Ralph Cudworth: An Interpretation

Citation preview

RALPH CUDWORTH

RALPH CUDWORTH An Interpretation

J. A.

BY

PASSMORE

Professor of Philosophy in the University of Otago

CAMBRIDGE AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

1951

PUBLISHED BY THE SYNDICS OF THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

London Office: Bentley House, N.W. 1 American Branch: New York Agents for Canada, India, and Pakistan: Macmillan

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY HEADLEY BROTHERS LTD 109 KINGSWAY LONDON WC2 AND ASHFORD KENT

CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE

Vll

ABBREVIATIONS

X

CHAPTER

I CUDWORTH AND HIS PREDECESSORS

I

II CUDvVORTH ON MIND AND NATURE

19

III CUDWORTH'S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

29

IV 'ETERNAL AND IMMUTABLE MORALITY '

40

V CUDWORTH'S MORAL PSYCHOLOGY VI THE GOOD LIFE VII ETHICS AND RELIGION VIII CUDWORTH AND THE BRITISH MORALISTS

5I 68

79 go

APPENDIX: THE CUDWORTH MANUSCRIPTS

I 07

A CUDWORTH BIBLIOGRAPHY

I 14

INDEX OF NAMES

I I9

T

PREFACE

is not the book I intended to write. 1\!Iy original purpose was to study the historical development of ethical rationalism in England, from Cudworth to the present day, in an attempt to understand its persistent vitality. I began to read the Cudworth manuscripts in the expectation that they would confirm the traditional account of his ethics, and would allow me to write of him as the first English representative of modern rationalism. But once the initial difficulty of sorting out the manuscripts had been overcome, an ethics began to emerge which looked very different from the 'Cudworth's ethics' of the text-books. With this clue, I returned to the study of his printed books. I thought I could now discern the outlines of a theory which was both interesting in itself and historically of very consider­ able importance. This book presents that theory. It is, then, primarily a work of historical excavation. The brevity of the book is deliberate. Cudworth is not a first-order genius, whose every word must be scrutinized with care. It would be absurd to trace out every change in the movement of his thought, to mention every inconsistency into which he falls, or to expound his views on matters which are not now of the slightest interest to anyone. There are obvious dangers in a policy of selection; but Cudworth must somehow be rescued from his own wordiness. No doubt other Cudworths could be hewn out of the great mass of his work; I hope I have not ascribed to him any views which he at no time held, but I do not pretend to be presenting every view he at any time maintained. I have not hesitated to modernize spelling, punctuation, capitalization; the reader of Cudworth has enough obstacles to overcome, even in a modernized text. The first and last chapters are primarily historical. The first chapter sets out to destroy the current 'stereotype' of HIS

Vll

Vlll

PREFACE

Cudworth, which pictures him as an antiquarian, remote, in his Cambridge is olation, from the philosophical controvers ies of his own time. The las t chapter s ketches his influence on Locke, Shaftes bury, Clarke and Price. The fifth, s ixth and s eventh chapters des cribe, critically, the ethico-religious doctrines of the manus cripts ; this is the heart of the book. The remaining chapters outline Cudworth's general philo­ s ophy, especially in s o far as it is relevant to the unders tanding of his ethics . The Appendix is added for the benefit of thos e who might like to make their own way into the dis order of the Cudworth manus cripts . I have tried to acknowledge my indebtednes s to my predeces s ors in the notes and in the bibliography, but I owe s o much to works from which I have nowhere had any occas ion to quote that any s uch lis t is bound to be incomplete and s omewhat mis leading. Similarly, I cannot hope to make quite clear the extent of my indebtednes s to Profes s or John Anders on, Profes s or of Philos ophy in the Univers ity of Sydney, both becaus e he has written s o little and becaus e his own interes ts do not lie particularly within the field of s cholars hip. But to him this book owes whatever philos o­ phical qualities it may pos s es s . On the other s ide, the s ide of detailed s cholars hip, I s hould like to acknowledge the training, and the encouragement, I received from the late Profes sor A. J. Waldock and :rvlr R. G. Howarth, of the Department of English in the Univers ity of Sydney, although in the years that have s ince elaps ed I have had time to forget a great deal that they taught me. Profes s or H. B. Acton, Profes sor of Philosophy in Bedford College, the Univers ity of London, and Profes sor John Anders on have been good enough to read through the manus cript of this book-of cours e, they take no res pons ibility for its contents ; and my wife undertook the tas k, by no means a s inecure, of checking my references. Profes sor J. La N auze and Profes s or R. M. Hartwell have helped me to make my bibliography les s imperfect than it would otherwis e have been. Errors which remain must be set down to my own obs tinacy. I owe a s pecial debt of gratitude to Dr H. von Leyden, of the Univer-

PREFACE

IX

sity of Durham, for helping me to make use of the unpublished and at that time uncatalogued, Locke letters in the Bodleian Library. And then there are the libraries. Above all, of course, the British Museum, but also the Fisher Libra ry of the University of Sydney, the Dr Williams Libra ry, which much facilitated, by its generous loa n of books, the final stages of this work, the Warburg Institute, the Library of Bedford College, the Library of the London Society of Antiqua ria ns a nd the Bodleian. Finally, I should like to thank the Senate of the University of Sydney for granting me leave of absence, and the Arts Research Committee, which so generously assisted me to meet the expenses of my year in England. J.A.P. LONDON

November 1948

ABBREVIATIONS The following abbreviated references are used in this book: T.I.S.,

1,

E.I.M.,

I

1,

1,

1st Sermon, 345

2nd Sermon, 356

T.F.W., Sermons, Aphorism,

I I, I

1

I

The True Intellectual System of the Universe, Mosheim's edition, translated by John Harrison, London, 1845, Volume 1, page I. A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, Book I, Chapter 1, Section 1. A Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons at Westminster, 31 March 1647. Page 345 in the Fourth Volume of Cudworth's True Intellectual System of the Universe, London, I 820. The Second Sermon, published in the above edition, p. 356 Additional Manuscripts in the British Museum Collec­ tion, Number 4982, page 1. A Treatise on Free-will, ed. J. Allen, London, 1838, page 1. The Works of Benjamin Whichcote, Aberdeen, 1751, Volume 1, page 1. Benjamin Whichcote's Moral and Religious Aphorisms, London, I753, Number 1.

X

CHAPTER I

C

CUDWORTH AND HIS PREDECESSORS

unwoR TH is a Cambridge Platonist; that phrase has pinned him, decisively, in the historian's display-case. The facts are indisputable. He lived at Cambridge, except for a brief interval, from 1630, when he entered Emmanuel as a pensioner, until 1688, when he died, as Master of Christ's College. He was a Platonist, although his Platon­ ism was that of the Renaissance, innocent of modern scholar­ ship. And it is not merely convenient but, from certain points of view, essential to think of him as a member of a school: the religious outlook which colours all his writings, with its emphasis on moral goodness and its distrust of all mechanical rules, was the common faith of all who fell under the influence of Benjamin Whichcote. Does it follow, as is so often assumed, that Cudworth's philosophy is of interest only to antiquarians, not at all to philosophers, or even to the historian of modern ideas? So sympathetic an interpreter as F. J. Powicke will not put the importance of Cudworth's writings more strongly than this: 'a rich quarry to which an occasional student has been indebted for apt quotations and curious references' 1• Perhaps he had in mind Berkeley's 'learned Dr Cudworth'2; perhaps Locke's praise of The True Intellectual System as a book 'where­ in that very learned author, hath with such accurateness and judgment, collected and explained the opinions of the Greek philosophers'3; in any case, there is evidence to spare• that Cudworth's writings were an important repository of classical learning. The Cambridge Platonist.)-, p. I 16. Siris, § 255. 3 Thoughts on Education. 4 cf. Warburton's extensive pillaging of Cudworth in Tlze Divine Lega­ tion, in its time a most influential work. 1

2

R A L P H CUDWO RTH

But that is not the whole story. Cudworth, wrote Pierre Bayle, 'avait joint ensemble deux: qualites qui ne vont guere de compagnie. Il avait une lecture prodigieuse et un pene­ tration d'esprit extraordinaire.'1 This combination of quali­ ties had already, when Cudworth wrote, passed out of fashion; and now that the 'prodigious reading' has come to seem prodigiously uncritical-looking at it as we do from the vantage-point of several centuries of scholarship-it is tempt­ ing to underrate Cudworth's 'penetration d'esprit' and to minimize the extent of his influence. That influence we shall later describe in some detail, but one general problem has to be faced at the outset. Was his influence that of a reactionary? This is certainly the prevalent view; Leslie Stephen in the Dictionary of National Biography says of him that 'he scarcely appreciates the modern theories of Bacon, Descartes and Spinoza' 2 ; Burtt that he was 'a thinker essentially conserva­ tive and failing to share the dominant interests of the main current of his day'3 • On the face of it, these judgments are amply justified. Our first impression of Cudworth's writings is that he was a man completely submerged by classical learning, an inheritor and exponent of the dullest kind of Renaissance humanism. It would be foolish to deny that this first impression is also, to a certain extent, our last impression. This is not the side of Cudworth which I intend to emphasize: Cassirer in his Die Platonische Renaissance in England und die Schute von Cambridge and Aspelin in his Ralph Cudworth' s Inter­ pretation of Greek Philosophy have made sufficiently clear the extent, and the character, of Cudworth's indebtedness to Renaissance philosophers such as Pico della Mirandola and Ficino. At the same time, Cudworth was a member of the Royal Society. His library contained its Harvey, Boyle, Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton; among philosophers, in the modern sense, were Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, 1 2

3

Oeuvres Diverses, Vol. III, Part II, p. 88 I. Cudworth. Afetapl�vsical Foundations of Alodem Science, p.

a rt.

2

142.

CUDWO R T H AND H I S P R EDECE S S ORS

Gassendi, Spinoza. 1 This already suggests that our first impression may not be wholly trustworthy. Then again, much of his work is a sustained polemic against Hobbes. Is this characteristic of a man who turns his back on the ideas of his own period, an antiquarian concerned to glorify and revive the past? This polemic, it might be thought, was so obvious a duty that the most determined recluse could not escape the battle; Warburton has described how ' every young churchman militant would needs try his arms in thundering against Hobbes' s steel-cap' . But Cudworth initiated this tradition: his was the first full-length attack on Hob bes2 ; it was in no sense expected of him. When, in the light of these facts, we turn again to The True Intellectual System, we can readily detect the modern philo­ sophy beneath the panoply of scholarship. His immediate successors were not misled. Hume, for example, thinks of him as a philosopher, not as a scholar3 , and Hume was any­ thing but lavish in his references to his predecessors. Again, while it is true enough, as Stephen says, that Cudworth 'scarcely appreciated' Bacon and Spinoza, if 'appreciated' means liked, this is not true if it means weighed and con­ sidered; as for Descartes, Cudworth both admired him and considered him. These points are worth making in detail, partly to remove a prevalent misconception, partly because we can scarcely understand Cudworth' s philosophy except in the context established by his contemporaries. First, for Bacon. Towards his philosophy Cudworth felt a great antipathy. He is prepared to concede this much good in him, that he rightly attacked anthropomorphism in physical science: 'Some, indeed, have unskilfully attributed their own properties, or animal idiopathies, to inanimate bodies; as when they say, that matter desires forms, as the 1

Bibliotheca Cudworthiana, a catalogue of the sale of books at Roll's Coffee-House, London, 1690. 2 Cumberland's De Legibus Naturae appeared in r 672, six years before Cudworth's book; but Cudworth had been ready for publication in 1671, and had been composing his book for many years before that date. 3 cf. Enquiry , Part I, VII.

3

RALPH

CUDWORTH

female does the male; and that heavy bodies descend by appetite towards the centre, that so may rest therein; and that they sometimes ascend in discretion, to avoid a vacuum.'1 But the rejection of anthropomorphism, so Cudworth argues, does not involve us in the rejection of final causes; in thinking that it does 'the Advancer of Learning' makes his greatest mistake. Cudworth's reputation as a reactionary is often made to rest, simply, on this adherence to final causes in biology. Thus Dugald Stewart, in his discussion of Bacon's rejection of final causes, alleges that Cudworth's criticism of Bacon 'must be imputed to a superstitious r everence for the remains of Grecian learning, accompanied with a corre­ sponding dread of the unknown dangers to be apprehended from philosophical innovations'2• Yet Spinoza spoke no less severely of Bacon ('he delivered himself confusedly enough and proved next to nothing'3), and the influence of Cud­ worth's reformulated teleology, the theory of 'plastic natures', on scientists like Robert Boyle and John Ray, the r eception, appreciative and critical, which greeted his theor y on the Continent-Le Clerc, Bayle, Leibniz4 all paid more than passing attention to it-sufficiently indicate that it was no mere rehash of an established position. Cudworth's theory was not to prevail ( although it would not be at all surprising to find that it was directly continuous, through devious ways, with later doctrines of elan vital), but there was a good deal more behind it than 'a superstitious reverence for the remains of Grecian wisdom'. Otherwise, Cudworth has not a great deal to say about Bacon, although he loses no opportunity to jibe at the 'affected language' of 'idols'. He does not specifically discuss Bacon's sharp separation of religion from science, of faith from r eason, a dichotomy which is alien to the whole tendency T.I.S., 2, 607-8. Philosophy of the Human Mind, Part I I, ch. XI. 3 Spinoza's first letter to Oldenburg. 4 'Je suis done de l'avis de Mr Cudworth (dont !'excellent ouvrage me revient extremement clans la plus grand parti) que les loix du Mechanisme seules ne sauroient former un animal', Considerations sur la Principe de Vie (Histoire des Ouvrages des Savants, Mai 1 705). I

2

4

CUDWORTH

AND

HIS PREDE CESSORS

of C amb ridge Platonism. vVh ich cote wrote: 'I oppose not rational to spiritual; for spi ri tual is most rational' 1 ; and noth ing could more succinctly express C udworth' s own conviction. On th is matter, h e was prepared to let h is phi lo­ soph y speak for itself. Th e case of Spinoza is somewhat more diffi cult. If C udworth h ad ignored S pinoza, th is would not h ave b een at all surprising. Wh en Lesl ie Steph en says of C udworth th at 'h e scarcely appreciated Spinoza', th is accusation, even if it were true, would do noth ing to prove th at h e was a sch olarly recluse, fo r ex actly th e same could b e said of C udworth' s 'empiricist' successors.2 Ex pli cit references to Spinoza are certainly not common in The True Intellectual System; I can trace only two. I n th e first, Spinoza ( disguised as 'a late writer') is criticized as an ally of Hobb es in promul­ gating ' th e ath eistic account of rel igion' s so generally prevail­ ing in th e world, from its b eing a fi t engine of state'3 ; in th e second 'th at late th eological pol itician' is condemned as th e auth or of a discourse on miracles 'so weak, groundless, and inconsiderable, th at we did not th ink it h ere to deserve a confutation' 4 • I suspect, h owever, th at Spinoza played quite an important role in determining th e structure of The True Intellectual System. V ery cons iderable sections of th at b ook are devoted to a criticism of 'h ylozoistic ath eism', of wh ich C udworth writes as foll ows: 'Though it were long since started b y Strato, yet b ecause it afterwards slept in perfect silence and oblivion, [ it] sh ould h ave been h ere by us passed b y silently, h ad we not h ad certain knowledge of its b eing of late awakened and revived b y some, wh o were so sagacious as to perceive th at th e atomic form [ of ath eism] could never do th eir b usiness . . . ; as also that th is, in all prob ab ility, would, ere long, pub licly appear upon th e stage, th ough not 1

Third letter to Dr Tuckney . Berkeley refers to Spinoza in his Commonplace Book, Hume seems to have read Bayle's account of him but nothing more (cf. Laird, Hume's Philosophy of Human Nature, pp. I 63 ff) . 3 T.I.S., 2, 564. 4 T.I.S., 3, 4. 2

5

RAL P H

CUDWORTH

bare-faced, but under a disguise.' 1 Who were these mysterious revivers of the ancient view that matter as such was alive? Almost certainly it was Spinoza and his school that Cudworth had in mind. (In one of his manuscripts 2 Cudworth refers to Spinoza as 'a kind of hylozoick atheist' . ) I t needs to be remembered that the imprimatur of The True Intellectual System is dated 1 67 1 , although the actual date of publication was 1 678. That it contains any reference at all to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus ( 1 670) is, in these circum­ stances, quite surprising ; and the only work of Spinoza's Cudworth would have had any opportunity of reading at leisure is his Principles of the Cartesian Philosophy . Cudworth refers us to a much fuller exposition of 'hylozoistic atheism', which was shortly to appear. Now, we know that Cudworth was corresponding with the liberal Dutch Arminians, men like Limborch. 3 We know also that Spinoza's works circu­ lated in manuscript, so that Cudworth's hints of dreadful things to come are at least consistent with the hypothesis that his attack on hylozoism is particularly directed against Spinoza. One must admit that the details of his criticism have little relevance to Spinozism. Characteristically, Cudworth prefers to criticize hylozoism in its classical form, but when he rejects as hylozoistic the doctrine that 'extension and life, or cogitation, are two inadequate conceptions of one and the self-same substance, considered brokenly and by piecemeal . . . ; and, consequently, all souls and minds, and even the Deity itself [is] either extended life and cogitation, or living and thinking extension' 4 we can have little doubt whose teaching he is rej ecting. Bacon, then, Cudworth knew, but did not highly regard ; Spinoza he knew only imperfectly but interpreted as reviving a tradition which was worth opposing in detail. His relation 1

T.l.S., Preface, p. 56. He is not, as one might be inclined to suspect, attacking Renaissance pantheism ; pantheism he regards as a muddled sort of theism. 2 4982, 55 . 3 G. von Herding, John Locke wzd die Schule z 1 on Cambridge, p. 164 n. 4 T.I.S. , 3, 394.

6

CUDWORTH AND HIS PREDE CESSORS

to D esca rtes i s much more i nti ma te. Ma ny o f the fu nda­ menta l pri nci ples o f Cudwor th' s phi lo so phy do no t deri ve (immedia tely) ei ther fro m hi s o wn o r fro m Greek specu la tio n bu t fro m D esca rtes; a fact u sua lly o verloo ked, o ften deni ed, b y wri ters o n Cu dwo rth. 1 The exceptio n i s J. A. Stewa rt i n The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics; he reco gni zes the i nfluence, b ut do es no t i ndi ca te i n what i t co nsi sted; la ter wri ters, li ke Mui rhea d, ha ve joi ned ea rli er o nes li ke Tullo ch i n denyi ng tha t the i nflu ence wa s a t a ll sub sta ntial. Mui rhea d, i ndeed, sets o ut to sho w tha t the roo ts o f Camb ri dge Pla to ni sm li e i n Chri stian Pla to ni sm a nd tha t i t wa s no t affe cted, o r no t fu ndamentally, b y the new develo p­ ments i n seventeenth- century phi lo so phy a nd sci ence. He a dvances two po si ti ve rea so ns for thi nki ng tha t Ca rtesian i n­ fluence o n Cudwo rth was o f li ttle o r no consequence. The first i s tha t 'we ha ve the evi dence o f the po et Mi lto n, wri ti ng i n I 6 44 tha t tra di tio n a t tha t date sti ll rei gned i n Ca mb ri dge pro ­ vi di ng o nly " a n asi ni ne fea st o f so w thi stles a nd b ra mb les" ; a nd there i s no evi dence tha t Whi chco te, the founder o f the schoo l, wa s a t a ll i nflu enced b y D esca rtes. ' 2 So mu ch can b e granted: Uni versity cou rses do no t cha nge o verni ght, a nd i t wa s no t until the si xteen- seventi es tha t Ca rtesian text-boo ks were i ntro duced i nto the Uni versi ty. It i s no t surpri si ng that Mi lto n shou ld enco unter no thi ng b ut scho la sti ci sm i n the Ca mb ri dge o f I 644 ; he wo uld no t b e li kely to kno w tha t Camb ri dge pro fesso rs were co rrespo ndi ng wi th· D escartes a s ea rly a s I 640 . T he real questio n i s wha t he wou ld ha ve met wi th twenty yea rs later. T hat there wa s a welco me for 'the new phi lo so phy' a t Ca mb ri dge, a s there wa s no t a t Oxford, i s i ndi sputab le. 3 As for Whi chco te, he wa s no t i n a ny profes­ sio na l sense a phi lo so pher; Cudwo rth wa s pro foundly i nflu ­ enced b y hi s reli giou s a nd mo ra l o utloo k bu t ha d sca rcely 1

Even by Cassirer : 'Und auch die neue Grundrichtung der Philo­ sophie, die durch Descartes gewiesen worden war, bleibt der Schule von Cambridge im Ganzen fremd . ' Die Platonische Renaissance in England und die Schule von Cambridge, p. 1 . 2 The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy, p. 25. 3 S . P. Lamprecht, The Role of Descartes in Seventeenth-Century England, Columbia Studies in the History of Ideas, Vol . 3, p . 1 94.

7

R A L P H CUDWO R T H

a nything else to learn from him. We shall quite mis under­ stand Ca mbridge P latonism if w e think tha t it c onta ined from the beginning Cudwor th's philosophical doctrines, or indeed tha t it wa s a s united in philosophical belief a s it wa s ( even then with reserva tions) in its r eligious sentiments. The other point raised by Muirhea d is more serious. He a dmits tha t a t one time the Ca mbridge Pla tonists (More espec ially) thought tha t the Cartesia n philosophy ha d a c ertain affi nity with their own views, but he quotes Cudwor th's j udgment on the Cartesia ns-tha t they ha ve 'a n undisc erned tang of the mec ha nically-a theistic humour ha nging a bout them'1-a s epitomizing the ma ture judgment of Ca mbridge P latonism on Cartesianism. N ow, when Cudwor th ta lks in this way, a s he does more tha n onc e, it is a lw ays in cr itic ism of a single point in Descar tes' philosophy, viz. the theory of a nimal mec hanism. So far, Descartes wa s in the camp of the enemy, but no fur ther. It is still not mislea ding to call Cudworth a Car tesia n, so grea t wa s their a greement on so many vital issues. These points of a greement ar e ea sily enough overlooked in the grea t bulk of Cudworth's wr iting. Perhaps that is w hy Tulloc h asserts tha t 'to the famous doc trine of Consc iousness [ i. e. th e Cogito] with the princ iple of c ertitude ba sed upon it, there is singularly no a llusion either in Cudworth or More'2 , when Cudworth ha d wr itten: ' though it should be supposed tha t our senses did deceive us in all their r epresentations, a nd tha t there were no sun, no moon, no earth, tha t w e ha d no hands, no feet, no body, a s by sense w e seem to ha ve, yet r eason tells us tha t of nec essity tha t must be som ething, to whom these things seem to be, beca use nothing ca n seem to be to tha t tha t is not. '3 As for 'c er titude', no one c ould be a more enthusia stic supporter of the doc trine of clear a nd distinc t perc eptions: 'N o ma n', he writes, 'ever wa s or can be dec eived in ta king tha t for a n epistemonical tr uth whic h he c learly and distinc tly apprehends, but only in a ssenting to I 2

3

T.I.S.,

I ' 280.

Rational Theology in the Seventeenth Centmy, p. 294. E.1. Af., 2 , 6, 2 .

