and Lucretius, and a defence of Plato and Aristotle. Though abandoning the old scholasticism, he scarcely appreciates the modern theories of Bacon, Descartes, and Spinoza,… and thus appears rather antiquated for his time. His profound learning in the ancient philosophy did not lead him, like his friend Henry More, into the mysticism of the later platonists.

  Cudworth’s works deserve to be studied by the modern student of English literature, not only for the excellence of their style but for the value of their contents. Many of his strictures upon the materialistic philosophies of his own and of a bygone day still bear on latter-day controversies, while his exhortations to live the Christ-like life rather than wrangle over doctrinal niceties would not come amiss in these times of party shibboleths.

  His life was mainly spent in his study, in the production of vast folios, where the ingots of philosophy lay stored while Locke’s current coin passed nimbly from hand to hand. The contrast between the men and the systems is complete at every point; and it is assuredly one of the strangest ironies of fate that Cudworth’s daughter should have become the good angel of Locke’s old age. Cudworth is no doubt by much the more attractive figure to imaginative minds; but it must be conceded as an indisputable truth that his way of thinking could not possibly have produced nearly so much good, have so profoundly leavened men’s ideas on legislation and education, or have so contributed to build up the national character for sound common sense. This admitted, Cudworth may be heartily praised as a sublime and refined thinker, epithets inappropriate to Locke.