8

CUDWORTH AND HIS PREDE CESSORS

thing s not clea rly a pprehended by him, which is the only true origina l of all error. ' 1 It is true that he rej ects the Ca rtesia n ' divine gua ra ntee'. He a ccepted, perhaps origina ted2 , the criticism common in seventeenth- century E ng la nd, tha t Desca rtes ha d a rgued in a circle. 'F or whereas some would endea vour to prove the truth of their intellectual faculties from hence, tha t there is a God, whose na ture is also such a s tha t h e cannot deceive; it is plain tha t this is nothing but a circle a nd ma kes no prog ress a t all, forasmuch a s all the certainty which they ha ve of the existence of God, a nd of his nature, depends wholly upon the a rbitrary ma ke of their faculties. '3 But C udworth opposes Desca rtes only beca use he thinks Desca rtes ha s been false to his own doctrine. C lea r and distinct percep­ tion, a ccording to C udworth, needs no guarantee. N ot even God could ma ke it false tha t wha tever thinks exists. This is to oppose Desca rtes by Ca rtesia nism, not by unreflective conserva tism. It ma y be obj ected that on this ma tter Desca rtes wa s himself in the C hristia n tra dition, a nd so should not be con­ sidered a n independent influence. But whatever the justice of this obj ection, the same ca nnot possibly be sa id of Desca rtes' theory of the corporea l; a nd here, too, C udworth is his disciple; the a tomic theory, he considers, is the best possible founda tion of theism, provided only tha t it is combined with dualism of the Cartesia n sort, i. e. with the denia l tha t mind I

2

E.L.W., 4, 5 , 5 .

cf. Lamprecht, The Role of Descartes, p. 2 1 5. The passage from Glanvill quoted by Lamprecht naturally precedes, in date of publication, the passage quoted below from Cudworth. But Glanvil l was an Oxford convert to Cambridge Platonism, and had probably taken over this argument with so much else. It is interesting to notice that Glanvill's Platonism did not prevent him from being a zealous defender of the Royal Society and the New Science in general. On one point , indeed , he differs sharply from Cudworth : he is a great admirer of ' the famous Verulam' (cf. his Plus Ultra) . He is perhaps too l ittle conscious of the points of difference between Cambridge Platonism and the New Science , but it seemed to nobody incongruous that he should declare his allegiance at once to the Royal Society and to More and Cudworth. 3

E.l. M., 4, 5, 6.

9

RALPH

CU D W O R T H

is a body. 'We c an never suffic iently applaud that anc ient atomic al philosophy, so succ essfully r evived of late by Car tesius, in that it show s distinc tly w hat m atter is. ' 1 (D esc artes had disclaimed any assoc iation w ith D em ocritus2 and disliked being thought of as a r eviver -but that is a different m atter.) F urtherm ore, as w e shall see later, he follow s D escar tes c losely in his distinc tion between sense and thought, denying, for exam ple, that sense ac quaints us w ith t he r eal nature of body on the gr ound that 'a body m ay be c hanged to all the several senses, and r em ain r eally the same that it was before'3 • Even the Cartesian illustr ation r eappear s in a form but slightly m odified: 'j ust as w hen a m an lookin g down out of the streets, is said to see m en w alking in the streets, w hen indeed he sees nothing bu t hats and c lothes, under whic h, for all he know s, there m ay be D aedalian statues m oving up an dow n. '4 Cudworth's theory of the r elation between m ind and body is equally Car tesian. Mind is 'a distinc t substanc e' w hic h is 'intimately c onj oined to the body'. And onc e m or e there is a Cartesian analogy: if mind w er e c ontained in its body as a mariner is in a ship it w ould not feel pain w hen the body is hur t, h ut would c ontem plate the body' s inj ur ies as the m ar iner c ontemplates an inj ury to his ship. 5 To take a final instanc e, Cudworth's w hole theory of sensation ( even down to the physiology) is indebted to Cartesianism , both in its general outlines and in detail. Thus, for example, Cudwor th's distinc tion betw een 'volitions in the soul to eat and dri nk', 'a sense of pain w hen the body is hur t' and 'the grief and sadness that arises from som e ill- tidings told and understood by the m ind'6 is an ec ho of a w ell- kn own 1

E.I. M. , 4 , 6, I 5. In his Preface to The True Intellectual System Cudworth blames Plato and Aristotle for introducing 'those exploded qualities and forms' into philosophy. On this important point Cudworth is no Platonist . 2 Principles of Philosophy, Part IV, CCI I . 3 E.I.M., 3, 3, 3 . 4 Second Meditation, Haldane and Ross, Vol. I , p . I 55. 5 E.I. M. , 3, 2 , 2 . Sixth Meditation, Vol. I, p. 1 9 2. 6 E.I. M. , 3 , I ' 4· IO

CUDWORTH AND

H IS P R E D E C ES S O R S

passag e in The Principles of Philosophy. 1 His defin iti on of sen sation as 'c onfu sed t houg ht' an d man y of his examples ( t he man who feels pain in his leg after it has been amputated, t he sword whic h g ives us pain t hough it self c ontain ing n o pain) derive fr om that same book. 2 In deed, Cartesian in fluenc e penetrates every n ook an d c rann y of Cudworth's epistemology. It is n ot surprising t o find that Damaris Cudwort h (Lady Masham) writing t o Loc ke3 , speaks of 'my fr ien ds, t he Cartesian s an d t he P laton ists', mean ing t he group we n ow c all 'the Cambridge P laton ists'; n o on e who was c losely in t ouch with Cudwort h c ould have fa iled t o r ealize how exten sively t he Camb ridg e P laton ists were in debted t o Desc artes, for all More's dec laration s of indepen ­ denc e. Something should also be said about Cudworth's relation t o Hobbes. Hobbes 's in fluenc e is also a pervasive on e, but in a direct ion almost ent irely n egat ive. Hobbes is n ever for l ong out o f Cud worth's mind, but among t he multitude of referenc es t o t hat 'atheistic politic ian' (n ever onc e mentioned by na me-like t he Devil) not on e is un reservedly fa vourable. We must n ot, however, fa ll int o t he t rap of t hinking that Cudworth's philosophy c an be summed up as 'the reaction t o Hobbes'. Hobbes was c ertainly t he c hief representat ive of modern infi delit y, but t here were broader soc ial t en denc ies at work, whic h were quit e as muc h a t hreat t o t he sort of Christ ian ity for whic h Cudworth stood as any form of at heism c ould be. It was again st Calvin ism, n ot again st Hobbism, t hat Cudworth was first led t o assert t he etern it y and immu tability of morality:� Cudwort h's, as we have already point ed out, was t he fi rst l arge- sc ale att ac k on Hobbes's philosophy (Claren don wrote Pt. IV, Principle CXC. E.I. M. , 3, 4, 1 -2 ; Princip les IV, CXCVII. 3 Letters from ' Philoclea' (Damaris Cudworth) to Locke (Locke MSS. C17, 136 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Letter dated October 7th, 1686) . 4 As he emphasizes in his letter to Limborch, Cudworth's B.D . thesis 'Dantur boni et mali rationes aeternae et indispensabiles' was maintained in 1 644, seven years before the publication of the Leviathan. 1

2

II

R A L PH CU D W O RTH

as a politic ian) and not unnaturally his inte rpre tation of Hobbe s is ope n to que stion, but he was, I think, right about what Hobbe s stood for, e ve n if not always right about what Hobbe s said. Hobbe s symbolize d five things: athe ism, mate rialism, de te rminism, individualism and e thic al re lativ­ ism. Cudworth was a the ist, a dualist, a libe rtarian, who be lieve d in the organic theory of the State and in e te rnal and immutable morality. Both accepte d the atomic theory of body, both re jec te d the sc holastic 'fac ultie s' , and the re wee r ce rtain othe r c oinc ide nce s of doc trine, but on the vital philosophic al issue s the re c ould be no c ompromise . If we want to know what Hobbes me ant to his own age , what viole nce to tradition he see me d to do, we shall find no be tte r source book than Cudworth's True Intellectual System. To sum up, Cudworth was a philosophe r more than o rdinarily alive to the philosophic al and sc ie ntific te nde nc ie s of his own pe riod. Ce rtain of the m he re sisted, some time s in a manne r whic h was to exe rt c onsiderable influe nce on the di rec tion of thought in the ce nturie s that followed, some time s, admitte dly, with pe dantry and inc ompre he nsion. With ce rtain othe rs of the se tende nc ie s he sympathize d, partic ularly with Cartesianism, no do ubt partly bec ause De sc arte s him­ self wrote within an e stablishe d tradition (for all that he like d to pre te nd to the c ontrary), but partly also bec ause Cudworth was sympathe tic to the anti-sc holastic te nde nc ie s of the se ve ntee nth-ce ntury re volution. It is signific ant that Cudworth seldom makes a direc t re fe rence (exce pt as a c ontemptuous aside) to scholastic te ac hing. So fa r, at le ast, he partic ipate d i n the se ve ntee nth-ce ntury philosophic al 'Ne w Thought' . Of c ourse , the bre ak with sc holastic ism was le ss abrupt than the se ve ntee nth ce ntury like d to prete nd, as Gilson has partic ularly shown; muc h that Cudworth sought to de rive from Plato and Aristotle he no doubt first e nc ounte re d in the schoolmen. But the anti- scholastic gesture is the re , as muc h in Cudworth as in De sc arte s or Hobbe s. How are we to acc ount, afte r all this, fo r the Cudworth of tradition, the antiquarian, re mote fr om the c ontroversie s of his own age ? And why is it that whe n we pass from 12

CUD W O R T H A N D H I S

PREDECESSORS

Descartes or Hobb es t o Cudworth we feel t hat we have stepped int o a diffe rent world? One ma in reason is that Cudwort h refu sed t o draw t hat sharp distinction b etween past and present which was chara ct erist ic of his age: he resisted t he seventeent h- cent ury reacti on against R enais­ sance huma nism. Descart es, like G. E. Moore and his followers in our t ime, appeals ov er the heads of scholars t o t he common­ sense of t he ordinary man; and t he suggest ion, in Descart es, t hat the scholar is a man who allows his 'nat ural light' t o b e darkened by his learning is made more emphatic in Hobbes' s declaration to A ub rey t hat ' if he had read as muc h as ot her men, he should hav e known no more t han ot her men' . 'The Renaissance; was principally t he reaffirmation of an ancient t radit ion; the sev enteent h- cent ury ' modernist s' , on the other hand, t hought of t hemselves as making a fresh start . The Cartesian ' met hod of doubt', with its emphasis on the need fo r reconst ruct ing our thought from t he foundation upwards , is not merely a philosophical t echnique. It ex presses, in a formal way , a genuine amb ition, one which Descartes shared with many of his contemporaries and immediate successors. Philosophy, so Descart es thought, could and ought t o start with a clean slat e. Cudworth, on t he other hand, looked upo n philosophy as an arena of conflict; the contestant s might change t heir name, or might improve t heir t echnical apparat us, b ut they could not seriously modify the fu ndamental struct ure of their argument s. He was impressed by the recurrence of cert ain patt erns of philosophi cal cont roversy ; he was not impressed by the claim of his contemporaries that they had shaken t hemselves free from t radit ion in order t o emb ark upon an enterprise quit e novel, in a manner untrammelled by t he errors of t he past . In an age which insist ed ab ove all upon originality, he insisted upon the continuity of t radition. He knew t hat his emphasis upon the past could not b e expected t o win him popularity. ' We do often giv e an account' , he writ es, ' of t he doct rine of t he ancient s; which, however, some of our over-severe philosophers may look upon fa st idi­ ously , or under-value an d depreciat e. ' But his scholarship

RALPH

CUDWORTH

was not a me re 'defect of philosophical style' , as Muirhead describes it; it is often tiresome, often inaccurate, but none the less it is essential to his purpose-to depict in general terms the kinds of philosophical outlook ( not merely X 's views and Y' s views) which threaten ' the True I ntellectual S ystem of the Universe'. Thus although it was his contemporaries who, along with Calvinism, provided the initial stimulus to his thinking, they are not important to him as innovators but as representative figures: they are the protagonists in a struggle perennial to philosophy, between materialism and rationalism, atheis m and theism. Cudworth wants to demonstrate to his con­ temporaries that ' the new philosophy' of Hobbes, for example, is old fallacy writ large; in exposing this fallacy, in playing Plato to Hobbes's Protagoras, he finds an ally in D escartes, an enemy in Bacon. Cudworth's scholarship, then, is not mere pedantry: it is a deliberate protest against the modern emphasis upon originality and innovation. I n fo rm it is a variation upon a method em ployed by Plotinus (' this doctrine is not new: it was professed fr om the most ancient times, though without being developed explicitly' 1 ) and worked out in detail by F icino. 2 I t is diffi cul t to avoid forcing analogie s of this kind, and from this temptation Cudworth did not always escape. These long and dreary wastes of tortuous ingenuity parti­ cularly repel the modern reader. His scholarship, naturally, was erratic , and he does not quite shake h imself fr ee from the aberrations of the F lorentine school; his long discussions of Platonic Love, for example, belong in spirit and often in detail to the Renaissance Ac ademy. I t is not surprising, in the light of the se facts, that Coleridge thought that Cudworth should be described as a Plotinist, rather than as a Platonist; certainly one cannot but be struck by the extent to which Cudworth makes use of the teachings of ne o-Pla tonists ( in its broadest sen se, including the E,zneads, 5, 1 , 8, as quoted in W. R. I nge, The Philosophy qf Plotinus, 3rd edition, 1 929. z cf. Kristeller, -The PhilosojJ!ty of J'vfarsilio Ficino, 1 930. 1

C U D W O R T H A N D H I S P R E D ECE S S O R S

Christian Platon ism of writers like Clemen t of Alexandria an d the Platon ism of the F loren tin e Academy1 ) . All the same, Cudworth had made a close study of the Platon ic tex ts, particularly of the later dialogues. In our own time there has been a con siderable revival o f in terest in thes e dialogues, an d in some respects Cudworth's Platon ism seems less stran ge to us than it would have don e to n in eteen th- century Platon ic scholars, whose atten tion was so largely directed towards the Phaedo or the Republic . His Platon ism is n eo-Platon ically tin ged but it is n ot merely second- han d. On e other source of infl uen ce (I shall say n othin g of the infl uen ce of Christian ity, for that will sufficien tly emerge in what follows) n eeds to be discussed, although it is n ot a matter on which on e can write with an y great assuran ce. How fa r was Cudworth infl uen ced by other members of the Cambridge circle? Sometimes we simply cannot tell. We kn ow, for ex ample, that John Smith was Cudworth's pupil an d admirer-a letter of Dillin gham to San croft refers to 'Mr Cudworth, Smith of Queen 's his emulator'2-but it does n ot follow that Cudworth had n othin g to learn fr om Smith. The case of Whichcote was rather differen t. He was a somewhat older man than C udworth, and an ackn owledged leader; precisely what he taught we can discover fr om his Aphorisms , his Sermons , an d his Correspondence with Tuckney. It clearly emerges that he was n ot, in the ordin ary sen se of the word, a philosopher; he had n o real in terest in most of the question s which Cudworth was later to ask and attempt to an swer. We could, I thin k, put the matter thus: Whichcote takes for gran ted a Christian world-view; atheism is n ot to him, as it was to Cudworth, a 'livin g option ' . What Which­ cote sets out to do is to develop a liberal an d human istic 1

A point particularly emphasized by Cassirer. It is, he says, only a 'conventional half-truth' to talk of 'the Cambridge Platonists'. ' Immer erscheint die Lehre Platons, so oft sie uns hier begegnet, wie durch ein brechendes Medium gesehen und ihm gemass verandert' (Die Platonische Renaissance, p . 6 ) . 2 Letter of December 1 650 quoted M. Nicolson : Christ's College and Latitude Men, Modern Philology, Vol. 2 7, p. 39 n.

RALPH

CU D W O RT H

versio n o f Christian ethics. This lib eral ethics had, as w e shall see, a very g reat influence o n Cudwo rth; and in a certain respect he sets Cudwo rth' s main problem-how is it po ssib le to live the go d- like life, as Whichco te co nceived it? -b ut he gives him no he lp in answering it. What was Cudwo rth' s relatio n to Henry Mo re? Mo re was the o lder man b y four years; Mo re' s majo r wo rks w ere written before Cudwo rth had pub lished anything b ut b rief theo log ical essays and sermons. It wo uld no t b e unnatural to co nclude t hat when Mo re and Cudwo rth ag ree o n a po int o f do ctrine, More is the o riginato r. But certain evidence tells against this hypo thesis. E ven altho ugh Mo re was the o lde r man, Cudwo rth was the first to g raduate and w as very likely Mo re' s teacher. And then there is the w ell- known sto ry o f the quarrel b etween Mo re and Cudwo rth, which is scarcely intelligib le unless Mo re was, in so me sense, Cudwo rth' s disciple. The sto ry runs (its source is the letters fro m Mo re and Cudwo rth to Wo rthingto n, pub lished in The Diary and Correspondence of Dr John Worthington 1 ) that Cudwo rth w as abo ut to pub lish his Natural Ethics-there was even talk o f proof- sheets b ut, o f co urse, the wo rk never appeared-w hen he suddenly heard that More was abo ut to pub lish a boo k o n the same sub ject; this boo k, Cudwo rth co mplained, wo uld anticipate his own proj ected pub licatio n. His indig natio n, and Mo re' s so mew hat apo logetic respo nse to it, are q uite unintelligib le unless Cudwo rth was the master and Mo re the disciple; and Mo re himself writes 'yo u may a lso take no tice that I am no t unmindful o f what passed b etwix t us at Cam­ b ridg e since I reso lve no t to pub lish my boo k (if at all) b efore his'2, whi ch is a clear admissio n o f indeb tedness. T he two men were very different in type-Mo re, with 'no design, at all' , he says, 'b ut to serve the pub lic'3 , was an inveterate writer o f boo ks, forever pro mising to pub lish no mo re and the nex t Edited by James Crossley for the Cheth am Society, Manchester, Vols. 1 3, 36, I 1 4 of the Proceedings. 2 Letter of 7th February 1 664-5 (Vol. 2, Pt. I, p. 1 66 of the Diary and Correspondence) 3 Letter of 24th January, 1 664-5, loc. ci t. 1

16

CUDWORTH AND HIS

P RE D E C ES SORS

minute writing an other; Cudworth was an equall y inveterate promiser of books he never wrote or coul d not bring himsel f to publish, the very type of the perfectionist. That M ore had the priority in publ ication means nothing at all. There is one other piece of evidence which woul d cli nch the matter but which I do not feel abl e to accept. I t has sometimes been maintained that in More' s Divine Dialogues the character of P hil otheus, 'a zeal ous and sincere l over of God and Chris t, and of the whol e creation' , is meant fo r Cudworth, and that Bathynous, ' the deepl y-thoughtful or profo undl y- thinking man' , is More himself. I f this were true, then, since P hil otheus dominates the dial ogues, it woul d be a reasonabl e assumption that More thought of himsel f as a · profo undly- thinking' discipl e of a great master. But I can­ not trace this interpre tation of the dial ogue fu rther back than M. F . Howard' s 1 9 1 r edition of Ward' s Life of More1 , and neither Howard, nor l\,fiss N icol son2 , who repeats the story, offers any evidence at all that the characters in the dial ogues were meant to repres ent actual persons. There are positive reasons fo r thinking that M ore identified himsel f quite as m uch with Philotheus ( and with the 'man of criticism' , Evistor) as with Bathynous. He pl aces in the mouth of Philotheus an el aborate interpretation of the Apocal ypse which is certainl y M ore' s own; he ascribes to him doctrines to which Cudworth woul d certainl y not have c ommitted himsel f ( e. g. that what is ex tended need not be material 3) but which are particul arl y characteristic of M ore' s own phil osophy; he makes Phil otheus use exampl es which had al ready been empl oyed in M ore' s books (with marginal re ferences to the books in question4); and in the Scholia attached to the second edition he regul arl y speaks as if Phil otheus' s opi nions are a constituent part of the corpus of his own phil osophy. The most it woul d be possibl e to say is that P hil otheus represents what M ore took to be the Cudworth-l ike el ements in his own 1

See his Preface. Edition of The Conway Letters, p. 2 1 6, 3 Divine Dialogues, 2nd edition, p. 6 1 . 4 e.g. on p . 2 2.

2

p. 4 n.

R A L PH C U D W O R T H

character, and even this hypothesis would be rather a leap in the dark. We have in fact littl e to rely upon in estimating the deg ree of influence More and Cudworth exerted upon each other ( it is bound to have been an influence not entirely one-sided) except our general impression of their work. Cudworth was a systematic and rigid thinker whereas More was content with aperqus. More was an odd mixture of the philosopher and the lover of ghosts and marvel s; there is something indiscriminate about him, which reminds us of Browne and Burton. I d o not think we do any g rave injustice to More in reg arding Cudworth as the l eading systematic thinker among the Cambridg e Pl atonists, but no doubt Cudworth l earnt a g reat deal from his more volatile contemporary, fo r all the temperamental diversity of the two men. To sum up, while it woul d be absurd to suggest that Cudworth was a philosopher of the stature of Descartes or Hume or Kant, it is equally absurd to dismiss him as an antiquarian's antiquarian. He was a Platonist, but not simpl y a laudator temporis acti ; he did not entirely sympathize with the new scientific movement, but neither was he pure R enais­ sance. His was the first major attempt, in E ng land , to reconcile the new science wi th the older philosophical trad i­ tion. His particul ar method of reconciliation, I hope to show, exerted a strong positive influence upon the course of philo­ sophy in E ng land, and particularly upon the devel opment of ethical theory, but apart from that, it has a not inconsider­ able interest, as a philosophy in its own right.

18

C H A P T E R II

C U D W ORT H O N M I N D A ND NAT URE

T

i ntenti on of C udworth's philosophy i s, of course, theologi cal, but thi s i s not to say that he sets out to establi sh the tr uth of a par ti cular dogmati c theology. The r ecurr ent contemporary cri ti ci sm of C ambri dge Platon­ i sm was that i t placed far too li ttle stress on creeds and doctri nes; as Masson puts i t, 'for all systemati c and rigi d C hri sti ans, i t glorified human r eason too much, made the essence of r eligi on to consi st too much i n a few great beli efs and i n noble aspirati ons after a godly life i n accordance wi th them, and i t scouted too much the authori ty of defini te and mi nute obj ecti ve cr eeds. '1 Sti ll, there wer e the ' few gr eat beli efs ': these had to be vi ndi cated; to put the problem i n K antian terms, i t had to be shown how the godli ke li fe was possible, a possi bi li ty whi ch was r uled out, C udwor th thought, on more than one of the world- vi ews of his contemporari es, the C alvi ni sti c as much as. the Hobbi st. Two 'great b eli efs ' had parti cularly to be sustai ned: the fir st, that there i s a natur al di sti ncti on between good and evi l, not dependent upon legislati on, human or di vi ne, but i nher ent i n certai n ki nds of life; the second, that human bei ngs have the power of choosi ng to act well or to act badly. C udworth's origi nal plan, he tells us, was si mply to wri te 'agai nst the fatal necessi ty of all actions and events'2, but he soon saw that human freedom could not be defended as an outpost, that i t i s only defensi ble on a certai n general scheme of thi ngs. So he was led to embark upon an elaborated meta­ physi cs, although wi th hi s origi nal pur pose never far from hi s mi nd. Thi s metaphysi cs, the mai n theme of The True Intellectual System of the Universe, is presented in the form of a sustai ned HE

1

2

Life of Milton, Vol. 6, p. 304.

T.I.S., Preface, p.

rg

I.

RALPH CUDWORTH

polemic against atheistic materialism. Not that Cudworth had any desire to reinstate a scholastic-Aristotelian theory of nature; in his eyes, the great virtue of the new science was that it had revived the atomic theory of body, which fur­ nished, so he thought, the most secure of all foundations for theism. So long as there was talk of occult powers and of substantial forms, or of 'a dark unintelligible matter that is nothing and everything' 1, mind itself might conceivably be only a peculiar form of body, or one of its occult powers, whereas if body consists of nothing but 'extended bulk' , then we know all the properties of bodies and know that mind is not one of them . I n two respects, indeed, atomism has the advantage. It provides us with an intelligible theory of the corporeal, 'shows distinctly what matter is' , whereas to up­ hold the theory of forms and qualities is 'to make our very ignorance of the cause, disguised under those terms of forms and qualities to .be itself the cause of the effect' 2 ; and by revealing the nature of the corporeal, it helps us to see how it differs from the incorporeal. Cudworth recognizes that there is a certain awkwardness in this position, for atomism has normally been a form of materialism, and had recently re-appeared in that shape in the work of Hobbes . This difficulty provokes one of the dreariest sections in The True Intellectual System (the major part of Chapter I ) , in which Cudworth sets out to show that the distinction between the corporeal and the incorporeal proceeded pari passu with the development of an atomic theory of the corporeal ; so that materialistic atomism is a degenerate offshoot of a doctrine originally dualistic. With this excursus, a medley of history and myth composed in the spirit of the Florentine Academy, we fortunately need not concern ourselves. Of considerably more interest and importance are his arguments to show that the connexion between atomism and dualism is logically necessary, as distinct from historically prior. He is thereby involved in a modification of the Cartesian dualism, 1 2

E. I. lvf. , 4, 6, 1 5 .

ibid.

20

CUDW O RTH O N MIND AND NATURE

which assumes at his hands a form more characteristic of I dealism. Body, he argues, is by nature passive. It fills space, and in that consists its whole nature. Hence, it can move only under external pressure; it can be pulled or it can be pushed, it can resist or give way, but it has no activity of its own. 'All its activity [is] either keeping out, or hindering, any other extended thing from penetrating into it (which it does merely by being extended, and therefore not so much by any physical efficiency as a logical necessity) : or else local motion, to which it is also but passive : no body, or extension, as such, being able to move itself or act upon itself.' 1 Therefore, the world cannot consist entirely of bodies, or else it would be an Eleatic world, uniformly and eternally at rest. 'All would be a dead heap or lump.' 2 To account for motion we must recognize that there are centres of 'self-activity' or 'internal energy'; these cannot be other than incorporeal, simply because they are self-active; they have their own force, 'internal energy', which nothing corporeal can have. 3 The atomist who holds that everything is corporeal cannot avoid Eleaticism; but once we make the distinction between the corporeal and the incorporeal, we can accept the atomic theory of the corporeal, and yet affirm the reality of change and motion, deriving it from the activities of the incorporeal. There is no other way of reconciling atomism with experi­ ence. It is implicit in the atomist's theory of perception, Cudworth further argues, that mind is not a corporeal entity. According to the atomists, colour, scent, and the rest are not properties of bodies but 'phantasms' or 'sensations' which arise in us when we are confronted by bodies of a certain bulk and extension. Such bodies, Cudworth argues, can only give rise (by pressure) to changes of a corporeal sort (i.e. changes in bulk or figure) and, by hypothesis, a colour is not a corporeal property. Hence our 'phantasms' cannot be the 1 2

3

T.I.S. , 3, 394.

ibid.

T.I.S. , 3, 392-6. 2I

RALPH CUDWORTH

produ ct of corporeal pressu re. Unless we su ppose them to be created by the mind, we cannot give an y accou nt of their character and origin. Body cannot create them, for, by hypothesis, body cannot create qu alities; they mu st therefore be created by the incorporeal, which mu st be endu ed with a special kind of creative activity. 1 Fu rthermore, if mind were merely receptive, it wou ld take everything as it came; it cou ld never look beyond the phan­ tasm to the reality. Yet u nless it can look beyond (which involves activities of j u dging and considering) it cou ld never have formu lated the atomic theory, or have come to realize that what immediately confronts it are not the corporeal entities themselves but only 'phantasms' 2• N or cou ld mind, conceived as a tabula rasa , ever fall into error; men make mistakes becau se they do not merely 'su ffer' bu t are active in perception. 'There mu st be something of self- activity in the sou l [ whereby] it can err.' 3 If we accept the view that the sou l is a corporeal entity, then we are inevitably forced into a Protagorean relativism-'All passion is tru e passion, and all sense or seeming and appearance tru e seeming and appearance' 4 -and any relativism of this sort Plato has shown to be self-defeating. (In the whole of this argu ment, Cu dworth recognizes his indebtedness to the Theaetetus5 ) . A mind which was merely an ex tended bu lk, played upon by external pressu res, cou ld neither make di scoveries nor fall into error; that discovery and error are possible proves mind to be active, and hence , by hypothesis, not corporeal. Cu dworth' s argu ments are not withou t a c ertain force: he sees, as Locke was not to see, that a passive mind cou ld never perceive ( the very word conation was first u sed by Cu dworth) as distinct from merely being su sceptible to p ressu re. And he is no dou bt right in thinking that the most E.I.M., 3, 1 , 3 . E.I. M., 2, 6 , 3. 3 T.I.S., 3, 42 7. 4 T.I.S., 3, 425. 5 ibid. and E.I.M., passim. I

2

22

C U D W O R T H O N M 'I N D A N D N A T U R E

pl au s ibl e method of defen ding duali s m is to redu ce the c orp oreal al mos t to none nt ity. T his reduc ti on, however, is at a c os t; the fiel d of th e inc orp oreal i s s o ex tended th at Cud­ worth' s du ali s m l os es a great deal of its theol ogical signifi­ cance. His is a duali s m of force and matter, activity and p as s ivity , not a du ali s m of sp irit and body; and he is abl e to make plau s ibl e the identification of the active with the inc orp oreal onl y b y regarding as incorp oreal whatever has anything of l ife in it, whatever is not merely the p as s ive r ecipi ent of pu s hes and pull s . Thi s means that incor­ p oreal ity is no l onger a gu arantee of immor tal ity. In C artes ianis m th e inc orp oreal i s the mental , the mental i s the cons ciou s , the consciou s is the immortal ; duali s m is a p rop to theol ogy as it c annot directly be in Cu dworth' s p hil os op hy. T his , no doub t, is one main r ea s on why his p hilo s op hy was r egar ded with su sp icion, as atheis tic i n tendency; he blu rred the s harp di s ti nction, on which D es cartes ins is ted, b etween the hu man mind and every other s ort of natu ral entity. On Cu dworth' s view, anything is incorp oreal which has a force of its own, anything which is not merel y the p as s ive r ec ip ient of pu s hes and pull s . Not everything which is incorp oreal is mental , and not everything which i s mental is consc iou s . To take the l atter p oint firs t, there are, accor d­ ing to Cu dwor th, mental activities which do not think and mental activities which are not thought ab out: two dis tinct p oints which, l ike F reu d, he s ometimes confu s es by sp eaking of 'u ncons ciou s ' mental activities , withou t its b eing cl ear whether this means that they ar e u nknown or u nknowing. Like Freu d, too, Cu dworth finds i n dreams the mos t s triking cou nter- ex ampl es to the C artes ian theory of mind. 'There is another more interior kind of pl as tic p ower in the s oul ', he writes , 'whereby it is formative of its own cogitations , which its el f is not al ways cons ciou s of; as when, in sl eep or dreams , it frames interl ocu tory dis cou rs es between its elf a nd other p er s ons , in a l ong s er ies , with coherent s ens e and ap t con­ nex ions , in which oftentimes it s eems to be su rp ris ed with u nexp ec ted ans wer s and r ep artees , though its elf were all the 23

R A L P H CUDWO R T H

while the poet a nd inventor of the whole fable. 'r Wha t is fundamental to mind, he considers, is a certain 'vital temp er'; thinking is part, bu t only pa rt, of the work of tha t vital temp er. To identify, in the Ca rtesia n manner, the incorp oreal wi th the consciou s wou ld be to make mind itself corp oreal, in a grea t many of its a ctivities. The essential division, a s Cu dworth sees it, is tha t be tween the mecha nical a nd the teleological, not between the u n­ thinking a nd the thinking. He rej ects the Ca rtesia n view tha t animal s a re mecha nisms, 2 a nd with it the sha rp Cartesian contra st between the a nimal a nd the hu ma n. Wha t links the hu ma n with the a nimal a re instincts: these, Cu dworth ma in­ tains, a re certainly not mecha nical, for they ha ve ends, which no mechanism ca n have, a nd since they a re not mecha nical, they ca nnot be corp oreal. 3 There is something incorp oreal, something which ca nnot be a ccou nted for in terms of the p ressure of extended bulks, whenever ends a re pu rsu ed, whether or not tha t pu rsu it is delibera te. To Desca rtes there is simply the dualism of mind a nd matter; bu t, a s we sa w, Cu dworth's division of realit y comes a t a different p oint, a s a dua lism of the a ctive a nd the pa ssive. Then Cu dworth ma kes a further distinction, w ithin the a ctive, between 'p la stic p owers' which pu rsu e ends withou t del iberation ( of which a nimal instinct p rovides the most striking examples) and the del ibera te op era tions of the hu man mind. He hop ed, with the a id of this modifi ed dua lism, to escap e from mechanism withou t falling into the occa sional­ ism of 'bigotical religionists'4 • The world is not a giant clockwork, which cou ld be given a n initial p u sh a nd then l eft to its ow n devices; there is l ife in it a nd, with l ife, novelty a nd crea tivity. At the same time, it is not necessary to suppose deliberate divine intention behind every op era tion. Tha t 1

T. I.S. , 1 , 247. On the double meaning of 'conscious' see Anderson, Mind as Feeling (Australasian Journal of Ps ychology and Philosophy , X II, 2) . z T.I.S., 3, 4 1 9. 3 Digression on Plastic Natures, 1 4- 1 6 ( T.I.S. , Vol. I) . 4 T.I.S. , 2, 606 .

C UDW O R T H ON M IND AND N A TUR E

hypo thesi s, ap ar t fro m its ab surdi ty, l eaves us with no po ssibl e way of acco unting for the imp erfectio ns, the ' erro rs and b ungles' 1 , characteristic of the wo rld as w e fi nd it. Fro m the exampl e of animal i nstinct, we can see at o nce the capacities and the li mi tatio ns o f plasti c powers; they work mo re ' easil y, cl everl y and sil ently' 2 than d el ib erate human actio n, b ut at the same ti me they l ack fl exib il ity, w hich expl ains their b unglings and mi stakes. If w e think o f these pl astic power s ( o r p erhap s of a si ngl e plastic power-'Nature' ) as the agents o f di vine intentio ns, w e can understand bo th the p erfectio ns and imp erfectio ns of animal l ife; the clo ck­ work theo ry, o n the o ther hand , canno t expl ain its p erfectio ns, no r o ccasio nalism its imp erfectio ns. He k new that he wo ul d b e accused of re- intro ducing, in this theory, the o ccul t qual ities o f scholasticism. But, he argued, there i s no thing o ccul t abo ut a plastic power ; w e have di rect exp erience o f such power s bo th i n o ur own actio n (whenever w e act w itho ut delib eratio n) and i n that o f o ther l iving o rgani sms. His theory merely presumes that these pow er s are al so op erating in o ther cases w here w e are no t d ir ectl y aware of them: this, to use a p hrase w hich G. E . Moore appl ies to a similar argument of Berkel ey' s, is ' a r easo nabl e inference' , w hereas it wo ul d no t b e r easo nabl e to presume the op er atio ns of a force of who se nature w e have no di rect exp erience ( as happ ens in the case of o ccul t q ual ities w hi ch can o nl y b e defi ned in terms of the effects they are suppo sed to p ro duce) . ' He that assigns an o ccul t quali ty fo r the cause of any p heno meno n, do es i ndeed assign no cause of it, b ut o nl y d ecl ar es his own igno rance o f the cause; b ut he that asser ts a pl asti c nature, assigns a determi nate and p rop er cause . . . mi nd and und erstand ing is the o nl y tr ue cause of orderl y r egul arity; and he that asser ts a pl astic nature asserts mental causal ity in the wo rld . ' 3 So much (i n b ri ef) for C udwor th' s theor y of the incorpor eal ; o ne canno t b e so p reci se abo ut his theory of the corpo real , 1

2

3

Summary of D ig ression, 4 ( T.I.S. , Vol. I ) . ibid., g. Digression, 7 .

R A L P H C U DWO R T H

no r determi ne exactly ho w fa r he div erg es fro m C artesi ani sm. P erso nal relatio ns co mpli cate the i ssue : Henry More had deni ed that the incorpo re al i s unextended, thereby, of course, rej ecti ng the vi ew that extensi on i s the essence of the co rpo r­ eal, and C udwo rth di d no t wi sh di rectly to oppose hi s fri end and co lleague. He sums up his posi ti on thus: 'We thought ou rselves concerned to say the utmost that po ssi bly we could, i n way of vi ndi catio n of the anci ents, who generally mai ntai ned i t [i nco rpo real substance] to be unextended ; . . . yet we would not be supposed ourselves dog mati cally to assert any more i n thi s poi nt than what all i nco rpo realists ag ree i n, that there i s a substance speci fically di sti nct fro m body. . . . But whether thi s substance be altogether unextended, or extended o therwise than body, we shall leave ev ery man to make hi s own j udgement co ncerni ng i t. '1 Nevertheless, hi s own sympathi es are fai rly obvio us, as i n the co mparable case of the ontologi cal arg ument, the v ali dity of whi ch C udworth, for the same reaso n, namely that More strongly mai ntai ned i t, 'leaves to o ur o wn j udgement'; whi ch do es no t prevent hi m from asserti ng i n the P refa ce that there can be no a priori proof of the exi stence of Go d. Granted that C udwo rth accept ed the tradi ti onal vi ew that extensio n i s peculi ar to the co rpo real, i t sti ll remai ns questio nable whether he too k i t to be essence of body. Lamprecht2 no tes that mo st Engli sh phi losophers, however clo sely they followed Descartes i n o ther respects, thought that i mpenetrabi li ty, as di sti nct from extensi on, was the di s­ ti ngui shi ng mark of the corpo real. Thi s was certai nly More's opi nio n: he defines bo dy as 'a substance impenetrable and discerpi ble'3 , and C udworth, when he speaks of bo dy as ' anti typo us extensio n, or resisti ng bulk'4, seems at least to be i nsi sti ng on the equal signi ficance of resi stance and extensio n. Y et he no t i nfrequently asserts that body consi sts of nothi ng 1 2

3 4

T.I.S. , Preface. The Role of Descartes, p. 2 I g. Immortality of the Soul, Book I, chapter I I I, Digression, I 2 0 .

1.

C U DWORTH ON MIND

A N D N AT U R E

bu t fi gu re, site , magn itu de and local mo tion ; an d he refers w ithou t unfa vou rab le commen t to the doctrin e of 'the incor­ porealists' , w hom he in gen eral su pports, that the resistance of b odies arises ' as a logical n ecessity' from the fa ct that they are exten ded. 1 This vagu en ess is n ot su rprisin g, b ecau se Cu dworth does n ot really care which of the two-impen etra­ b ility or exten sion-is taken to b e the essence of b ody; or even w hether min d is exten ded or unextended. H is own view, fun damen tally, is that passi vity is the essen ce of b ody ( and n either impenetrab ility n or ex ten sion involves activity) an d that self- activity is the essen ce of the incorporeal ( an d there is n othing in the n atu re of the case to preven t the active from b ein g also exten ded) . P rovided that it does n ot den y the passivity of the c orporeal or the self-activity of the in­ corporeal, an y theo ry of b ody will satisfy Cu dworth. In fa ct, Cu dworth is in terested in the philosophy of n atu re only in so fa r as it is a n ecessary step in the fulfilmen t of an in ten tion which is primarily theological. The assu mption from which his argu men t sets ou t, that the corporeal is the passive recipien t of pulls an d pu shes, is on e which few wou ld n ow main tain . N evertheless, the form in which du alism appears in Cu dworth, as an opposition b etween the active an d the passive, an ticipates the cen tral issu es in modern phi losophy in a way which makes it n ot un reason ab le to describ e Cu dworth, as Mu irhead does, as the 'real foun der of British Idealism'2 • P ierre Bayle3 , it is worth n otin g, thou ght that Cu dworth' s theory, for all its au thor's in ten tions , led directly to atheism: on ce gran t the presen ce in n atu re o f powers capab le of pu rsu in g en ds w ithou t delib eratin g ab ou t them an d it can n o lon ger b e argu ed tha t whenever en ds are pu rsu ed there mu st b e a design ing min d, n or that pu rely n atu ral an d n on -delib era­ tive forces cou ld n ever of themselves seek on e ob jective rather than an other. Cu dw orth ob viou sly an ticipated this sort of criticism: that is why he sets ou t to distin gu ish his position 1 2

3

T.I. S. , 3, 394. The Platonic Tradition, p. 35. Oeuvres Diverses, Vol. 3, p. 2 1 6.

R AL P H

CU D W O R T H

quit e as s har ply from hylozois m as fr om materi alis m. His plastic nat ures are a s ort of 'thir d man' designed to bri dg e t he gap b etween God and matter , mi nd and b ody; t hey are 'reason i mmers ed and plunged i nt o matter and, as it w er e, fuddled i n it and c onfounded with it' 1 • O nc e s uc h an i nti mate c ommuni on b etween r eas on and matter is admitt ed to b e possible, t he s har p edg e of dualis m is b lunted. Cudw orth s aw c ertai n of t he diffic ulti es i n t he Cartesi an dualis m; he r ealized t hat , as t he French materi alists 2 w er e lat er t o mai n­ tai n, i f t here is any r eas on for t hi nki ng t hat ani mals are mec hanis ms , t here is j ust as muc h r eas on for t hi nki ng t hat t he s ame is true of human b ei ngs . But his own dualis m helps t o destroy, i n a s omewhat different way, t he g ulf b etween mi nd and nat ure on whic h t heolog y has ordi nari ly i nsisted .

T.l.S. , 1 , 238. cf. Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine. She comments specifically on Cudworth's role in this development (pp. 98-9) . I

2

C H APTE R III

CUDWORTH'S T H EORY O F KNOWLEDGE

T

traditional t� eories � f cognition do not aris� out of a _ direct exammat10n of the contents of consc10usness' but as a consequence of metaphysical presuppositions. Once the fatal distinction has been made between reality and appearance, corresponding cognitive faculties must inevitably be set up; sense which presents us with appearances must be distinguished from thought which penetrates to, or intuits, or constructs-on this point there can still be disagreement­ reality itself. Thus the general structure of Cudworth's theory of knowledge can be predicted from what we have said about his philosophy of nature: Eternal and Immutable Morality, in which Cudworth's epistemology is mainly developed, is, in a way, a series of footnotes to The True Intellectual System of the Universe. Certain of the details, however, are intrinsically interesting and of considerable relevance to Cudworth's ethical theory. Cudworth maintains, with Descartes, that 'sense is confused thought', it being 'no pure and sincere cogitation of the soul alone' 1 • But the Cartesian formula has to be reinterpreted, in a way which brings it very close to the 'secret doctrine' of the Theaetetus, and must be understood thus : sensation, unlike thought, is not pure self-activity, although equally it is not pure passivity. We do not create our sensations, nor are they merely given to us. Both the process of sensation and the sensible objects arise out of the interaction of the corporeal and the incorporeal, the corporeal exerting pressure upon us, the mind displaying its vital energy. 2 The mind, Cudworth insists, is never purely passive: 'Sense of itself is not a mere passion, but a passive perception of the soul, which hath something of vital energy in it, because it is a H_ E

I

2

E.I.M., 3, 4, I . E.I.M., Ioc. cit.

29

R A LPH C U DW O RTH

c ogitation. '1 At the same time, he is not prepared to acc ept t he doc trine he asc ribes to 'some of the Platonists', viz. that sensation is simply the form of ac tive knowledge in whic h the soul bec omes c onsc ious of what is going on in the body. 2 And like Berkeley, he feels bound to admit that the soul c annot c hoose what sensations it shall have; hence t hat they are not simply of its c reation. The soul, then, has passive as well as ac tive energies; if this were not so, Cudworth argues, it c ould never be 'vitally united to any body, neither c ould there be any suc h thing as an animal or living c reature. '3 Sensations, as in Desc artes, have an odd sort of twilight ex istenc e. They are modific ations of mind but at the same time they are not 'pure c ogitations'; they are the meeting­ plac e of the c orporeal and the inc orporeal, the passive and the ac tive; they c ombine susc eptibility to loc al mo tion with c reative power. That there should be suc h a meeting-plac e is bound to be an embarrassment to any sort of a dualistic theory. The effec t is either t o break down the original dualism, or alternatively t o set up new dualisms within the original c lear-c ut system. In Cudworth's c ase, 'a passive energy' has now to be distinguished both from simple passion and from ac tive energies. Similarly, on the side of knowledge, Cudworth fluc tuates bet ween the view that sensation is the perc eption of the soul and body working t ogether-'the c ogitations of the whole c ompound or animal'4- and the view that the soul has itself two parts-one purely ac tive, t he other passive. 5 He is not, however, very much co nc erned to desc ribe t he nature of sensation, sinc e his main objec t is t o argue that sensation, whatever its prec ise c harac ter, is in a ny c ase not knowledge. His argument is pa rtly Cartesian, partly Platonic . Sensation, he a rgues with Desc artes, does not even give us knowledge of t he c orporeal, and he quotes with approval the 1 1

3

4 'i

E. I. l'vf. , E.I. Af. , E.I. Af. , E./.Af., E. I.M.,

4, 3, 3, 3, 3,

1, 1, I'

3. 3. 4.

2, 2 . 2,

4.

C U D Vl O RT H ' S T H E O RY

OF

KNOWLEDGE

Cartes ian doctr ine that 'Bodies are not properly perceived by the s ens es , or by the imagination, bu t by the u nders tanding alone. ' K nowledge of the corporeal is a knowledge of phys ics , and this is ve ry different from either the reception or the creation of phantas ms . T hat is for Cu dworth, as fo r Des cartes , the vital point. There is a s econ d reas on why s ens ation cannot be know­ ledge: in knowledge, according to Cu dworth, knower and known mus t be identical, whereas in s ens ation the s ens er an d the s ens ed are dis tinct. T hus Cu dworth ass erts ex plicitly what s o many epis temologis ts have tacitly assu med-that knowledge is always s elf- knowledge. 'The ess ence of nothing is reached u nto by the s ens e looking ou tward, bu t by the mind's looking inward into its elf. That which looks abroad ou tward up on its object is not one with that which it perceives , bu t is a distance from it, and therefore cannot know and comprehend it . . . in abs tract things thems elves , which are the primary objects of s cience, the intellect and the thing known are really one and the s ame. F or thos e ideas or objects of intellection are nothing els e bu t modifi cations o f the mind its elf. Bu t s ens e wholly gaz es and gads abroad, and therefore doth not know and comprehend its object, becaus e it is different frorn it. '1 This is the assu mption which u nites s eventeenth- and eighteenth- centu ry epis temology and produ ces in the end su ch s triking identities of doctrine between Locke and Cudworth, for all that their original s tarting- points are s o different, the one ass erting and the other denying that in perception the mind is a tabula rasa. Both assu me that we can only know what is s omehow 'in ou r mind', and that once it is in our mind, there is no longer any qu es tion how knowledge is poss ible, s ince knower and known are then not dis tinct bu t identical. T he problem of know­ ledge, in its modern fo rm, is the problem how mind can 'get ou ts id e of its elf '; although it might well be argu ed that it is mu ch more difficu lt to u nders tand how the mind can know its elf than it is to u nders tand how it can know anything els e. Bu t this is not the way the problem appeared to Cu dworth I

E.I. AI., 3, 3, 4·

31

R A LP H

CUDWORTH

and to Locke: to them, the problem of knowledge is settled once the objects of knowledge have been incorporated within the mind itself. That knowledge, in the strict sense, is always of the mind-dependent is a point on which Cudworth and Locke ( allowing, of course, for Locke's inconsistencies) agree. Both argue, furthermore, that perception must be sharply distinguished from knowledge, since knowledge is of propositions, and perception of isolated sensation. They disagree about the mechanism of perception, they disagree about the source from which the constituents of our knowledge arise, but they agree (substantially) about the nature of knowledge itself, and they agree in thinking that perception and knowledge are two quite distinct processes. On this point, Cudworth emphasizes the connexion between his theory and that expounded in the Theaetetus; and, on the opposite side, between Hobbism and Protagoreanism. In the Theaetetus, Socrates is represented as maintaining that all judgement involves relations and that therefore, since relations are never sensorily perceived, knowledge and per­ ception cannot be identical. Cudworth takes this doctrine as his starting-point and tries to work out a detailed theory of the forms of relationship. As Berkeley was to do, he draws a distinction between 'phantasms' (Berkeley's 'ideas') and 'conceptions of the mind' (which he often calls, in Berkeley's manner, 'notions') ; and, again like Berkeley, he thinks that relations are all of them things of which we have 'notions'. His list of conceptions is more extensive than, but similar in kind to that supplied by Socrates in the Theaetetus. It includes 'cause, effect, means, end, order, proportion, similitude, dissimilitude, equality, in­ equality, aptitude, inaptitude, symmetry, asymmetry, whole and part, genus and species'. Even though these relations are attributed both to the corporeal and to the incorporeal, they none the less 'proceed wholly from the activity of the mind comparing one thing with another' 1 (just as do all relations in Locke's theory) . When we know, we often have 'phantasms' before our mind. Thus even in geometry I

E.I. M., 4,

2,

I.

CUDWORT H' S THEORY OF

KNOWLED G E

w e are t hin kin g of a part icular t riangle-we have a pict ure of it in our min d-b ut st il l geomet ry is n ot ab out this picture b ut ab out t hose t rian gles which ex ist on ly as n on ­ pictorial int ellect ual ideas. Every phant asm is, b y the n at ure of t he case, pa rt icula r, every picture of a t rian gle is a pict ure eit her of an isosceles, or of a scalen e or of an equilateral t rian gle, b ut t he trian gle which geom et ry describ es is all of these t oget her, a s a phant asm can n ever b e. 1 E ven when w e cann ot kn ow wit hout the help of phantasms, our kn ow­ ledge is st ill n ot about t he phantasm. There are two different ways in w hich phantasms are relat ed t o con cept ions: phantasms will sometimes precede an d in vit e t he con cept ion ( 'b ein g b ut imperfect , in complete, an d superficial cogitations'), t hey will sometimes 'follow and att en d upon t he con ception s of t he min d, as t he shadow upon t he sub st an ce, b ut never comprehen d t he t hin g'2 • In t he first case, t he phantasm has a special role t o play in t he development of our kn owledge sin ce it in cites us t o acquire a knowledge which w e might n ot ot herwise possess. The appearan ce of a particular invites t he con ceptual act ivity of t he min d which in corporat es it w it hin a syst em. In t he secon d case, t he phantasm is merely an aid t o t he imagin a­ t ion . In neit her case does t he apprehen sion of the phantasm constitute kn owledge; kn owledge is of propositions, involving un iversality, an d sen se 'lies flat an d grovellin g in t he in divi­ duals; for which cause it n ever affirms or den ies anythin g of it s obj ects' 3 • Certain of t hese relation s-order, proport ion, symmetry, aptit ude-are particularly important, on account of the role w hich t hey play in rationalistic et hical t heory. It was t o b e argued b y certain of Cudworth's successors t hat moral action c an b e defin ed as act ion which is proportion ate or fit, b y others t hat it is marke d b y a peculiar symmet ry or orderlin ess, an d t his was t aken t o show that moral action had ab out it somet hin g intrin sically rat ion al or int ellect ual. It is precisely I

2

3

E./.,.H. , 4, 1 , g. E.I. M. , loc. cit. E.I. M., 3, 3, 2 .

33

R A LPH

C U D W O RT H

these relatio ns which Cudwo rth selects as the mo st obvio us ex amples o f his po int that relatio ns ' pro ceed who lly fro m the activity o f the mind' . T ake the case o f o rder. Cudwo rth argues that the o rderliness o f a watch is no t a pro perty which co uld ever b e disco vered by simple inspectio n o f the w atch, even if its o ther pro perties co uld b e detected by direct inspec­ tio n. Orderliness, in o ther wor ds, can never b e perceived. If it were no t for the activity o f the mind, expressing itself in its co nceptio n, we co uld never determine that the watch had a peculiar o rderliness no t po ssessed, for ex ample, b y a mere co llectio n o f its parts. No w, this will seem very o dd if we think o f the o rder o f the watch as co nsisting simply in its structural pattern, b ecause, o n the face o f it, that the parts fi t to gether in certain ways is as much a matter o f direct ob servatio n as that, to take Cudwo rth' s ex ample, the watch is made o f gold. T his structural pattern is no t, ho wever, what Cudwo rth means by o rder. He defines it teleo lo gically as ' that whic h makes all things to co nspire all to o ne end' 1 • To say that a watch has o rder is the same thing as to say that its parts fu nctio n to gether as a single who le. We co uld, then, put his po int thus: it is impo ssible by direct ob servatio n o f a watch to disco ver the purpo se o f the particular arrangement o f parts which perceptio n detects within it. T his must, o f co urse, b e grante d, and also that the same can certainly b e said o f 'utility' , ' aptitude' , ' means' , ' instru­ ment' , and can perhaps also b e said o f ' whole' and ' part' . Fo r in each case what we are at first inclined to treat as an independent pro perty turns o ut to co nsist in a relatio nship to o ur ideals, i. e. to the demands we make upo n things. No thing is in itself usefu l o r o rderly (in the required sense), fi t o r instrumental. It is ' usefu l' o nly if such and such is o ur purpo se, 'fit' if it is appro priate for o ur ends, 'o rderly' if its parts co nspire to gether to our adva ntage. It is ano ther matter to attempt to apply this same analysis to all relations, b y arguing that, for ex ample, in call ing so me­ thing a 'cause' we are really saying so mething abo ut the I E.I.Af. , 4, 2, 7.

34

CUDWORTH's THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

workings of our minds or that all relations are 'mere notions of the mind and modes of conceiving in us, that only signify that things are relatively to intellect' 1• Such an analysis, we are inclined to object, by turning relations into fictions makes all propositions false, for if the terms of propositions are in themselves not related, if relations are only our way of look­ ing at things, then we are simply mistaken when we affirm, as we do, that things are related . In 'bringing things under' relations we are falsifying them . This is a point which considerably disturbed Cudworth. 'This must not be granted,' he writes, 'that the modes of conception in the understanding (where all truth is) are disagreeable to the reality of the thi ngs conceived by them ; and so, being unconformable, are therefore false. ' 2 We shall be forced to that conclusion, Cudworth argues, only if we begin from the assumption that what we passively receive is the sole reality. Then, certainly (in Hobbes's manner) , we must deny the reality of anything but local motions. 'As the atomical philosophy instructs us, there is nothing com­ municated in sensation from the material objects without, but only certain local motions .' 3 But, of course, the Carte­ sian-Platonic Cudworth is not prepared to identify the real with the sensorily perceived. He argues, on the contrary, that things are as mind knows them, not as sensation perceives them ; to be real is to be clearly and distinctly conceived, and to be clearly conceived is to be known as entering into a system of relations. For Cudworth, as for Hegel, 'the real is the rational' . We do not know the watch as it really is until we know it as a system. 'The true nature . . . of this watch . . . is really compounded and made up of those several relations, as ingredients of it, so that it cannot possibly be understood without them ; though sense could not reach to the comprehension of any one of them, much less of this whole logical system or collection of them.' 4 Relations are E.I.M., E.I. M., 3 E.I. M., 4 E.I.M., I

2

35

4,

2,

5.

loc. cit.

4, 3, I I . 4, 2, 8.

RALPH

CUDWORTH

not given i n sensatio n, but neither is any o ther real ity; as soo n as we are acqu ainted with real ity ( i. e. in thou ght) it is as a system o f rel atio ns. We do not first o f all have co nc ep­ t io ns and then rel ate them into systems; Cu dwo rth rej ec ts, what Loc ke was to acc ept, the distinctio n between co nc eptio n and intell ec tio n, o n the grou nd that to co nc eive is al ready to have kno wledge. 1 To have a co nc eptio n is itsel f to rel at e into a system ( a co nc eptio n is mo re l ike t he 'co nc rete' than t he 'abstract' u niversal). What exac tl y is the relatio n between t hese co nc eptio ns and sensations? This is o ne o f the po ints at whic h Loc ke and Cu dwo rth sharpl y diverge. Loc ke t hinks ( restating a sc hol astic doc tri ne) that sensatio ns are t he raw material o f co nc eptions; this is a view whic h Cu dwo rth had sco rnfull y rej ec ted. Fo r, he argu es, if we kno w at what co nc eptio n we are trying to arrive in t he proc ess o f abstrac ting fro m sensa­ tio ns, we do no t need to co nstruct it, sinc e we have it al ready 'and to what pu rpo se shoul d he [ the intellectus agens] u se hi s tool s, and go abou t to hew and hammer and anvil ou t t hese phantasms into thin and su btl e intell igibl e ideas, merel y to make t hat whic h he hath al ready? ' 2 And if we do not kno w at what co nc eptio n we are t rying to arrive, how c an we tell that this rather t han t hat is to be sl ic ed away fro m t he phantasm in o rder to arrive at t he co nc eptio n? In o ther wo rds, u niversal s c annot be co nstruc ted out o f particulars, bec au se if we have a pl an o f co nstruc tio n, we al ready kno w the u niversal , and if we have no pl an we have no met ho d o f proc edu re. To Cu dwo rth, t he sensatio n ( 'phantasm') is merel y, as we said before, t he occ asio n o f ou r co nc eptions o r, as he put s it in a manner reminisc ent o f D esc artes and pro phetic o f B erkel ey, it is a sign, the l angu age throu gh whic h natu re speaks to u s. 'Sense is but a kind o f loqu el a, " speec h" ( if I may so c all it), natu re as it were t al king to u s in the sensibl e o bj ects withou t. '3 We shoul d no mo re expec t se nsatio ns I 2

3

E.I.M. , 4, I ' 3 . E.1.M., 4 , 3, 14. E.I.A1. , 4 , 3 , I 3 . The Cartesian doctrine is in Le Afonde, chapter

1.

C U DWO R T H ' s T H E O R Y O F

K N OWL E D G E

to b e like reality than we expect words t o b e like the things they signify; but they act as a stimulus to our thinking and assist ' the use and concernment of our body' 1 by warning us of dangers to come. They are imperfect, incomplete, frag­ mentary. Just for that reason they incite us to systematize, but also, for that same reason, they do not supply us with any sort of foundation for our systematization. What is the status of conceptions? Obviously, they are modifications of mind. This was the Cartesian view, and Cudworth, oddly misinterpreting, as many others have done, a passage in the Parmenides, thinks it was also Plato' s doctrine. But of what mind are they modifications? Not of our mind, because they are the obj ects of science, i.e. of a knowledge which is entirely independent of our existence as individuals. 'Though all the material world were quite swept away, and also all particular created minds annihilated together with it ; yet there is no doubt but the intelligible natures or essences of all geometrical figures and the necessary verities belonging to them would notwithstanding remain safe and sound.' 2 They are, in fact, what Berkeley was later to call 'ideas in the mind of God' and this guarantees their eternity, immut­ ability and incorruptibility. Cudworth does not mean, of course, that they are pictures or models, stored up in a divine gallery ; an idea is not a phantasm, but an activity of system­ atizing; to know a truth is to systematize things in a certain way. 'The rationes or essences of things are not dead things, like so many statues, images or pictures hung up somewhere by themselves alone in a world : neither are truths mere sentences and propositions written down with ink upon a book, but they are living things and nothing but modifica­ tions of mind or intellect. ' 3 The human mind can achieve knowledge just in so far as it participates in the divine mind, of which 'all particular created intellects are but derivative participations' 4 • Science E.I.M., z E.I.M. , 3 E.I.M., 4 E.I.M.,

I

3, 2, 4· 4, 4, 5 . 4, 4, 7.

37

loc. cit.

RALPH CUDWORTH

is a unity, because the divine mind is a unity ; it is 'public', to use the terminology of a later day, because it is not · an individual production but a sharing in a common activity; it is a permanent possession because God's ideas are eternal and immutable; it is objective because God's ideas are not subject to whim and fancy. 1 But how is a particular indivi­ dual to tell that he has in fact attained to that certainty which Cudworth, a true Cartesian, ascribes to science? We might expect Cudworth to fall back on some version of the correspondence theory; we might expect him to argue that we must compare our propositions with those in the mind of God before we can have any assurance of their truth. But he is quite conscious of the difficulties in which this sort of corres­ pondence theory would involve him-'though the eternal divine intellect be the archetypal rule of truth, we cannot consult that neither, to see whether our conceptions be com­ mensurate with it.' 2 The 'criterion of true knowledge' cannot be anything external to our minds, for knowledge, as we saw, is incompatible with any sort of externality; it must lie some­ where in the nature of our conceptions. 'The entity of all theoretical truth is nothing but clear intelligibility, and what­ ever is clearly conceived is an entity and a truth.' 3 There is no criterion of truth lying outside the truth itself. Not even God can make propositions true or false, although it is only in so far as we share in God's nature that we can apprehend the truth. This is one of the most important points at which Cudworth's ethics and his epistemology converge. It would be absurd to pretend that Cudworth's concep­ tualism is a satisfactory theory of knowledge. The difficulties attaching to conceptualism are well known, and Cudworth' s theory does nothing to overcome them. But few, if any, English philosophers have worked out so thorough-going a conceptualist philosophy, and his 'empiricist' successors fall into a great many of the traps he was careful to avoid. Certainly Cudworth' s theory of knowledge does not involve I 2

3

E.I. M. , 4, 4, I 1 - 1 3 . E.I.M. , 4, 5, 5 . E.I.M. , loc . cit.

CUOWORTH' s THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

that nai:ve adherence to innate ideas which is sometimes (under the influence of Locke' s polemic) ascribed to him. Indeed, he avoids the expression 'innate ideas', and has no desire to affirm that there are 'rules or propositions arbitrarily imprinted upon the soul as upon a book'. 1 What he asserts is that certain forms of mental activity, certain methods of systematization, are not the products of experience; it is the passivity of mind that he is especially concerned to contest. He is a nativist only in the sense that he denies that mind is the passive recipient of external pressures. This view enables him to give a certain sense to the view that conceptions are modifications of mind, which does not now mean that mind is a collection of objects of mind, but that a 'conception' is a method of conceiving. No doubt, he does not succeed in working out this theory consistently; sometimes the concep­ tion is a sort of abstract idea (though it is never the product of abstraction) , because it has to function as an obj ect of knowledge as well as a type of mental activity: it has to be what science is about as well as the activity of science. There are bound to be inconsistencies in any theory which treats knowledge as a sort of internal relation because the knower and the known have at once to be identified ( to secure internality) and distinguished (since after all the knower is not triangular, for example) . And sometimes, in consequence, the 'conception' comes perilously close to the sort of innate idea against which Locke inveighs. I n general, however, 'Philoclea' (Damaris Cudworth) seems to have been right when she argued that 'the difference between you [LockeJ and some friends of mine' is not really 'so great as it seems' since 'they mean not that there is a number of ideas flaring and shining to the animadversive faculties like so many torches; or that there are any figures that are legibly written there like the astronomical figures in an almanac, but only an active sagaci ty in the soul where­ by, something being hinted to her, she rises [?] out into a more clear and large conception. ' 2 1 2

E. I. A1. , 4, 6, 4. 7 th April 1 688, in Bodleian Locke MSS. , C 1 7.

39

C H A P T E R IV

' E T E R N AL A N D I M M U TA B L E M O RA L I T Y ' and immutable morality' was the rallying-cry of eighteenth-century rationalists in their controversial battles with 'men of feeling' and Cudworth has kept his place in the history of ethics as the originator of this slogan. Precisely what the slogan meant for Cudworth cannot fully be understood without the help of his manuscript remains. Cudworth's Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality was not intended for separate publication ; it contains prolego­ mena to ethics, not ethics itself, and, as Cudworth fully realized, the prolegomena without the ethics are bound to seem incomplete and insufficient . Writing to Worthington, on the occasion of his quarrel with More, he says : 'I cannot be confined merely to one thing, to show that there is such a thing as virtue, that it is not a mere name, without showing what it is. For the showing what it is must prove that it is.' 1 Yet the Eternal and Immutable Morality, as it stands, is confined precisely to that 'one thing' ; it is an argument, epistemo­ logical and logical, designed to prove that virtue is not 'a mere name' , but the best proof that an obj ective ethics is possible, viz. the construction of such an ethics, finds no place there. The importance of the Eternal and Immutable Morality is principally polemical ; we see in that work why Cudworth was dissatisfied with the ethics ( and, along with that, the theology) most generally current in his own time. As a polemic, it was directed against three main antagonists. First 'that late writer of ethics and politics' (Hobbes) in so far as he had affirmed that 'in a state of nature nothing can be unj ust; the notions of right and wrong, justice and inj ustice have there no place' ; secondly, against 'divers modern theologers' , Ockham and his followers, and after them ( and much more in ' ET E R N A L

1

Letter of J anuary I 664 -5, in Worthington's Diary and Correspondence.

' E T E R N A L A N D I M M U T A B L E M O R A L I T Y'

Cudw ort h' s mind) t he Calvinist s, 'such as t hink not hing so essent ial t o t he deity as un cont rollable power, and arb it rary w ill, and t herefore t hat God could not b e God if there should b e any t hing evil in it s ow n nat ure which he could not do; and w ho imput e suc h dark counsels and dismal actions u nt o God, as cannot b e j ust ifi ed ot herwise t han b y saying t hat w hat soever God can b e supposed t o do or w ill, w ill b e for t hat reason good or j u st , b ecause he wills it' 1 ; t hirdly against D escart es, so fa r as he had denied that 't he idea of good impelled God t o choose one thing rather t han anot her'2 • Against all such t heories he assert s a general logical prin­ ciple, deri ved, as he point s out , from Plat o' s Euthy phro: 'It is a t hing w hich w e shall very easily demonst rate, that moral good and evil, j ust and unj ust , honest and dishonest , (if t hey b e not mere names w it hout any significat ion or names for not hing else b ut w illed and commanded, b ut have a realit y in respect of t he persons ob liged t o do and avoid them) , cannot b e arb itrary t hings, made b y w ill without nat ure, b ecause it is universally t rue t hat t hings are what they are not b y w ill b ut b y nat ure. '3 As a w ay of underst anding t he charact er and force of this argument , let u s consider Tulloch's criticis m of it . 'He has no suspicion' , says Tulloch, 't hat he is here merely stating an identical proposit ion-t hat what is moral is moral-t hat a t hing cannot b e b ot h moral and w ithout morality-a proposi­ t ion w hich no one w ould deny. But such a proposit ion t hrow s no light on t he quest ion, why a thing is moral and not immoral ? w hich is t he real quest ion b etwixt him and his opponent s. ' 4 This is a crit icism which must not b e lightly disregarded. Tautologies flourish in t he environment of moral t heory, and there is on t he fa ce of it somet hing t aut o­ logical ab out saying t hat a t hing is what it is by nature. Surely, anyone wi ll grant that a t hing is what it is b ecause it is what it is! 1 2

3 4

E.I. M. , 1 , 1 , 4-5.

Reply to Sixth set of Objections, Haldane and Ross, Vol. I I , p. 248. E.I. M. , I , 2, I . op. cit. , p. 285.

41

RALPH CUDW O RTH

Yet Butler, and Moore after hi m, thought i t worth assert­ i ng that 'a thing is what it i s and not another thing' : thi s i s also, one might think , a mere tautology, but i n Moore' s hands i t becomes a powerfu l cri ti cal weapon. It i s no doubt i mportant not to let tautologi es masquerade as empi ri cal statements. It i s equally i mportant not to i nterpret statements as tautologies ( to remove them, that i s, from the arena of di scussi on) ex cept as a l ast resort. Cudworth' s argument, of course, depends upon a certai n i nterpretation of his predecessors: he thinks that they have asserted both that a good action is different i n kind from an evil one and that its having this difference depends si mply on i ts havi ng been willed by a sovereign power, or, putti ng the matter i n the form which Moore has made fami liar, they have asserted, both that 'God always wills what is good' is a non­ tautological proposition and that to be good simply means to be willed by God. Cudworth' s criticism could then be put thus: i f a good action is different from an evi l one, this difference must be a difference i n that act itself and cannot be con­ sti tuted by i ts relati on to something else. If an act i s moral, i t i s so whoever wills i t, or fa ils to w ill it. It is moral because i t is the kin d of act that it is. J ust as ( this against Descartes) not even God could construct a triangle which has not the sum of its three angles equal to two right angles, so not even God could create an act which was, fo r ex ample, just, but not morally good. 'For though the will and power of God have an absolute, infini te and u nlimited command upon the ex istences of all created thi ngs to make them to be, or not to be, at pleasure; yet when things ex ist, they are what they are, this or that, absolutely or relatively, not by will or arbitrary command but by the necessity of their own nature.' 2 1

cf. Anderson's attack on what he calls 'relativism' in a number of articles in The Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, and particularly his Realism versus Relativism in Ethics (Vol. XI, No. 1 ) . 2 E.I.M. , 1 , 2 , 2 . Mr A. N. Prior i n his Logic and the Basis of Ethics ( I 949), referring to my article The Moral Philosophy of Cudworth, in which I argue somewhat as I have argued here, draws attention to this passage (which I did not then quote) and takes the phrase 'absolutely or rela­ tively' to show that Cudworth did not have in mind the criticism (that

' E T E R N AL A N D

I M M U T A BL E

M O R A L I TY '

Now, it is not at all an eas y matter to det ermine whet her a part ic ular t heorist holds, or does not hold, a posit ion of the k ind C udworth is here att acking. In The Right and the Good1 Ross draws att ent ion t o the diffic ult y of dec iding whether a partic ular Ut il it arian maint ains that ' r ight' means 'having c ertain c onsequenc es' or that having c ertain c onsequenc es somehow makes an act right . S imilarly, it is often hard t o say whether a moralist of t he legi slative sc hool is asse rt ing t hat G od' s c ommands mak e act ions moral, or r at her t hat t o c all t hem m or al is just a way of saying that t hey are c ommanded by G od. Obviously , Cudwort h' s c rit ic al princ iple c an only be applied t o positions of t he first sort; if anybody likes t o say t hat t here is no differenc e in nat ure between good and evil, it is pointless t o retort t hat t hings are what t hey are not by wi ll but by nat ure. Cudwort h so strongly believes in r eal distinctions of m oral c haracter that he is t oo r eady t o asc ribe suc h a belief t o his opponents. It is t rue that h e parenthe­ t ic ally c ontemplates t he possibilit y of a t ype of ethic al t heory against whic h, as he admits, his c riticj sm would have no fo rc e. Moral good and evil, he says, must be what they are, not by will but by nat ure 'if they are not mere names without any signification or names for nothing else but willed and commanded' . B ut he does not stop t o ask whet her this is not what in fact bot h Hobbes and t he Calvinists would argue-t hat good and evil are but names for willed and c ommanded. T here is t his muc h t o be said, however : that while t wo moral distinctions cannot be constituted by their relation to something else) which I have just been making. But the point remains : if there are moral relations (as there are geometrical relations) so that we can sensibly say that the relation between A and B is a bad one, but the relation between A and C a good one, then this too is a difference in the character of the relations, and a difference which cannot be constituted by their relation to some third thing D. Cudworth, as we have seen in the pre­ ceding chapter, has very special views about 'relations' and 'natures', but I think the position I am here ascribing to him is the one which, at least, he is attempting to formulate. I pp. 8- 1 0 ,

43

RALPH CUDWORTH

distinct mo ral theo ries can be analytically di sti ngu ish ed, and Cu dworth's cri ticism o nly has force against o ne o f them, mo ral theo rists have no t u nco mmo nly held bo th theori es at o nce, slipping fro m o ne to the o ther as seems to them co n­ venient, that bei ng why i t i s so hard to tell exactly what they are asserting. That ri ght means 'co mmanded' i s the co nclu­ sio n to which the lo gic o f thei r po si tio n forces them, bu t at the same time they wish to ask and answer the qu estion: 'Why ou ght we to do what i s co mmanded? '-and are tempted by the answer: 'Becau se it is ri ght to do what i s co mmanded. ' Thu s, although Ho bbes expli ci tly asserts that to act w ell means to do what is co mmanded, he i s also incli ned to argu e that a perso n who do es what i s co mmanded acts well1 , as i f thi s were no t, o n his sho wing, a tau tology. Of thi s, Cu dwo rth was well aware. 'Ou r athei sti c po litici ans' , he says, 'plainly dance rou nd i n a circle'2 ; and he thinks that, i f pressed, Ho bbes mu st co me do wn o n the si de o f natu ral j u stic e, si nce i t i s his princi pal o bj ective to sho w that we ou ght to o bey the so vereign, and since no co ntract, based merely o n u ti li ty, cou ld o blige u s to o bey in tho se cru cial cases where our o wn i nterests are threatened; that is why Ho bbes has to mai ntain that there is a general law o f nature, we ought to ob ey covenants, antecedent to all particu lar co venants. There i s, I think, r eal grou nd for this analysis, even if i t canno t be accepted qui te as it stands, bu t this i s a poi nt which need no t no w be stressed. It wi ll be a sufficient j u stificatio n o f Cu dwo rth' s princi ple i f i t do es no thi ng mo re than this: to su ggest qu estio ns which are always wo rth aski ng abou t ethical theories, even i f they are no t always easy to answer-wo rth aski ng becau se they help u s to detect ambigui ty and o bscuri ty, difficult to answer becau se su ch ambigui ty and o bscu ri ty i s the very li fe- bloo d of so many ethical theo ries. The sharpness o f Cu dwo rth's cri ti cal weapo n i s blu nted by a co mpro mi se whi ch i nvolves hi m i n serious i nconsi stenci es. It ar ises ou t o f this difficulty, that the tendency o f any theory o f cf. my Moral Philosophy of Hobbes (Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, Vol. XIX, No. 1 ) . 2 T.I.S., 3 , 50 I . 1

44

' ET E R N A L A N D I M M U T A B L E M OR A L I T Y '

eternal and immutable morality is, on the fac e of it, an ti­ n omian . The laws of the State are n either eternal n or immutabl e; an d whatever morality we take to be etern al and immutable, it will be easy en ough to point to occasion s on which adher en ce to it confl icts with the precepts of a parti­ cular sovereign . This was a poin t on which Hobbes had in sisted. He had argued that un less morality is iden tical with the decrees of the sovereign , there will be a confl ict of mor alities within the c ommun ity, of the kin d which leads in evitably to c ivil disorder and warfare. Cudworth was n ot boun d to be discomfited by this con clusion, but he was n ot in fact prepared to accept the radical con sequen ces of his doctr ine. An d he tries to evade them by arguing that obedi­ en ce to the sovereign is a con stituen t par t of eternal an d immutable morality. 'We deny n ot but that evil person s may, an d sometimes do, make a preten ce of con scien ce and r eligion in order to sedition an d r ebellion , as the best things may be abused; but this is n ot the fault of r eligion, but only of the men; c on scien ce obliging, though first to obey God, yet, in subordination to him, the laws of civil sovereign s also. ' 1 This was as far a s he took the matter in the True Intellectual System, but in Eternal and Immutable Morality he tries to over come c er tain of the more obvious diffi culties in this position by drawing a distin ction between two kin ds of goodn ess. The prin cipal diffi culty can be put in this way: if we accept the ordinary view, as Cudworth wishes to do, we shall have to say that a person acts morally when he obeys the law, even though to act in precisely the same way before the law was promulgated would n ot have been to act well. Similarly, it is usually believed that a person acts wei l when he keeps a promise; yet the same act, had the promise n ot been made, might have been mor ally in differen t. In these cases, then , the moral character of an act seems to have been altered by arbit­ r ary dec ision , whether it be the decision of the legislator, or of the promise- maker. How can these facts be r econ ciled with the doc trin e that an act is mor al or n ot moral by its nature, whoever wills or fails to will it? 1

op . cit., 3, 5 1 4.

45

R A LP H

C U D W O RT H

In trying to meet this diffi culty by disting uishing two differ­ ent sorts of goodness, Cudworth no doubt had the ex ample of Plato before h im ( 'civic' goodness and 'philosophical' goodness) and, even more, the example of Aristotle's distinc­ tion between Natural and Legal Justice. 1 In Cudworth 's theory, 'positive' goodness corresponds to P lato' s 'civic' goodness and Aristotle's 'legal' justice, 'natural' g oodness to 'philosophical' goodness or 'natural' justice. And positive goodness, Cudworth arg ues, is derivative from natural g ood­ ness; 'even in positive commands themselves, mere will does not make the thing commanded just; . . . it is natural justice or equity, which gives to one the righ t or authority of commanding , and begets in another duty and oblig ation to obedience. '2 That is why no ruler ever issues a law that his commands should be obeyed: 'everyone would think such a law ridiculous and absurd; for if they were obliged before, then this law would be in vain, and to no purpose; and if they were not before obliged, then they could not be obliged by any positive law, because th ey were not previously bound to obey such a person's commands; so that oblig ation to obey all positive laws is older than all laws, and previous or ante­ cedent to them. '3 Thus at least one natural obligation must be admitt ed, prior to all law; if we are obliged to obey the com­ mands of God, this cannot be because God commands us to do so: if we accept the right of the ruler to rule, this ' righ t' cannot be identified with the ruler's command. ' It is n ot th e mere will or pleasure of him that commandeth , that obligeth to do positive thing s commanded, but the intell ectual nature of him that is commanded. '4 Cudworth's final conclusion goes rather further than this, 1

See E.I. M., 1 , I and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, v, c, I O. G. P. H. Pawson in The Cambridge Platonists ( 1 930) links Cudworth's argument with Hooker's analysis of law in his Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I, but the resem­ blance seems to me of the most tenuous sort. Probably, Cudworth's distinction was most immediately derived from Whichcote (cf. Sermons, Vol. IV, p. 1 0) . 2 E.1. 111. , 1 , 2 , 3. 3 ibid. 4 E. l. M .• I . 2, 4·

' ET E R N A L AND I M MUTABLE M O R ALIT Y '

but for the moment he is content to su mmarize thu s: 'There are some things which the intellectual natu re obligeth toper se, " of itself" , and directly, absolu tely and perpetua lly, and these th ings are called" natu rally good and evil" ; other things there are which the same i ntellectu al natu re obligeth to by accident only, hypothetically, u pon condition of some volu ntary action either of ou r own or some other person's, by means whereof those things which were in their own natu re in­ different, falling u nder something that is absolu tely good or evil, and thereb y acqu iring a new relation to the intellec tu al natu re, do for the time being become " suc h things as ought to be done or omitted'' , be ing made su ch n ot by will bu t by natu re. ' Thus, he continue s, if we make a promise to perform an action to whic h natu ral ju stice does not oblige u s, that promise does not change the moral charac ter of the ac tion, bu t the indifferent act now 'falling u nder something abso­ lu tely good, and b ecoming the matter of promise and coven­ ant, standeth for the present in a new relation to the rational natu re of the promiser, a.nd becomes for the time being a thing which ought to be done by him, or which he is obliged to do. ' 1 It wou ld be absu rd to say that promise- keeping is good becau se we have promised to keep promises, bu t it is not absu rd, he thin ks, to say that ( to take the ordinary trivial ex ample) to post a letter is good when we have promised to do so. At the same time, he wants to distingu ish. He does not wan t to say that writing a letter ( when we have promised to do so) is good in the same sense that, say, hu man affection is good : what is 'positively' good is not good in the full sense of the word. 'Indifferent things commanded' , he says, 'con­ sidered materially in themselves, remain still what they were before in their own natu re, that is, indifferent . . . all the moral goodness, j u stice and virtue that is ex ercised in obey­ ing positive commands, and doing su ch things as are positive only and to b e done for n o other cause bu t becau se they are c ommanded, or in respect to political order, consisteth not in the m ateriality of the ac tions themselves, bu t in that formality I

E.l. M.,

47

I , 2,

4·

RALPH CU D W O R TH

of yielding ob edienc e t o the commands of lawful aut hority in t hem . . . wherefore in pos itive c ommands the will of t he c ommander does not creat e any new moral ent ity, but only diversely modifies and det er mines t hat general dut y or ob ligation of naturalj u stic e to ob ey lawful authority and keep oat hs and c ovenants. '1 What are we t o make of this ? In part icu lar, of t he distinc­ t ion between 'formality' and ' mat eriality'? As in so many other ca ses2 , we can make sense of t his dist inct ion if we inter pret ' material' as qualitative and 'for mal' as relative: t he previou sly indifferent act ion does not c hange in qu alit y when it is c ommanded but it ent er s into a new r elation; it now is r elated in a special way t o t he will of a lawful sovereign. In itself it r emains morally indifferent, neither good nor evil. The act itself is not mor al but t he r elation between t he agent and t he sovereign is a moral r elat ionship. Perhaps we c an bring out t he c haract er, and t he difficult y, of this doctrine if we choose a modern example. L et u s su ppose t hat a law is passed c ompelling per sons who are seeking emplo yment t o make u se of a L ab our E xchange. Then, Cu dwort h is argu ing, althou gh ob edienc e t o t his law is morally good, we are not t o say t hat t he act of seeking employment throu gh a L ab our Bur eau has c hanged in char­ act er, t hat from being morally indifferent it has c ome t o b e good. The proposit ion 'Seeking employment t hr ou gh a L abour E xc hange is good' is not parallel t o 'The love of God is good'; t he sec ond proposit ion asserts t hat c ert ain feelings are eternally and immutab ly of a c ert ain kind-' good' means ' mat erially good' in t his proposit ion-t he first , t hat a c ert ain c lass of acts is a ' modific ation' or a 'determination' of an et er nally and immutab ly moral kind of action. ' Good' here means 'formally good' , or, as he ot her wise put s it, t he act ion I 2

E.I. M. , I ' 2, 5 .

cf. M. Schlick,s Problem of Ethics, for example. The distinction between material and formal goodness in scholastic ethics is of a rather different kind, but the same analysis applies : an action acquires its formal goodness through its relation to the intention of the agent (cf. T. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, Essay V, ch. IV, § VII) .

' ETERNAL AND

I M M U T A B LE M O R A L I T Y'

i n q uesti on 'fall s under' a typ e of acti on whi ch i s absol utel y good. Thi s di sti ncti on between two sor ts of goodness has a certai n r esembl ance to the conventi onal di sti ncti on between 'good as means' and 'good as ends' . But i t is not the same: to seek empl oyme nt through a Labour Ex ch ange i s not a means to th e p er for mance of a l aw- abi di ng act, i t i s an examp le of such an act. In fact, and thi s paradox emp hasi zes th e l ogi cal diffi­ cul ti es i nto whi ch Cudworth' s concessi ons l ead hi m, the class of l aw- abi di ng acts i s made up entir el y of vari ous parti cul ar acts, none of whi ch , accordi ng to Cudwor th , need be naturall y good, whereas l aw- abi di ng acts as a cl ass ar e naturall y good! To put th e matter i n a somewhat more for mal way: from th e premi ses 'To be l aw- abi di ng i s good' , and 'Thi s i s an exampl e of l aw- abi di ngnes s' , Cudworth does not want us to draw th e concl usion that 'Thi s i s good' . Yet thi s concl usi on cannot be avoi ded: and th e 'good' i n the pr emi ses and the 'good' i n t he concl usi on will h ave exactl y th e same meani ng. In Cudwor th' s transi ti on fro m 'modificati ons' to 'deter mi na­ ti ons' , and from 'determi nati ons' to 'falli ng under ' , we can see an uncer tai nty about the l ogi c of hi s argument, and thi s uncer tai nty i s ampl y j ustified. If we are goi ng to say th at we act morally i n obeyi ng the l aw, then we have to admi t th at th e very same act can be moral at one ti me ( before a l aw i s passed forbi ddi ng i t) and i mmoral at another ( after th e l aw has been passed) or morall y i ndi fferent at one ti me and moral ( or i mmor al) at anoth er. Th ese concl usions c annot be avoi ded by tal k of 'for mal ' and 'materi al ' goodness, and th ey are q ui te i ncompati bl e wi th the theory of eternal and i mmut­ abl e morali ty. Thi s at l east emerges from the moral p hil osop hy of Hobbe s and the 'modern theol oger s' , th at i f all l aw- abi ding acts ar e moral , then no other cl ass of acts can be ei ther moral or i mmoral , because any p arti cul ar act mi ght come to be com­ manded or forbidden by l aw. Thus the proposi ti on 'all l aw­ abi di ng acts are good', i f i t i s tr ue at all , will be the wh ol e content of moral theor y; th e r est will be casui stry, whi ch will r estri ct i tsel f to deter mi ni ng wh eth er or not a particular act

49

R ALPH CUDWOR T H

1s m accordance with law. Hobbes was right in believing that the doctrine of eternal and immutable morality is a 'dangerous' one-'dangerous' , that is, to the sort of absolutist social order he envisaged . Cudworth tried to avoid that 'danger' by including obedience to law within the system of eternal and immutable morality, but it refuses to be so con­ tained, and the attempt badly distorts the general structure of his ethical system. How alien is this intruder to the spirit of his ethics will become more apparent in what follows.

50

CHAPTER V C U D W O RTH ' S M O RAL P S Y C H O L O GY

T

H E Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality is primarily designed, we said, to show how it is possible for morality to be eternal and immutable. So far the Treatise is a work on epistemology and logic, no more ethical than Kant's Critique of Pure Reason; and, for the rest, it is a polemic, still mainly logical, against legislative ethics. If it were not for his manuscript remains, we could never discover what Cudworth had to say about most of the issues which have been of principal concern to ethical theorists. Of course, once we have scrutinized the manuscripts we see the impor­ tance of remarks in passing, suggestions not fully developed, in his published work, particularly in the Sermon preached before the House of Commons on 3 1 st March 1 647, but it is not surprising that these hints have generally been over­ looked by historians ; for their import, without the help of the manuscripts, is not at aH clear. Muirhead, in his The Platonic Tradition in A nglo-S axon Thought, comes closer than anyone else to the essential Cudworth, primarily because he made some attempt to grapple with the manuscripts. But as his mis­ description of them shows (see Appendix) , he failed to examine them with sufficient care; he missed entirely the all-important, though brief, ethical essays which are included, with so much that is valueless, in the British Museum collections of fragments entitled Loci Communes Morales and Collection of

Confused Thoughts Memorandums relating to the Eternity of Torments. I ndeed, he seems to have studied none of the

manuscripts in detail except the Summary attached to Addit. MS S . 498 1 . Since the manuscripts survive in an incomplete and muti­ lated form, there are naturally many points in Cudworth's theory on which it is impossible to speak with assurance. Still, we can discern in them the outlines of a theory which is 51

RALP H CUDWO RTH

interesting in itself and (since this must have been the content of Cudworth's teaching at Cambridge) which was presumably of importance in the development of ethical thought in England, even if, from the nature of the case, not much can be said with certainty about the extent and direction of that influence. This theory is not quite the one we would expect to find, if we come to the manuscripts with the traditional stereotype in our mind. Cudworth is usually regarded as the first of a line of rationalistic thinkers ( a general impression certainly fortified by Selby-Bigge's physical separation in his British Moralists of Cudworth from Shaftesbury, and the general character of the selections from Cudworth in that work) ; what we have so far said about his logic and epistemology might seem to add greater security to that tradition, in so far as we have emphasized the Platonic- Cartesian trends in Cudworth's thinking. But no one can compare the Cudworth of the manuscripts with, say, Samuel Clarke without realizing how misleading it is to think of Cudworth as 'one of Clarke's predecessors' . I n Clarke, rationalistic psychology assumes its crudest form. Reason is a moral and intellectual faculty, that in us which apprehends necessity, an impersonal arbiter remote from the hurly-burly of passion and feeling : in short, Clarke is an admirable target for the shafts of Hume. Cudworth's psychology is quite different, in some respects Humean but without Hume's individualism. Impartiality, to Cudworth, is not freedom from passion, but a passion for universality ; it is not freedom from desire, but freedom from self-love. Reason, if we understand by that name nothing but intellec­ tual apprehension, is no motive to action . 'The first principle of motion in the soul is not, of course, reason and understand ­ ing . . . there must be some other spring and motion, or first mover in the soul, that sets the wheels at work and employs the thinking, consulting and speculative power. ' The spring is 'a certain love' , it is ' that radical vital temper or state of being which is predominant in everyone' 1, in short, it is something very like Shaftesbury's 'ruling passion ' . I

4983, 84.

52

CUDWORT H ' s MORAL P SYCHOLOGY

What C udworth calls 'the vul gar physiology of the soul ' , w ith its division of the min d in to r eason in g parts an d feelin g par ts, cann ot, he argues, accoun t for the most characteristic features of human action . Human action al ways in volves en ds, an d we cannot 'excogitate' en ds-they are the obj ects of desire, n ot the product of r eason in g. Reason , as 'the vulgar physiology' con ceives it, has no favourite s, n o in clin ation to do this rather than that; this is the price it pays for its impar tial ity, a price which r obs it of all capacity for action . 'Mer e specu­ l ative in tell ection without an y in clin ation to on e thin g more than another, w ithout anythin g of appetite or volition , is n ot the first gate or en try, the first origin al an d beginn in g of all action s in the soul, but . . . in stin cts an d in cl in ation s are the sprin g an d sour ce of life an d activity when ce en ds ar e suggested to us that provoke an d in cite en deavours an d awaken con sul tation towards the attain men t of them. '1 T he in stin ct comes first; n o 'sen timen tal ist', n o uphol der of hormic psychol ogy, has ever asserted this more fir ml y than C udwor th. It is odd to fin d so much of modern psy­ chology hidden in these forgotten man uscripts, in a han d­ w r itin g in con gruousl y an tique even by the stan dards of its own age. Just how r adical was his doctr in e can be seen by comparin g it w ith the moral psychol ogy of \Vhichcote. Whichcote w rites: 'The affection s an d passion s . . . are to be still an d quiet, till after j udgemen t an d choice. For their place is onl y in pursuan ce: n o place in deter min ation . By j udgemen t w e fin d out our way, an d by our passion s w e ar e ex pedited in it . . . affection s are bl in d thin gs in themselves, an d they must onl y follow.' 2 For all that Whichcot e taught to C udwor th, even al though Whichcote made him the sor t of Christi an he wa s, th eir moral psychology lies poles apar t. 4982, g. Sermons, 4, 432. On the theoretical issues raised, see John Anderson, Mind as Feeling (Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, Vol. X I I, No . 2), and Determinism and Ethics (Vol. VI, No. 4) , my Reason and Inclination (Vol. XV, No. 1 ) and A. Boyce Gibson's reply, Can reason Influence Conduct ? (Vol. XV, No. 3) . I

2

53

RALPH

CUDW O R T H

The psychology to whi ch Cud worth was obj ecti n g i s, of cou rse, the faculty psy chology, whi ch divi ded t he sou l in to facu lti es of Reason, Will and D esire, wi thj u dgemen t, volition, an d the pu rsu it of sp ecific ends as their respective func ti on s. According to Cu dworth, on the contrary, i t i s 'on e and the same thin g that both ju dgeth and willeth'1 • Thu s whereas, on the ordinary view, Reason (in its capaci ty as Practical Ju dgement) determines that something ou ght to be done, and then bec kon s to Will to carry ou t the deci si on, to Cu dworth the 'last prac tic al j u dgement' and the dec ision to act in a certain way are i den ti cal. There can be no qu esti on 'whether the will always follows the last practi cal j u dgemen t'; this is a pseu do- problem, 'i t really bein g as if they shou ld di spu te whether the will follows itself'2 • To will is simply to deci de to do thi s rather than that. O f cou rse, one mu st not expect to find that i n Cudworth's writings a facu lty psychology plays n o part. Is there an y psyc hology of whic h this c an truly be said? Bu t that is the tendency of hi s psychology. His regular argu ment i s that there i s 'a c ompli cation both of appeti te wi ll and velleity and also of light and u nderstan din g an d perception i n the same act'3 , thi s as opposed to the view that wanti ng, wi lling an d thinking are th ings so diverse in character that each mu st be the work of a separate agen t. 'It is really the man or sou l that un der­ stands, an d the man or sou l that wills. '4 There ar e not diverse au tonomou s 'men tal acts', there i s j u st the sou l, wi th its varied life, whi ch someti mes acts wi thou t deli beration , some­ times pau ses for refl ection . He saw that the theory of facu lti es was an empty one­ 'to attribu te the ac t of intellec t an d perception to the facu lty of u nderstandi ng, an d acts of voliti on to the facu lty of will, or to say that i t is the u nderstanding that u nderstandeth, or the wi ll that willeth . . . i s all one as i f one shou ld say that it is the fa cu lty of walkin g walketh, and the facu lty of speakin g I 2

3 4

49 79, 7 • ibid.

4982 , I O . T. F. lV , 24-5.

54-

C U D W O R TH ' s M O R AL P S YCHOLOGY

speaketh.' 1 This criticism was, indeed, a natural consequence of his rej ection, typical of his age, of 'occult qualities', but it is surprising how many of his contemporaries, like Male­ branche in Recherche de la Verite2, rejected faculties in physics only to retain them in psychology. An alternative physics had been worked out, but not an alternative psychology; this, no doubt, is the main explanation of so recurrent an inconsis­ tency. Just because Cudworth did have an alternative psycho­ logy, he had no need to clothe his ignorance in the thin disguise of the faculty theory. Cudworth realized that once the faculty psychology had divided the mind, it had no way of putting the pieces together again. If we suppose that there is one faculty which acts, but cannot think, and another which thinks, but cannot act, there is no conceivable way in which one could influence the other: Will cannot argue with Reason, for Will cannot argue; Reason cannot exert force on Will, for Reason knows no force but argument, to which Will is by its nature unsuscep­ tible. 'There cannot be one thing that judgeth, another thing determining the action, for then that which deter­ mineth would not know what it determined. , 3 To the theory of faculties it is customary to counterpose a strict insistence on the unity of the soul: the most common criticism of the faculty theory is that it 'destroys the unity of the soul'. But Cudworth sees that this unity is destroyed by the facts, by the existence of the conflicts so characteristic of our mental life. The conflict, however, is not between faculties, but between ways of life. Naturally, Cudworth employs the terminology of Platonic Christianity, which here lies ready to his purpose : the conflict is between the spirit and the flesh. But this dichotomy Cudworth somewhat reinter­ prets. 'The soul', he says, 'might be considered as double or as having two theories of life' 4 ; 'the flesh' is not merely an urgent passion but a theory of life, 'spirit' is not merely a

w.,

T.F. 24-5. cf. 6, 2, 2 and 2, 1 , 1 . 3 498 1 , Summary, p. 4. � 498 2 , 28. I

2

55

RAL P H CUDWO RTH

theory of life but also an urgent passion. Two distinc t system s of passion c on stitute the human soul; on the one side 'anim al appetite', on the other side 'love' or 'c harity' or 'the instinc t of honesty' or simply 'spirit'1• In some human beings, spirit m ay ex ist only as a 'glimmering', but no soul is ever simply animal or simply spiritual. How does this differ from the traditional opposition of Reason to Passion, Consc ienc e to Inc lination? P rinc ipally in this, that Cudworth has no need of the 'third m an' c har­ ac teristic of those other psyc hologies, no need of P lato's 'spirit', or Butler's 'self- love', whic h c onjoin within themselves the c harac teristic s originally disjoined as inc om patible­ p assion and c alc ulation. Self-love, to Cudworth, is sim ply the anim al passions in their c ooler m oments: there is nothing in the c onstitution of the passions to prevent them from deliber­ ating, and that deliberation may take the form of a prudent c alc ulation of c onsequenc es. This c alc ulation is 'the inferior reason, whic h c omparing the future wit h the present dic tates m ore truly and impartially our own private utility'2 • There is no antithesis whatsoever between being passionate and being ( in this sense) rational. The 'ec onom ic m an' has lost none of his passions; they determ ine his calc ulation of c hanc es. On the other side, there is what Cudwo rth c alls 'the higher intellec tual instinc t', Superior Reason. Superior Reason is a c ertain kind of love-a love of 'honesty' ( moral exc ellenc e)­ just as Inferior Reason is a c ertain k ind of love-prudenc e. 'Both these dic tates are instinc ts, appetites or inc linations.' 3 The spiritual m an is a m an of passion ; he does not m erely c ontemplate exc ellenc e, he passionately engag es in it. The point of distinc tion between the animal and the spiritual is not, then, that spirit deliberates, while passion ac ts without c alc ulation. To be governed by the princ iple of utility is no less animal, though it is m ore rational, than immediately to satisfy the passing appetite. Nor, for the same reason, c an one properly s ay that appetite takes a short 1 2

3

cf., for example, 4983, 82. 4979, 8. 4982, I O .

CUDW ORTH ' s M O R A L PSYC H O L O G Y

view and spirit a l ong one; this woul d be to regard appetite and spirit as identic al in kind, though diffe rent in c ompetenc e. L ong- sightedness may be the grou nd of distinc tion between p ru dential and impru dent ac tion, bu t c ertainl y will not serve to distingu ish the animal from the spiritu al. F or the spiritu al is a different kind of passion fr om the animal , and al ong with that differenc e in kind goes a differenc e in their theories of l ife. The animal appetites are egoistic , Util itarian, where spirit is disinterested ( though not u ninterested); its c onc ern is with the c ommon l ife of men, not with indiv idu al gain. The signific anc e of this 'new psyc hol ogy' ( as Cu dworth rightl y c all ed it) for his ethic s has by now partl y emerged; in detail it will be ou r l ater c onc ern. A t the moment, another qu estion has to be fac ed, of v ital importanc e to Cu dworth: where, in this acc ou nt of hu man natu re, is there room for fr eedom? This is the probl em whic h most perturbed him, to whic h he again and again retu rns in his manu scripts, nev er, to j u dge fr om his 'hu ndred dec isions and revisions' , settl ing it to his c ompl ete satisfac tion. The problem, it should be observ ed, was not how the will c oul d be free; that probl em disappeared with the facul ty. 'It is reall y the man or soul that u nderstands, and the man or soul that will s. ' There is no qu estion of asc ribing fr eedom to a particul ar facul ty, a fr ee agent within an otherwise determined mind; if any­ thing is fr ee, it is the soul . In Cu dworth' s psychol ogy, freedom is threatened from two sides. He had to c ontend against 'the divine Fate moral ' , whic h emphasizes divine grac e to the point of denying indivi­ du al fr eedom, qu ite as muc h as against 'The Atheistic Fate' with its rej ec tion, as mythol ogy, of any l ife other than the l ife of appetite. And the difficul ty for Cu dworth is that he fel t himself obl iged to admit so muc h to his opponents: he has to grant that neither animal passion, as suc h, nor l ov e (spirit), as suc h, is free, in the metaphysic al sense of freedom. Of the animal passions, he writes: 'We are not c ommonly thought to be so muc h the c au se of them, as Natu re in u s. ' 1 We c annot c hoose ou r animal passions, they c ome and go as 1

498 1 , Summary, p. 2 .

57

RALPH

CUDWORTH

they will, not as we will ; we cannot be praised o r blamed for

our impulses. And j ust as animal passion is nature in us, so spirit is God in us ; we do not choose to love in its spiritual sense any more than we choose to love in its carnal sense : ' it is a thing which must invade and as it were seize upon those who are possessed of it. ' 1 This does not mean that we must sit back and wait until the spirit seizes us : Cudworth says that it is our task to 'remove obstacles' to the workings of spirit. We can put ourselves ( and other people) in the way of being 'invaded' , but we cannot ensure that the invasion will take place. So far, then, the human mind is a battle-ground of compet­ ing tendencies. Human life is a struggle between the posses­ sive Utilitarian force of the animal passions and the creative force of divine love. The forces in this contest are not of our creation ; to praise us because the spirit works within us is as irrelevant as to blame us because we sometimes experience animal impulses. This conclusion Cudworth feels bound to accept, but not what is often believed to be the con­ sequence, that praise and blame (in the sense in which it assumes human freedom) has nowhere any application . ' I may compare the human soul to a ship under sail moving upon the waters and necessarily carried along with the winds and tide in which the chief pilot himself is carried as well as the other mariners, as being passive to its motion, and yet, notwithstanding, he, sitting at the helm, has also some power of determining the motion of that ship in which he is carried on, can direct its course to some port rather than another. ' 2 'Some power' , notice, not a great power; indeed Cudworth calls it 'a weak staggering power' 3 , but still, a power it is, 'whereby the soul . . . doth in doubtful cases add something of its own to the moments of Reason and impulse' 4 • What is it that exercises this power? It cannot be a faculty, I

4983, 84.

4979, 1 78. 3 4979, 39. 4 4979, 20. 2

CUD W O R T H ' S M O R A L P S Y C H O L O G Y

for faculti es have been abandoned; it cannot be a specifi c passion, or set of passions, for they arise out of the operations of God or of nature. In any case, it is not a part of the man, but the man, who is free. Cudworth answers: it is 'the soul reduplicated upon itself '1 • This solution is not devoid of obsc urity, but what he is suggesting is something of th e following sort: the soul can stand above its constituent parts and exert a force which is not the force of those parts, i. e. which is not the force of nature or the force of God in us but belongs to the individual as such and is peculiarly his c ontribution as an individual person. This power is not sufficient to initiate action, but 'in doubtful cases' it turns the balance in favour of a particular judgement or of a particular choice 'by means of which it can either promote itself some­ thing towards the higher good of honesty and reason or else sluggishly succumb under the lower inclinations'2 • So far we are free, free, that is, to throw our i ndividual force on the side of the good life ( the side of God) . Is this power ex ercised as a purely arbitrary act? Cudworth ans wers this question in the negative, although he knows that to answer it thus is to make an important concession to the determinist. Indeed, to say that he answers it nega­ tively is to put the matter too apologetically, as if he were constrained to an answer he was not desirous o f giving, whereas, in fact, the rejection of ' the vulgar doctrine of fr ee­ will which makes the essence of it to consist in nothing but indifferency to act or not to act'3 is the second main objective of his writings on free-will. The parallel with his other writ­ ings is a close one: they are directed primarily against atheism but secondly, and at no great distance, against the ascription to God of mere naked power. D eterminism now takes the place of atheism, and 'indifferency' represents 'the Divine Fate immoral or violent': the theory of 'indiffer­ ence', in fact, ascribes to human beings a power which is a pallid reflection of the power it a scribes to God. Man's 1 2

3

op. ci t . , 1 2 3 et passim. ibid. 4982, 76.

59

R A L PH CU D W O RTH

fr eed om, l ik e God' s freed om, is taken to consist in the abil ity to act without respect for principl e, to perform what mod ern revivers of this d octrine have call ed 'gratuitous acts' . To Cud worth, on the other hand , freed om and respect for prin­ cipl e are not in opposition to one another but id entical (remembering that the principl e we respect is not a precept bu t a mod e of l ife). His first obj e ction to 'ind ifferency' is that it is 'the id ea of such a thing or power as cannot possibl y be in Nature' 1 • Were there reall y in a man a naked power of choi ce, then 'the wick ed est person might i n a moment by his free will mak e himsel f as hol y as the seraphim' . 'But' , continues Cud worth, 'these things are not agreeabl e to the phenomena'2 , and for the phenomena he came to have more and _ more respect. F or the existence of free-will in this sense, he thought, there i s no warrant whatsoever in our experience. But what is to become of moral ity? D oes not moral ity l ose its meaning u nl ess free-will , in precisel y this sense of ind ifferency, is ascribed to man, unl ess, that is, we are at all times equally capabl e, whatever our character or our past circumstances, of 'promoting' the good l ife? Thi s criticism, Cud worth considers, comes naturally from those who think that m oral ity consists in isol ated acts of obed ience to an external will , itsel f quite arbitrary in its command s. But if moral ity, as Cud worth maintains, consists in l iving a certain k ind of l ife, or in coming to be possessed of a certain spirit, then to suppose that man is end owed with a power of choice ind ifferent in its nature to good and evil d oes not assist, but actually hind ers, the cause of moral ity. F or one thing, it absol ves us from all responsibil ity for our d eed s. If it is the very nature of free-will to be ind ifferent to good and evil , then we cannot properl y be bl amed when on a particul ar occasion we show oursel ves ind ifferent to the cl aims of moral good ness; for we cannot be bl amed for 'the mere use of a natural fa cul ty' , the power of choos ing ind iffer­ entl y. The ind ifferentis t theory l eaves us in no sense 'l ord s I

4982, l 1 9. 4982, 1 5.

60

C U D W O RT H ' s M OR A L P S Y C H O L O G Y

and masters of our volitions'\ in no sense, then, responsible fo r our ac tions. They are not indeed our ac tions, the ac tions of a being with his own c harac ter, b ut the ex erc ise of a fac ulty not of our maki ng and not disp laying our distinc tive c harac ter. Again, the i ndifferentist hyp othesis, in so far as it identifies fr eedom, in general, with the ex erc ise of arbitrary power, gives rise to this p aradox ic al c onc lusion: that the nearer we app roac h the good life, the less we have of freedom. ' From this doc trine it fo llows that it is neither p ossible fo r the will of man ever to be determined to good only or to be fix ed in a state of holiness or righteousness, nor, if it c ould, would [ it] be a desirable pe rfection, fo r it would be a most unnatural violenc e and essentially c ontradic tious to his liberty.' 2 F or if we were to br ing ourselves to suc h a state that we c ould not c hoose b ut to ac t well, this would mean that we had lost our indifferenc e and henc e, on this hyp othesis, our freedom. Cudworth argues, on the c ontrary, that if we were p erfec t, we would p ossess p erfec t fr eedom; i n bec oming p erfec t, in attain­ ing divini ty, all heteronomy would disapp ear from within us, as it does in God. But this p erfec t freedom would not be naked p ower; on the c ont rary, the truth of freedom is nec essity -'at onc e a fr eedom from all law, a state of p urest liberty; and yet a law, too, of the most c onstraining nec essity' 3-a c ondition ac hieved in love. F ree-w ill is not, of c ourse, the same thing as freedom; indeed, a p erfec tly free being, Cudworth argues, would not p ossess will, although neither would a being c omp letely animal. 'F ree- will is a power in suc h beings as are not essen­ tially good b ut yet are c apable of being unspottedly holy. '4 To talk of us as p ossessing the p ower to c hoose the good life imp lies that we are not p erfec t: a p erfec t being does not 4982, 1 5. ibid . 3 ISt Sermon, 345. 4 4982, 20. This is a doctrine he learnt from Whichcote, who wrote : 'Liberum arbitrium which men so brag of; as it includes posse male agere is an Imperfection : for such liberty or power is not in God. ' (Aphorism 1 3. ) I

2

R AL P H

CU D W O R T H

choose the good life, it is never to him an end, he lives the good life by nature. That is why Cudworth c alls free- will 'a mongrel c ompound of perfec tion and imperfec tion'; it is a perfec tion in so far as it shows us c apable of preferring good­ ness, it is an imperfec tion in that it testifies to the heteronomy in our soul. But although freedom and free- will must not be identified, 'free' , acc ording to Cudworth, has in both c ases a similar signific anc e: the 'freedom' of fr ee- will does not c onsist, just as freedom in general does not c onsist, in the c apac ity for arbitrariness. I ndeed, that c apac ity is alien to it; far fr om being 'indiffer­ ent' , free- will is nothing but the c apac ity for preferring the spiritual to the animal life. 'The fac ulty of fr ee- will is nothing but a self- ac tive power in order to good, towards the keeping or rec overing a dominion over our lower appetites and inc linations, whic h is the only perfec t liberty or fr eedom, when we, that is, our better part, rules over our worse, for everything properly is the best thing in it. ' Far fr om it bei ng an 'unnatural violenc e' to liberty for us to c hoose always to ac t well, it is in fac t only when we do make that c hoic e that we exerc ise our fr ee- will. F ree- will, thus c onc eived, as the power of c hoosing to be free, no longer seems to serve its theologic al func tion-as the explanation of man's c apac ity for sin. How c an it be our c apac ity for free- will whic h is the sourc e of our sin, if fr ee- will c onsists, simply, in our power to c hoose the good life? Cudworth' s answer is that we do not sin through our exerc ise of free- will but rather through our failure to exerc ise it. 'Sin is privation. ' He knows with what satire 'the wits' will greet this doc trine-is it, they will ask, for nothing at all that we are c ondemned to eternal punishment? But spiritual privation is not merely negative, any more than bodily priva­ tion is ' nothing'; it is a positive state of the soul, a state of 'sluggishness' in whic h the soul fails to live u p to its possi­ bilities . And again he reminds us of what, on his theory, c onstitutes sin: ' Sin is not the wilful opposing of the arbitrary 1

2

I

l

4982, 20. 4982, 40,

CUDWORTH'S M OR A L

P S Y C HO L O G Y

c omma nd of a nothe r pe rson [ the " divin e Fate immora l" ] but it is a fa lling short from na tu ra l pe rfec tion'1 ; it does not c onsist , prima rily, in ou r failu re to do what is c ommande d but rat he r in ou r succu mbing to a wa y of life whic h is me rely a nima l a nd, he nce, in whic h we fa il fu lly to realize ou rselve s. The re a re ob viou s difficu ltie s in all this, of whic h Cu dwort h wa s probab ly not u nc onsc iou s. He is now left wit h three sorts of free dom: free dom a s ide ntical with goodne ss, ou r capac ity for c hoosing this sort of free dom (free -will), and ou r capac it y for not exe rc ising this capac ity. So that in the e nd Cu dworth ha s t o postu la te ' a n indiffe re nt volu nta ne ity' , whic h he pre viou sly ca lle d 'a monstrosity in Natu re '. Phra se s like 'the volu nta ry non-exe rcise of free -will'2 re veal his difficulty only too sta rkly. 'Free- will' ha s come t o be the na me for a ce rta in kind of c hoice , and now t he meta physical prob le m rea ppea rs-a re we free (in t he meta physical se nse) t o ma ke or not to ma ke that c hoice? If Cu dworth maintains t hat we a re free to ma ke the c hoice, the difficult ie s on whic h he ha s himse lf insiste d rise u p to c onfront him; if we a re not free t o ma ke it , t he n what bec ome s of that pra ise and blame whic h this whole psyc hological appa ra tu s is de signe d t o pre se rve ? Whe n Cu dwort h write s: ' If wha t I shall sa y c on­ ce rning free -will see msu nsatisfactory to a ny, I shall think it no ma rvel at a ll, for I ne ve r was myse lf fu lly sa tisfie d in any dis­ c ou rse whic h I rea d of it'3 , t his re flects his dissatisfac tion wit h his own vie ws qu ite a s muc h a s with those of his pre dece ssors, a dissa tisfac tion su ffic ie ntly a ppa re nt in his e ndle ss re visions of his ma nu sc ripts, and ce ntring on just this prob le m­ how t o rec onc ile with ' the phe nome na ' that mea su re of ' indiffe re nce ' de ma nde d, as he thought, b y the c once ptions of pra ise a nd b lame . ' Indiffe re nce ' is drive n fr om one appa re nt stronghold t o anot he r, but finds nowhe re a ny rea l secu rity of te nu re . His a tte mpt to stee r a middle c ou rse be twee n de te rminism a nd the ' indiffe re ntist' sort of libe rta ria nism may be fu rthe r 4982, 40. 4982, 2 I . 3 4982, I . I

2

R A L P H C U DWO R T H

illustrated from his discussion of the doctrine that the will necessarily chooses ' the highest good'. This thesis he is bound to reject; for, as he sees, it is a form of determinism. He admits that the will [' the redoubled self-active life'] is unable to choose what seems to it in all respects evil, in the broadest sense of ' evil' in which it means that which is not ' congruous' with the soul: 'I t cannot possibly pursue after any evil as such ( that is, as it is incongruous to it) but only as taking notice of something as good in it. ' The good may be utility ( anim al good) or moral goodness (' honesty') , so that the ' congruity' may be either with the animal or the spiritual life of the soul, but congruity of some sort there must be. I f an act is both disadvantageous and morally evil, that act is one which we cannot choose to perform. Similarly, if good­ ness and utility ' conspire', then ' the will d oth in a manner naturally and necessarily without any wavering or hesitation embrace the same'; this is the ' immutable nature of the will', that it cannot reject what is in all respects good, nor seek after what is in all respects evil. And over and above this ' immut­ able nature' there is a 'factitious nature' made up of ' habitual dispositions which do strongly incline it one way more than another and are not whensoever we please immediatel y vincible and destroyable in us'. We cannot in a moment overcome the habits of a lifetime. So far Cudworth has been talking like a d eterminist: where then lies the will's liberty? I n this fact-that there are very many cases where good and evil are mix ed, and where habitual dispositions do not deter­ mine our action. I n all such cases ( when, for ex ample, an action will involve a sacrifice on our part but is morally good) we are free to act as we choose; here the will finds its ' great compass'1 • This, if we are correct in our hypotheses about the relative dates of the Cudworth manuscripts2 , is a comparatively early version of Cudworth's libertarianism ( as its relatively ortho­ dox character would in any case suggest) , but already ' the self-active power' is considerably restricted i n its power of 1 2

498 r , r r o ; all the above quotations are taken from this place. cf. Appendix.

C UDWORTH' S MORAL PSYCHOLOGY

c hoic e. A s his views develop ed, the 'habitual disp ositions' enc roached more and more up on the 'great c omp ass' of the will; l iberty of c hoic e c ame to seem inc omp atible with the only sort of fr eedom whic h c ould p rop erly be asc ribed to the good man- the fr eedom whic h lies, not in c hoic e, but in autonomous ac tion. Or, to p ut the matter differently, Cudworth's theory of good and evil bec ame steadily more diffic ult to reconc ile with his theory of praise and blame. Sometimes he is determin ist enough to write: 'All the c on­ tingency that is essential to a free-willed being is only this­ that it is not absolutely nec essary for them always in like c ases when the ou tward c irc umstanc es are the same to ac t alike'r-a degree of c ontinge nc y whic h any but the most nai: ve of determinists would be p rep ared to grant. At other times, he seeks a c ontingenc y whic h rises sup erior to c har­ ac ter as well as to c onsequenc es, but then 'the p henomena' weigh heavily up on him, and his ethic s bids him p ause. As it stands, his theory wi ll satisfy nobody, bu t from its un­ satisfac toriness there are p hilosop hic al lessons to be l earnt: his inc onsistenc ies are not those of eclec tic ism; they arise out of an attemp t to grapp le with a ser ious p roblem, seriously envisaged. Two other qu estions of moral p syc hology muc h pre­ occ up ied Cu dworth's succ es sors: the first, in what manner moral distinc tions are c ognized; the sec on d, what motives we have to ac t morally. On neither p roblem does Cu dworth write at length, but what he has to say is onc e more somewhat surp rising, if we app roac h his writings with the p resupp osition that he is the typ ic al rationalist. Coming fr esh fr om the reading of The Treatise on Eternal and Immutable Morality, we shoul d c ertainly exp ec t to find Cudworth arguing that Reason, and Reason alone, appre­ hends moral distinc tions. Has he not already denied that knowledge ever has its sou rc e in sense? Certainly, bu t he has also emp hasized the imp ortanc e of sensation in elic iting the ac tivities of ou r minds; Reason c oul d not of itself ju dge that this (in p ar ticu lar) is good, even thou gh the notion of I

4982,

121.

RALPH

CU D W O R T H

goodn ess has its origin in the min d's own activities. An d as Cudworth's ethics devel ops he graduall y works further an d further away from the n otion of purel y cogn itive facul ties, self- operatin g in 'men tal acts'. So n ow he writes: 'As the first sprin g of vital action is n ot from the specul ative un derstan d­ in g, so n either is dry an d in sipid ratiocin ation the onl y measure an d rul e of good an d evil . . . . It is n ot sapl ess specul ative kn owl edge that is the proper rul e or j udge of good an d evil but vital touches, tastes an d savours . . . . The first prin cipl e b y which good an d evil are distin guished is vital , n ot n otion al . '1 This is far more an an ticipation of Shaftesb ury than it is of Cl arke; the kn owl edge of good an d evil is a 'taste', n ot merel y an in tell ectual apprehen sion of the differen ce b etween con gruity an d in con gruity. But, at the same time, this taste is n ot a 'sen se', as writers l ike Hutcheson woul d defin e a sen se; it is n ot a facul ty for apprehen din g moral distin ction s, which reacts to their presen ce as the eye does to l ight. Our j udgemen ts of good an d evil are part of our mann er of l ife . ' Accordin g as every man 's vital disposi­ tion is, so is a man's j udgemen t diversified con cern in g en ds and goods. '2 Cudwo rth does n ot mean that good an d evil are themsel ves con stitu ted b y their rel ation ship to our 'vital disposition s'; the differen ce between good an d evil remain s immutabl e an d etern al . It is onl y our capacity fo r recognizing the distin ction which varies with 'our vital disposition s', j ust as, indeed, our capacity for j udgemen t in gen eral varies with the char­ acter of those disposition s. For it is we who j udge, n ot our 'Reason ', an d we are our vital disposition s, operatin g in a variety of ways. Sin ce there is n o special facul ty of moral j udgemen t, the question whether this facul ty is ration al or sen suous is a pseudo- probl em. Simil arl y, Reason cann ot b e the motive to moral action , j ust because it is n ever a motive to action . It is merel y ab surd to tell men that they ought to hate vice ' for its own sake', i. e. even if they fin d it in no way distasteful . 'It is n ot in the I 2

498 2, 8-g . 498 2, 9.

66

C U D W O R T H ' s M O R A L P S Y CH O L O G Y

power of the so ul to hate anythi ng bu t as it fe el s it by it s senses and knows i t by i ts reason to be an evil . . . . to talk of hating vice in itself i s indeed but to hate the name, but if it has not some visi ble prospect of its deformity it can have but little i nfluence upon the mi nd. '1 That there is a di stinction, intellectuall y apprehensi ble, between good and evi l can never, in itself, be the motive for choosing good and rejecti ng evil. Indeed, there i s no such thing as the moti ve to moral acti on, for this is a matter on whi ch i ndi viduals are bound to differ. In a particular person we may find that one parti cular motive is strongest and that one is particularly to be encouraged in that particular case. 2 One person will be most impressed by the ugli ness of vi ce, another by the puni shments it brings with it. But unanimi ty cannot be expected, for i t is not some spec ial faculty in us-the same in every man-which per­ forms our moral actions; those ac tions flow from the ' vital dispositi ons' which consti tute our nature. Again and agai n, the story is the same: we are not to thi nk of the mi nd as consisti ng of faculties, Reason, Will, Moral Jud gement, each operating autonomously in 'mental acts' . Our acti ons flow from our vital dispositions: how we wi ll, how we reason, how we j udge will depend on what we are, on the particular relationship which has been established in our mi nd between our animal and our spi ri tual natures. At least, in the case of will, it doesn't quite consi st in that; there is a certain 'contingency' to be taken into account. But it is not surprising that to descri be precisely the character of this contingency lay beyond Cudworth's powers; contingency forms no part of his theory, but is forced upon it by pressure from theology.

I 2

4982, 1 8. ibid.

CHA PTE R VI

T HE GOOD LIFE

T

H E central co ncep tio n in C udwo rth' s ethics is goo dn ess, no t duty. He writes: 'It wo uld be o ne o f the surest means to judge witho ut mistake o f o ur p ro gress in goodness if men didj udge o f their imp ro vement by the lo ve o f virtue rather than by do ing their duty. Fo r to be virtuo us is to have the temper o f o ne' s mind transformed into a heavenly lo ve . . . but do ing o ne' s duty is do ing it indeed as an act o f submissio n and o bedience, but with restraint and in differ­ ence o f will, the wi ll no t being mo ved to it fro m the excellency o f the act itself. . . . Lo ve wo uld make the o bedien ce mo re lasting and mo re willing and to beco me the natural dispo si­ tio n and temp er o f the mi nd: this is freedo m and liberty; the o ther is the tireso me task and slavi sh impo sition o f religio n.' 1 As this p assage suggests, and as we saw in detail in o ur di scus­ sio n o f Eternal and Immutable Morality, Cudworth wishes to retain the o rdinary view that o bedience to law has a certai n virtue in it. But even o bedience must be freely given if it is to manifest the sp ecifically ethical p rop erties; it s mo tive must no t be servility, it must be lo ve. Thus the task o f mo ral theo ry, to Cudwo rth, do es no t co nsist in drawing up a list o f duties, i n the manner charac ter­ istic of the co mmo np lace mo ralists; his p eculiar p ro blem co uld rather be p ut thus: to describe the goo d life. Naturally, he begins by assuming that cert ain kinds o f life are goo d and o thers evil. He is no t inventing a distinctio n but, rather, he is tr ying to elucidate mo re fully a distinctio n already p erfectly famili ar: with this reservatio n, o f co urse, that the elucida­ tio n may bring to light differences which were no t p revio usly susp ected. (Just as bo tany begins fro m the quite fa miliar no tio n o f a flo wer, but ends by describin g as 'flo wers' many 1

4983,

68

I

7-8.

THE GOOD LIFE

types of vegetation which no ordinary person ever calls by that name . ) 1 One characteristic of the good life has already come to the fore : spontaneity or freedom-'the free air of perfect liberty' 2 • ' Freedom' need not now be understood in a metaphysical sense ; Cudworth is referring to a property of human actions which is perfectly familiar to us, and the existence of which is not at all incompatible with determinism. We all know _the difference between acting under a sense of constraint­ whether the constraint takes the form of physical compulsion or of 'a sense of duty'-and acting spontaneously, without servility and bondage. The distinction is most sharply made in Cudworth's discussion of 'enthusiasm' . Whichcote-in this matter, as in so many others, at one with eighteenth-century 'enlighten­ ment'-had expressed a bitter hostility to enthusiasm. 'Nothing is more necessary to the interests of religion' , he wrote, 'than the prevention of enthusiasm.' 3 And Cudworth grants that there is a bad sort of enthusiasm, in which the enthusiast 'is ridden by furious and dark impulses' 4-the sort of enthusiasm which modern psycho-pathology has abundantly described. At the same time, there is another kind of enthusiasm which, Cudworth complains, his con­ temporaries have confused with the dark compulsion-neurosis of the fanatic. It consists in a certain 'swing and impetus' ; and in this sense of the word, 'there never was anything done or written transcendently in any kind, without a certain enthusiasm.' 5 This point of opposition between Whichcote and Cudworth arises naturally enough out of their very different moral psychologies ; to Whichcote anything which disturbs the calm deliberations of 'Reason' is suspect; to 1

For a discussion of the logical issues involved in such cases as these, see my Logical Positivism III (Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philo­ sophy, Vol . XXVI, No. 1 ) . 2 1st Sermon, 308. 3 A phorisms, 349. There is much elsewhere to the same effect . And, of course, More wrote an A ntidote against Enthusiasm. 4 4982 , 46. 5 4982, 47.

69

R ALPH CUDW O R T H

Cudworth, reason without enthusiasm would b e impotent, as much for good as for evil. Whichcote finds no goodness in irrational obedience: 'To obey without reason is to be led like beasts' 1 ; Cudworth finds none in obedience without enthusiasm. Both men saw in the contrast between freedom and servility a central point of distinction between the good life and the evil life ; and indeed between the good life and that third sort of life which lies between good and evil, what Cudworth calls 'the merely legal state' when 'men are only passive to God's law, and unwillingly subject to it for fear of wrath and vengeance, [which] must needs be a state of miserable bond­ age and servility, distraction and perplexity of mind.'2 Cudworth's emphasis upon spontaneity does not carry with it any denigration of knowledge. Whichcote had written: 'Knowledge alone doth not amount to virtue; but certainly there is no virtue, without knowledge' 3 ; such a modified version of the Socratic dictum Cudworth would be quite prepared to accept. It is a second important character­ istic of the good life that it is rational : a rationality consisting in this, that goodness sees things as they are, and not in this, that goodness is the application of rules. 'Some philosophers,' he writes, 'have determined that . . . virtue cannot be taught by any certain rules or precepts. Men and books may propound some direction to us that may set us in such a way of life and practice as in which we shall at last find it within ourselves, and be experimentally acquainted with it; but they cannot teach it to us like a mechanic art or trade.'4 The first sermon preached before the House of Commons, from which this passage is quoted, is not altogether represen­ tative of his mature doctrine, or, at least, it may mislead us ( just as some of Plato's dialogues can mislead us) because in that sermon he had a very special purpose : to preach, to an audience split by doctrinal controversies, the need fo r 1 2

3 4

Sermons , I , 258. 2nd Sermon, 382 . Aphorisms, 5. 1st Sermon, 298.

THE GOOD LIFE

tolera tion . Thu s he is led to con tras t k nowledg e ( ta ken n ow a s k nowledge of ru les and dogma) wit h holine s s, in a w ay whic h could easily le ad the u nwary to su ppose that his purpose was the elevation of goodness at the ex pense of wisdom. Perhaps it was bec au se he c ame to be somewhat uneasy lest in this sermon he had t ipped t he balance, always a prec arious one, bet ween humanism and pietism too far in the direct ion of the latter, t hat he chose th e occasion of it s dedication to make a st rong plea fo r the enc ou ragement of sc ienc e: 'it may w ell bec ome you, noble gentlemen, in you r public sphere t o enc ourage so noble as t hing as knowledge is. '1 The rat ionalit y of t he good life is c losely associat ed wit h it s t hird property, its impartiality or disinterestedness: 'being expanded fr om the narrow particularity of it self t o t he universalit y of all, and delighting in the good of all . . . it is an impartial natu re, not fo ndly tied to t his or that, not c ap­ t ivated t o itself as suc h, but loving good as good. ' 2 The c on­ trast is wit h t he egoism, the narrowness of the animal affections, which seek not 'good as good' but good as their goo d. Onc e more, t he hint c omes from Whichcote, t hou gh, of course, t he roots of Cu dwort h's doc trine lie muc h fu rther back, in t he Platonic t radit ion. 'There is nothing in religion', writes Whichcote, 'that is dishonourable, selfish; t hat is part i­ c ular, and narrow- spirited. . . . They are worldly spirits t hat are low, narrow and c ont rac ted. '3 'Worldliness' is prudence, w ith it s eye always fixed upon t he material advan­ t age of the agent : the good life t akes a broader view of things, concerning it self not with the agent as a pu re individual b ut wit h t he syst em t o which he belongs. The notion of 'syst em' is, of course, fu ndament al t o Cudwort h' s whole philosophy; it is as belonging to a system t hat t hings dis play t heir generalit y. Just as the parts of t he wat ch are what t hey are through their partic ipation in that partic ular system, so, Cud wort h argues, individ uals are what they are only t hrough their part ic ipation in the system of ISt Sermon, 293 . 4983, 83 . 3 Sermons, I , 59. 1

2

RAL P H CUDWORTH

ratio nal beings. 'There is a c ertain universality o f b eing whereby a man c anno t apprehend himself as a b eing standing by itself, c ut off, separated, and disjo inted fro m all o ther beings, who se good, being private, is, as it were, o ppo site to the goo d o f all o ther beings, but loo ks upon himself as a member lo vingly united to the whole system o f all intellec tual beings, as one animal, o r as co nc erned in the goo d and welfare o f all besides himself. . . . There is . . . a princ ipi e o f co mmon sympathy in everyo ne, that makes everyo ne to have ano ther bei ng besides his o wn private selfi sh parti­ c ularity, whereby he rises abo ve it, and is in a manner all, as parent£ and c hildren seen to make up a totum.' It is in ' this new magnitude o f the so ul, rising abo ve all external things and fi nding so mething greater than its o wn selfi sh parti­ c ularity, o r creaturely narro wness, nay so mething mo re in­ ward to it and mo re its o wn than itself ' that the so ul disco vers the goo d life; its o wn po tentialities are revealed to it o nly when it passes beyo nd the limits o f ego ism, when it beco mes ' an impartial nature, no t fondly tied to this o r that, no r captivated to itself, as such' 1 • It fi nds itself o nly when it transcends itself. Even o n the basis o f his so mewhat inadequate kno wledge o f Cu dworth's writings, Muirhead co uld see adumbrated in C udwo rth the o utlines o f an Idealist philo so phy; as we read the manuscripts tho se o utlines become mo re distinc t. And we c an no lo nger co mplain, as Muirhead did, that C udwo rth' s so cial philo so phy was never 'co-o rdinated with the general ethic al mo tive o f the treatise'2 • Indeed, C udwo rth's ethic s is intimately asso ciated with his social philo so phy. Naturally, he rej ec ts Hob bes's individual­ istic theo ry o f human so ciety; this must fall with his ego istic theo ry o f human nature. To Ho bbes, the so cial tie is a marriage o f co nvenience: there c an be no o ther so rt o f unio n between iso lated human beings, eac h in pursuit o f separate and inco mpatible ends. C udwo rth saw that o n this founda­ tio n so ciety i s impo ssible. If we begin by 'villainiz ing human I

2

4983, 83.

op. cit., p. fr2 .

THE GOOD LIFE

nature'1 , w e ca n nev er unders tand how the vil lain s can work toget her in society. Lik e the I dealis ts aft er him, he thinks that the on ly alternative to individualistic egoism is the supposi ti on that there is a ' public good' , 'the good of the whole community'2 , so that ov er and above the div erse and particularized ends of individuals there stands the end of the system to whi ch they belong, which the y can pursue just in so far as that system is their system. The fu nction of Law is then i dentical with the fu nctio n of Reason: Law sees men as they are, impartially, as memb ers of a system, just as Reason sees things as concepts-agai n, tha t is, as formi ng part of a systematic whole. 'Civ il laws are a Commonwealth . . . a common and impartial measure, between one man and another, that aims at the good of the whole com muni ty. Civ il law circumscribes the infinity and uncertainty of men's priv ate lusts and appetites and therefore it bears a great resemblance to the principle in the soul . . . not as if the measure of all morality was an external law, but because outward laws bear such a resemblance to that pri nciple in nature that i s the rule and measure of moral actions, in respect of its publicness and impartiality and ai ming at a common good and being of a determinate nature. '3 This social phi losophy is on ly lightly sketched, but we can see well enough what manner of theory i t was, and how closely it was linked, precisely in the Ideali st manner, with Cudworth's ethics and with hi s epi stemology. The notion of system reappears i n the fourth char acter­ i stic of the good life, that it is systemati c or orderly. P lato had already maintai ned that the different elements in a good l ife mutually assist one another; this is, i ndeed, one princi pal theme in the Republic. And there were fu rther hints to draw upon in Whichcote's description of the life of religion: 'Faith i n G od, humi lity of spi ri t, and active care and diligence in the affairs of our salv ati on are things that are united in the common root of truth and goodness. They do comply with each 1 2

3

T.I.S., 3, 49G. 4983, 85. ibid.

73

R A L PH C U D W O R T H

other in their nature and disposition. They mutually p romote

each other in their several operations.' 1 These properties, compliance and mutual promotion, make possible according to Cudworth the systematic orderliness of the good life. 'There is a discord and enmity between the several vices and a uniformity in the several virtues. Vice labours with a civil war, with dissension, and an intestine rebellion in its own bowels, its cheating and defrauding the soul with its irregular and contrary disposition. Pride and Lust, Covetousness and Drunkenness lead and harass the soul with irreconcilable desires to the same end of happiness; but no single virtue is any enemy to the enjoyment or accomplishment of another. These rather assist and promote one another, receiving a more vigorous and enlarged power from the progress and perfection of one another . . . they being as several members of the same divine life. . . . The several virtues have their several particular offices and function to the composure and forming of the same heavenly life; and [each] not terminating in its own end, the perfection of itself, but by its own virtue helping the propagation and extent of its whole being : by distributing its energetic power to increase its fellow members it may also receive a supply from the other virtues to quicken and advance its own self, so conspiring to perfect its own self, and its whole being at the same time, the divine life being the complete perfection and union of all the virtues in the same mind. � 2 This unity, it should be observed, is not a merely negative one : it does not merely consist in the fact that the various elements in the good life do not compete with one another. Far more important, they actively encourage each other's development. That they do not compete with one another is a consequence of the fact that they are not posses­ sive; the struggles between the animal passions are economic in their origin. But the co-operativeness of the virtues is a positive property, since by their very nature the virtues extend their energies beyond their own confines; they lend one another assistance, just as men assist one another in 1 2

o p . cit., Vol . 4983, I O- I 2 .

74

1,

p. 348 .

THE GOOD LIFE

co- operat ive work. By their n ature, th ey are social, an d in their man n er of workin g we see how soci ety in the broader sen se can survive an d flourish. The c apacity of the good life for un itin g a diversity of vir­ tues w ithin the closest of un ities carries with it, so Cudworth argues, a c ertain beauty; the beauty of goodness is a fifth distin ctive property. Beauty in genera l lies in the triumph of unity over diversity. 'What is pulchritude in visible obj ects or harmon y in soun ds but the proportion , symmetry an d commen suration of figures an d soun ds to on e an ot her, where­ by infin ity is measured an d determin ed an d multiplicity an d variety vanquished an d triumphed over by un ity?' 1 The good life 'makes a unity an d harmon y of differen t scattered affec­ t ion s', it brin gs them 'in to order an d proportion'2 ; therein consists its 'pulchritude'. Cudworth particularly has in min d the example of music, an d the comparison between the good life an d a musical harmon y run s through his First Sermon to the House of Common s. On ce more, of course, the Pythagorean tradition is hj s in spiration . The spon taneity of the good life, its ration ality, its dis­ in terestedn ess, its orderlin ess, its beauty are con joined with another property, closely l in ked with these-its creativity. We n eed to distin guish, Cudworth argues, between two dif­ feren t sen ses of the word 'good'; 'good' in the ethic al sen se, an d 'good' in the 'an imal' sen se. 'An imal good' is iden tical w ith what we should n ow call economic good: it is that which w e seek to own , the object of self-love. Cudworth describes it as 'passive', mean in g that it is n ot a way of life but simp ly an object w hich waits for us to accept or reject it. In the ethical sen se, on the other hand, good is an activity-'the active ex ertion of love itself '3 • This is a poin t of con siderable importan ce. The ethi cal theories most widely curren t in En glan d begin from the assumption that 'good' i s that which is by its n ature an en d, an object of purs uit; so that the differen ce between econ omic I

E.l. M., 4, 2, 7.

4983, 82. 3 4983, 38. 2

75

R A L PH CU D W O RTH

and ethical good would consist simply in something like this : that economic goods are 'material', whereas ethical goods are 'spiritual' . In so far as 'material', to Cudworth, means 'passive' and 'spiritual' means 'active' , this is a ground of distinction which he could accept, but when the contrast of 'material' and 'spiritual' is interpreted in this way it is a contrast between ends and activities, not between different species of ends. Cudworth would grant that goodness can be an end in the limited sense that we can choose to throw our power as individuals on the side of goodness, but it is not its nature to be an end, nor is it, principally, as a result of our pursuing it that we become good. Goodness is 'a principle that is not of our making or production' ; 'the divine life is formed not by us but in us' 1 ; 'it is a thing which must invade and as it were seize upon those who are possessed of it. ' 2 Our role as individuals is a very limited one. In a sentence pro­ phetic of Bosanquet' s 'hindrance of hindrances' he writes : 'This (love) will invade and seize upon all those that are prepared for it, and have the obstacles removed' 3 ; 'prepara­ tion' and 'the removal of obstacles' are positive tasks, but for the rest goodness comes as it wills, not as we will. This does not mean that we lose our independence-our independence is not inconsistent with our membership of the system of rational beings-but it does mean that we do wrong to imagine that goodness is something external to us which we can choose to pursue or to reject. ( A man makes a mistake when he thinks that it is as a result of a prudent calculation of chances, or any sort of deliberate intent, that he fell in love. ) Cudworth's ethics, then, is a theory of a certain kind of human activity. Perhaps what is central to it can most readily be detected by considering what Cudworth says about vice. 'At bottom' , he says, 'all vices are one and the same thing, they agreeing in one vital source or centre, " self­ desire" .' Vice is egoism, the pursuit of 'private good', which I

2

3

4982, 46. 4983, 84. ibid.

T HE G O O D

LIFE

'distracts, c ru mbles all into piec es'1 ; it is selfish, c ompet1 t1v e, ugly, unc reativ e. In short, the 'ec onomic man' is the su preme type of viciou sness; the supreme type of goodness, on the other side, is love, disinterested, c o- operative, spontaneou s, beautiful, c reativ e whic h ' u nites and c onglu tinates all together'. 2 How is goodness related to happiness? That is a qu estion which has v itally conc erned most mo ralists, c onc erned as they have been to persu ade men to goodness by tel ling them o f the advantages it will bring. T he theologic al doc trine of hell and heaven is the most pic tu resque fo rmulation of a demand fo r 'rewards' everywhere apparent. On heaven and hell, Whic hc ote had already written: 'Both heaven and hell have their fou ndation within us. Heav en primarily lies in a refined temper, in an internal reconc iliation to the natu re of God, and to the rule of righteousness' 3 ; and again, 'Some think the hellish state is the sole produc t of omnipotenc y and sovereignty, the effec t of God' s power. These are inju rious apprehensions of God. Here is the tru th of the c ase: misery doth arise out of ourselves; and misery and iniqu ity hav e the same fou ndatio n. Hell (fo r the main of it) is ou r gu iltiness and c onsc ienc e of it; and the worst of God is his just refusal of a sinner.' 4 In this mode offo rmulation, there is still the sugges­ tion tha t Hell is a mode of pu nishment, though now an internal rather than an external pu nishment. Cudworth goes further than this: the essenti al feature of hell is not that it i s painful bu t that it is morally evil. To be good is already to be in heav en: to be evil is already to be in hell. 'We do ac tu ally in this life instate ou rselves in the possession of o ne or other of them. '5 In the end he is led to deny ou tright the ordinary Christia n doc trine of eternal rewards and eternal pu ni shments, a doc trine whic h he regards as an ac tual hindranc e to the c ause of religion. 6 For it is inc onsistent with 4983, 82. ibid. 3 Aphorisms, 1 00. 4 Sermons, 3, 1 06. 5 I st Sermon, 328. 6 4983, 36. I

2

77

R A L P H CUD W O RTH

the n ature of the human soul, which always con tain s within it the poten tiali ty fo r good an d evil, a poten tiality which immortality could do n othin g to remove; an d if we can n ever quite lose the capacity fo r goodn ess, then heaven always li es open to us. Happin ess is n ot an en d, n ot a possession which can be gran ted to us or refu sed us, n ot a 'passive good'; it con sists in livin g a certain kin d of life. 'God himself cannot make me happy if he be on ly without me, an d unless he give in a participation of himself an d his own liken ess in to my soul. ' 'Happin ess is nothin g but the releasing an d un fetterin g of our souls from all these n arrow, scan t, an d particular good thin gs; an d the espousin g of them to the highest an d most un iversal good. '1 Happin ess is n ot the reward of goodn ess, fo r happi­ n ess cannot be han ded out as a reward, but in bein g good we are also bein g happy. Happin ess, freedom, goodness, rationality, spirituality are differen t n ames fo r the same thin g: the escape of the soul from human bon dage, the bon d­ age of egoism.

1

ut Sermon, 327.

C H A P T E R VII

E T H I C S AND RE LIGIO N

C

U D W O R T H ' s ethics sets out to be humanistic without ceasing to be Christian. It is penetrated by religion without being in the classical sense 'a theological ethics'. Within it, we feel a certain tension, an uneasy con­ sciousness that there is still a gap to be bridged, a recon­ ciliation to be affected; and only through a study of that tension can we come quite to appreciate the detail of Cudworth's ethics or understand just what place it occupies in the history of British ethical theory. Cudworth's personal role in the troubled religious con­ troversies of the period is not altogether clear and unambigu­ ous. The Cambridge Platonists are often accused of quietism, of finding in the ideal of the 'contemplative life' a retreat from the violent political and religious life of their own time; this may have been true of More and Whichcote, but it was not true of Cudworth. Lady Masham, Cudworth's daughter, attacks those who think 'the duties of social life to be low matters, fit only to exercise the young Christian, not yet advanced to the spiritual state'1, and in this, as in so much else, she was her father's daughter. Concern for 'the good of the system', 'public-spiritedness', these were virtues Cudworth particularly emphasized. He was extremely active in the affairs of his own college 2-a delicate and arduous business in those days of political and religious controversy-and this was by no means the limit of his political activities. Under Charles I, he was a marked man, even amongst the Platonists, on account of the peculiar vigour of his re­ action against ecclesiasticism. This we know from Burnet, who, writing of the Cambridge Platonists, singles out 1

A Discourse Concerning the Love of God, pp. 4-8. cf. \Vorthington's Diary and Correspondence, passim.

79

RA LPH CUDWORTH

Cu dworth as 'be ing in a c lou d as favou ring the Nonc on­ formists'1 • His alleg iance to an u npopular c au se did not g o u nre warde d afte r the Civ il War. Whe n the P arliame ntary V isitors e jec te d the Maste r of Clare Hall, Cu dworth was c hose n Master in his place; it fell to him to adv ise Thu rloe , the n Sec re tary of State , on the c hoice of Cambridge you ng me n for g ove rnme nt e mployme nt2 ; and it was ce rtainly a signal mark of honou r to be c hose n to pre ach be fore the Hou se of Commons. Ye t Cu dworth g reete d the Re storation wi th a se t of c on­ g ratulatory ve rse s addre sse d to Charle s II; nor was he re move d from his maste rship, althoug h he was a man who made bitte r e ne mie s. Was Cu dworth sti ll anothe r of the innu me rable V ic ars of Bray? Against that hypothe sis is the fac t that his adhe re nce to Nonc onformity was dec lare d be fore the Civil War, at a time whe n Nonc onformity was anything bu t a passport to preferment. His sermons, further­ more , we re not the produc tions of a time- se rve r. Although the Hou se of Commons was split asu nde r by qu arrels abou t Chu rc h disc ipline , Cu dworth pre ac he d the doc trine , popular with no party, that what re ally matte rs is the kind ofl ife we le ad-'withou t whic h, I may boldly say, all the seve ral forms of religion are bu t so many dre ams. And those many opinions abou t re ligion that are eve rywhere so e age rly c ontende d for on all side s are bu t so many shadows fighting with one anothe r. '3 In fac t, Cu dworth's story is a su ffic ie ntly fa miliar o ne , easily parallele d in ou r own day. Himself an advoc ate of tole ration, de sirou s that e ac h shou ld work ou t for himself the religiou s forms that see me d be st and most natu ral to his o wn requ ire me nts, he we lc ome d Pu ritanism for its promise of Supplement to History of My Own Times, ed. Airy, p. 464. cf. Birch's Life and Thurloe's State Papers . His administration was not universally applauded. There is a letter in the Tanner MSS (XL IX , 32) alleging that he 'brought Clare College to a ruinous con­ dition' by his 'ill administration' . But obviously the authorities had confidence in him . He left Clare, and Cambridge, for a time, but returned to become Master of Christ's College in 1 654. 3 I st Sermon, 289. 1

2

Bo

E T H ICS A N D R E L I G I O N

spir itual diversit y. But, like Milton, he came t o see 'New Presbyter but Old Priest writ large' ; 'I fear that ma ny of u s t hat pull down idols in t he c hurc hes ma y set them u p in our hearts.' 1 The fl uidit y c haracterist ic of a r evolut ionar y move­ ment soon hardene d into orthodoxy: new quarrels r eplac ed t he old ones, n ew persecutors arose. Not sur pr isingl y, he w elcomed t he Restorat ion, n ow t he sole hope of t olerat ion. He c ould stand c loser t o the Purita ns than Whic hc ote ever did, because he did not share Whic hc ote' s fa st idious distast e for 'ent husia sm' . Apart from this single, but impor­ ta nt , point of differenc e, his r eligion was t hat of Whic hc ote, t he r eligion of Ta ylor a nd C hillingworth. Whic hc ote enu nc iat es 'six mista kes a bout r eligion' 2 in a wa y w hic h sums u p t he hu ma nist crit ic ism of tra ditional r eligion and of Puri­ ta nism a like; and against these sa me 'mista kes' Cudwort h' s own polemic s w er e directed. The first mistake is 'to think that r eligion lies in a system of propositions' . Ther e is no set of proposit ions whic h w ill ma ke t hat man r eligious w ho learns them by heart. Cu dw orth carries t his a nt i- dogmat ism even furt her tha n Whic hc ote, t o lengt hs somew hat dangerou s in his own time. There are no doctr ines, he ma inta ins, the acc eptanc e of whic h is either suffic ient or nec essary for the practic e of a good life ( or, in t heological t erms, for salvat ion). None are nec essar y: t he heat hen can live w ell3 ; none are su ffic ient , for ' the gospel, t hough it be a sovereign a nd medic inal thing itself, yet t he mere knowing a nd believing of t he history of it w ill do u s no good . . . salvation it self cannot sa ve u s a s long a s it is only w it hout u s. ' 4 To be good is t o ha ve a c ertain c haracter; t he belief t hat w e can be sa ved by doctrine 1 s one spec ies of su perst ition. The sec ond mista ke is c eremonia lism. 'Some men ta ke c ertain images, performa nc es a nd for beara nc es t o be reli­ gion. . . . I lea ve these t o every man but he must n ot la y 1 2

3

4

1st Sermon, 290. Sermons, 2, 387.' 1 st Sermon, 303. ibid. 323.

81

RALPH

C U D W ORTH

stress on them.' There is nothing wrong in ceremonies as such ; the error consists in laying stress on them. Thus Cudworth rebukes the Puritans for being 'superstitiously anti-cere­ monial' 1. Ceremony can neither save nor damn us : it is superstitious to think that ceremony has any fundamental importance, one way or the other. The third mistake is to adopt 'severities and affectations' in the belief that in them lies salvation. Cudworth put the same point more vigorously : ' I do not doubt that many have over-practised the duty ofreligion . God made religion to be a reasonable service, not a bondage and imposition on human nature.' 2 One sees how little of the Puritan, in the ordinary sense of the word, there was in Cudworth. I n his account of the fourth, fifth and sixth mistakes, Whichcote preaches substantially the same lessons. ' We ought not to hold another to our form of words or phrases. ' Men express their religion i n different verbal forms, but this is a fact of no real consequence, certainly not an excuse for persecution. We must avoid 'censoriousness' . It is not for us to judge with severity the religious beliefs and the religious practices of our fellow-men . And then, by way of summary, he adds this : we must not confuse means-ceremony, institu­ tions, verbal phrases-with ends. What is the end? 'The state of religion lies, in short, in this : a good mind, and a good life. All else is about religion and hath but the place of a means or instrument.' The humanistic religious ideal could not be more succinctly expressed. I n still stronger terms, he writes : 'Better nature alone, though debased, abused and neglected, the very refuse of God's creation, than that religion which is false and insecure. . . Certainly, were I to take an estimate of Christianity, either from popery, or any of the gross superstitions of the world, and the affected modes of persons, I would return to philosophy again, and let Christianity alone. ' 3 This emphasis on goodness largely accounts for the 1 2

3

2nd Sermon,

394.

Sermons, 1 .

1 68.

4983, 28.

E T H IC S A N D

R E L I G ION

suspicion with which the Cambridge Platonists were so often regarded. As Shaftesbury put it: ·Some men . . . have been afraid, lest by advancing the principle of good nature, and laying too great a stress upon it, the apparent need of a sacred revelation . . . should be in some measure taken away . . . . Christianity, they thought, would by this means be made less necessary to mankind ; if it should be allowed that men can find any happiness in virtue but what is in reversion.' 1 This suspicion was by no means groundless; Cambridge Platonism was certainly a step on the road towards that secularization of moral_ theory which was to be so notable a tendency in eighteenth-century thought. Of course, moral theory had already been secularized, in a very different fashion, by Hobbes. But, in essentials, Hobbes's ethics is a primitive theological ethics. In a state of nature, men are brutish-so they are, echoes the theologian, since the Fall. They can only live together in some sort of comity by surren­ dering their 'right to all' to a sovereign power-perfectly true, says the theologian, men must learn to obey the com­ mands of God. Before there is a Commonwealth, there is no j ustice-if there were no God, the theologian translates, there would be neither right nor wrong. Men can only pursue thei r own good-just so, if it were not for the fear of hell-fire, morality and civilization would collapse. And so, as Shaftes­ bury puts it, ' Men who profess a religion where love is chiefly enjoined . . . combine to degrade the principle of good nature and refer all to reward. ' 2 No ethical theory so exalts the economic man as the typical theological Utilitarianism. To Cudworth, on the contrary, and to the Cambridge Platoni sts generally, good and evil are characters of men's souls; a certain kind of soul is good, just in being that kind of soul, not at all because some external authority so decrees. 'Virtues and holiness in creatures . . . are not therefore good because God loveth them, and will have them to be 1

2

Preface to Sermons, 7 . ibid.

R A L P H CUD W O RTH

accounted such; but rath e r God therefore loveth them, because they are in themselves simp ly good. '1 Men find happiness in the good life itself, and their own nature inclines them to social life. By nature men are p art animal, but only p art; they have also a sp iritual nature. Then, it w ould seem, God's function, as the sole guardian of morality, is no longer necessary; c annot ethic s shake its elf quite free from religion? His rej ection of a theological ethics in its classical form has a number of consequences for Cudworth's ethics. F or one thing, it leads him to rej ect the view that every human action must be subj ect to moral j udgement; a view natural enough, indeed inevitable, if every hu man act must either opp ose or assist the will of God, if every one of ou r acts counts either for or against us in the search for eternal salvation. On this matter, too, Cu dworth is no P uritan; he exp licitly rej ects 'such foolish and pharisaical doctrines that make every­ thing a sin and find a du ty in everything' 2 • W e are not in every act of our life on trial. The thing that matters is the general tenor of our life. At the same time, his Chri stianity vitally affects, at a nu mber of p oints, the structure of his ethics. The virtues on which he ordinarily insists are the typ ical Chri stian virtues; a fa ct wh ich makes it very difficult for hi m to give any genuine content to the notion of a good life, as he describes it. F or examp les of creativity, of sp ontaneity, of disinterest edness, w e naturally turn to science and to art, to courage and to human affection. 3 But all of these are secular activities; affection is the only one of them which p lays any p art in a sp ecifically Christian morality, and l ove, therefore, holds the central p lace, as an ex ample, in Cu dworth's ethics. Otherw ise, he must fall back on 'the mortifi cation of lust', on p atience, on 1 2

2nd Sermon, 3 1 2 .

4983, 36.

For an example of an ethical theory which, developed in complete independence, of course, fr om Cudworth's, and entirely secular in its inspiration, yet describes goodness very much in Cudworth's way, see various articles by Professor John Anderson in the Australasian J ournal of Psychology and Philosophy, especially, perhaps, Realism versus Relativism in Ethics (Vol . XI, No. 1 ). 3

E T H I C S A N :D R E L I G I O N

c ontentment, on resign ation: virtues which he mig ht pos sibly , w ith some plausibil ity, main tain to be n ecessa ry con dition s of the good life-in so fa r as they involve the overcomin g of egoism- but which he could scarcely take to con stitute the c ontent of that life. T his is not the only point at which Greek and C hristian ideal s consort oddly together, but it is a parti­ c ularly striking one; the life his ethics describes is the humanist life, the virtues w hich make it up are not the human ist virtues, and this is one of the main sources of the tension one feels in his ethical writings. It is not too much to say that what particularly attracted him in C hristian ity was the Platonism in it, but, of c ourse, he did n ot kn ow that there is Platonism in C hristianity. (Though w e may detect a c ertain uneasin ess in Whichcote's c omment: 'for we do imagin e that St. John took not any of his forms of words from the Platonists. '1) And he felt himself bound to defend, with the Platonism, much that is inc ompatible with it. It was his C hristianity, too, which led him to place such emphasis on praise and blame-in general, on desert. Desert is worthiness for salvation; and it is a C hristian assumption, whic h C udworth never questions, that all must have 'an equal chanc e' of livin g the good life so that 'cosmic justice' can be satisfied. It is at this point, and only here, that hi s libertari­ anism is at all essential to his ethical theory. That the good life arises, an d only arises, un der specifiable conditions would n ot prevent it from bein g spontaneous, creative, disinterested, in the sense which C udworth's theory requires. Of cou rse, he is bound to rejec t determin ism in its mechanical or clock­ work form; an d this theory, when it was applied to mind, was naturally C udworth's peculiar detestation . If the min d is a tabula rasa, if all that can happen to it is that it is pushed, n ow in this direc tion, now in that, then c ertain ly there can be no spontaneity, and C udworth's ethics would be ruled out on general physical gro unds. C udwort h accepts the c lock- work theory of matte r, as a p hysics, while rejectin g it as psy chology; this commits him to a dualism between the active an d the passi ve, the pusher and the pulled, force and 1

Sermons, 2, I 73.

R A LP H

C U DWO RTH

mass. 1 But this dualism, once more, is not essential to his theory of good ; it is his theology, the doctrine of salvation, which leads him thus to maintain the uniqueness of mind, and to seize hold, with such avidity, of any physics which promises to rob matter of every tincture of spontaneity. While he is content to ask: 'What is the good life like? ' he is asking a question not at all theological ; a question which can make sense to an atheist. Theology enters when he asks 'What must we be like if it is to be fair that some of us are damned and others saved?' It is only if this question is assumed to be a real problem that free-will, i n any meta­ physical sense, must be maintained . At yet a third point, the demands of religion affect the structure of his ethics. The emphasis of his ethics, we have insisted, is on goodness, not on duty or obligation . But there can be no disguising the fact that the conception of obligation is central in traditional Christianity : obedience to God's will must be a constituent in the good life. Cudworth's instinct is to re-interpret the conception of ' obedience' , so that it can be replaced by 'participation' . There are not, then, two things, God's will and our will, God's will demanding obedience of ours; there is just God's will, displaying itself within us, so that all heteronomy in the relation between God and man quite disappears. But there is still a heteronomy within man, between what is divine and what is animal. Thus he is led, on occasions, even to define good in terms of obligation . 'Things called naturally good are such things as the intellectual nature obliges us to immediately, absolutely and perpetually.' 2 I n this mode of expression, he falls back into the dichotomy of reason and passion . And the dilemma characteristic of Cudworth's criticism of legislative ethics reasserts itself; does our intellectual nature command a cer­ tain kind of action because it is good or is it good because it is commanded? The second alternative reduces 'good' to a 'mere name' ; the first alternative means that the obligation is, At this point, in my way of describing classical determinism, I am considerably indebted to the lectures of Dr K. R. Popper. 1

� E. l.M.,

I , 2,

4.

86

E T H I C S AN D

RELIGION

a s it we re, 'ex te rna l' to goodne ss: if the inte lle ctual na tu re co mma nds us to do what is goo d, this is informa tio n abou t o ur intelle ctua l na tu re ra the r than a bou t goodne ss. C learly e no ugh, wha t Cu dwo rth ought to be sa ying is simp ly this: goo dne ss is t he so rt o f life we spo nta neou sly live in so far a s we a ct a s 'ou r intelle ctua l na tu re' de sire s; bu t he re lap se s, no w a nd the n, into a mo de o f exp ressio n which is really qu ite a lie n to his ma tu re theo ry, a nd which easily leads to mis­ inte rp re ta tio ns o f his rea l inte nt1 ; a relap se no t a t all su rp ris­ ing, for this wa y o f talking is so much a part o f the o rdina ry a tmo sp he re o f religiou s e thics. The re ca n be no dou bt, ho we ve r, t ha t the p rima ry function of Go d, in Cu dwo rth's theo ry, is to act a s 'a fou ntain o f goo d­ ne ss'. To pu t the ma tte r o the rwise, Go d is tha t which release s us fro m ego ism; Go d is the sou rce o f a ll disinte re ste dne ss. This, it may be a rgue d, is the mo st impo rta nt thing tha t e thics ha s to lea rn fro m re ligio n, though it is a lesso n which religio n doe s no t co nsiste ntly teach, that the hu ma n be ing is no t, a s Utilitaria nism maintains, a be ing co nce rne d a lwa ys with the p ursu it o f p leasu re a nd the a voi dance o f pa in; he falls in lo ve, he de dica te s him self to cau se s, he is the e nthu sia st, the poe t, the a rtist, the inno va to r, the martyr; e ve n the bu sine ss-man is mo ved le ss by the de sire for p rofits a nd mo re by de vo tio n to his o rganizatio n tha n he ca re s to a dmit. Eve ry age ha s its e nthu sia sts, although it is so me­ time s fashio na ble to dismiss the e nthu sia st as a n ecce ntric o r a fana tic, a nd to p ro fe ss, with a n insiste nce which is extremely co mic, tha t o f cou rse we fall in lo ve o nly be cause matrimo ny is a co mforta ble sta te, o r e ngage in scie nce o nly in o rde r to imp ro ve the ge ne ral sta ndard of living. Eve n suppo sing we gra nt, ho we ve r, tha t the religious ma n ha s a n e ye for facts which the ra tio na list is incline d uncom­ fo rta bly to igno re -the reality of disinte re sted actio n, the depe nde nce o f the individual mind for its na tu re o n force s which do no t o rigina te within tha t m ind-it is qu ite a no the r cf. as an example of such misinterpretations, my The .Aforal Philosophy of Cudworth (Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, Vol. 1

xx,

161).

R A L P H CUD W O R T H

matter to maintain that there is some single source of all dis­ interestedness, some single person, himself perfectly disinter­ ested, from whom all disinterestedness flows, so that to experi­ ence a 'conversion of the soul' is to participate in the activities of a particular ( even though not a human) person. On the face of it, there is a multitude of social activities in which we can disinterestedly engage, a multitude of causes which work upon us and subdue our egoism. Interestingly enough, just as Hobbes's secularizing of social theory took over from theology the assumption that if there is to be order there must be a single sovereign power, so modern sociological interpretations of religion often retain the assumption that there must be a single source of disinterestedness, calling it now Society instead of God. But there is no reason to believe that disinterestedness, any more than sovereignty, resides in any single person or entity ; on the contrary, we are moulded by a multitude of agencies, we sink our indivi­ duality in innumerable causes . Polytheism is nearer to the sociological facts than monothei sm can ever be. If we interpret in a sociological way the phenomena on which Cudworth insists-disinterestedness, the invasion of the soul, conversion-then we can see anticipated in the theo­ logical disputes of the period the sociological conflicts of our own time. Thus, Whichcote writes : 'That which God doth by us, is both ascribed to God, and to us ; we work, and God works ; we are awakened, directed, and assisted by him, so that I think there is too much heat in many controversies, and a right stating them would extinguish them from the world .' 1 Could not the same be said about contemporary controversy between sociologists and psychologists? Once the issues are clearly stated, false antitheses are found to be posing as an irreducible dilemma. To pursue this theme would be to carry us too far from our appointed task; the point we have wished to emphasize is si mply this : that for all their personal devotion to religion, the ethics of the Platonists, and Cudworth's especially, can be interpreted in terms wholly secular. This was the danger 1

Sermons,

88

1,

70.

ETHICS AND

R EL I G I ON

their theological opponents clearly perceived ; and this was the attraction of the Cambridge school for the apostles of Enlightenment. An ethics which is eternal and immutable stands in no need of being supported by God. Of course, Cudworth's epistemology is meant to show the contrary ; his defence against the secularizing of morals was an attack on the possibility of secularizing any science, any systematic order. But this general thesis was not to have many followers ; and once the epistemological barriers were down, Platonism readily transformed itself into a humanist, secular ethics. Only if morality is somehow ontologically dependent upon God-as it is, of course, in the Calvinistic ethics Cudworth so bitterly opposed-can ethics be retained as a theological preserve.

89

C H A P T E R VIII

C U D WO RTH AND THE BRITISH MO RALISTS

I

is al ways difficul t to a ssess the i nfl uence of a seventeenth­ century writer upon his immedia te successors. At no time ha s the custom of acknowl edging indebtedness been s o l ightl y rega rded. In reac tion, perhaps, fr om the obsessive deference to a uthority which was a s cha racteristic of Rena is­ sance huma nism a s it wa s of medieval schola sticism, men m inimized the extent of a l ea rning of which they woul d previousl y have been gla d to boast. The difficul ties in the ca se of C udworth, even then, a re pecul ia rl y grea t. For one thing, he wrote a s a member of a school . Much tha t his successors coul d ha ve l earnt fr om C udworth might equall y derive fr om Whichcote or fr om More, to say nothing of the l esser l ights; a nd, a s we ha ve al rea dy noted, it is impossibl e to be sure, on a pa rticula r point, which of the younger members of the school wa s the originator, a nd which the discipl e. O r perha ps Plato, or Aristotl e, or Cl ement of Al exandria , or St John ta ught their s uccessors the l esson which the Ca mbridge Pla tonists al so ela bora ted; perha ps the teacher will be Limborch ( with whom both C udworth a nd Locke were cl osel y associa ted), perha ps some Engl ish Arminia n or la titudina ria n, perha ps a Rena issa nce huma nist. The idea of ' tol era tion', for exa mpl e, was so much ' in the a ir' tha t it woul d be ra sh to a rgue that Locke m ust ha ve l ea rnt from the Cambridge Platonists to a pprecia te its virtues. And, a point ea sil y overl ooked, one m ust ta ke into a ccount the continuing influence of schola sticism, a n influence rarel y admitted al though by no m ea ns negl igibl e. To ma ke ma tters w orse, onl y The True Intellectual System, of C udworth' s maj or work, wa s publ ished in his l ife-tim e, a nd even tha t did not appea r until 1 67 8 . Eternal and Immut­ able Morali ty wa s not publ ished until 1 7 3 1 , twenty-five years a fter Cla rke' s Boyl e l ectures. Yet C udworth ta ught, alm ost T

go

C U DWO R T H A N D T H E B R I T I S H M O R A L I S T S

for his life- time, a t Ca mbridge, a nd we know tha t he wa s a n unusuall y popula r tea cher1 ; he wrote a t a time when the pa ssing a round of ma nuscripts wa s still a quite normal method of phil osophical communica tion; he ha d a da ughter who wa s a zeal ous defender of her father' s memory2 ; and this same zeal descended even to a second genera tion, for it wa s through the efforts of his gra ndson tha t Eternal and Immutable Morality first a ppea red in print. 3 The difficul ties one ha s in determining the exact infl uence which Cudworth ex erted on Locke' s Essay will serve to ill us­ tra te the general probl em. \V e know, in the first place, tha t Locke ha d rea d Cudworth. In his Thoughts on Education, a s we ha ve al ready seen, he recommends The True Intellectual System as a repository of l ea rning, and tha t this wa s not merel y a gra ceful gesture to Lady Ma sha m is cl ea r fr om his Journal : Locke' s a rguments for the ex istence of God a re certainl y worked out with one eye on Cudworth' s book.4 Recent schola rship5 ha s rightl y insisted on Locke' s ra tional ism, a nd the ol der view tha t his phil osophy wa s by its very na ture hostil e to th e Pla tonist tradition can no l onger be ma intained . Indeed, a s Aaron points out, 'much of the fo urth book of the E ssay might · ha ve been written by one of the Ca mbridge school' 6• But Ca mbridge Pla tonism wa s largel y Cartesian in its phil osophical content; how a re we to tell wha t Locke l ea rnt fr om Cudworth a nd wha t from D esca rtes? Aaron goes on to sa y tha t 'his cha pter deal ing with rea son 1

cf. Birch's Life. She wrote to Bayle, for example, in order to defend her father against the charge that his views led directly to atheism. I t is sometimes said that she abandoned her father's theories in favour of those of Locke , but this view derives from the general ignorance of Cudworth's unpublished work. 3 cf. Preface by the Bishop of Durham to the first edition. 4 cf. Locke's Journal for Saturday, 1 8 February 1 682, in An Early Draft of Locke's Essay, edited Aaron and Gibb. s Especially since the appearance of James Gibson's book, Locke's Theory of Knowledge. 6 John Locke, p. 2 9 . 2

91

R A LPH

CU D W O R T H

and revelation, and that on enthusiasm, are very much in line with Cambridge thought'. On this point, however, it is necessary to discriminate, for, as we have already suggested, the Cambridge Platonists were by no means of a single opinion in the matter of enthusiasm. Locke would have agreed with Whichcote as against Cudworth. In a letter to Damaris Cudworth, Locke, commenting particularly on John Smith's Select Discourses (which reflect Cudworth's point of view) , writes that his views 'savour too much of Enthusiasm and so will be very little different from my Vision­ aries' 1 . No doubt that would have been Locke's judgement on Cudworth's mature ethical theory. He sympathized with the rationalism of the Platonists, but not with the other, less rigid, side of their teaching, the side which has sometimes led to their being described, although misleadingly, as 'mystics'. But, almost certainly, The True Intellectual System exerted a powerful, and somewhat disconcerting, effect on Locke's ethical theory. In the early drafts of Locke's Essay he is the simple apostle of a legislative ethics: 'The rectitude of actions . . . is nothing but the relation or conformity of the actions of men to some rule, and this is that which we call moral goodness and badness.' 2 In the Journal of 26 June 168 1 a new note is struck: 'He that has a true idea of God, of himself as his creature, or the relation he stands in to God and his fellow-creatures, is capable of knowing moral things or having a demonstrative certainty in them. . . . I cannot but think morality as well as mathematics capable of demonstration, if men would employ their understanding to think more about it.'3 The peculiar tortuousness which so many of his critics have noted in Locke's ethical theory is a consequence of the impact of this, the Cudworthian, sort of ethics upon a mind 1

This appears as a Journal entry for Tuesday, 2 1 February 1 68 2 . ' Philoclea's' letters of 1 6 February, 2 7 February and 9 March in th e Bodleian M SS. C 1 7, 87-93 are replies to this letter. 2 An Early Draft, p. I I . 3 Quoted from Aaron and G ibb but modernized.

CUDWORTH AND

TH E

BRITISH M ORALI STS

already largely committ ed to a mos t un-Cudworthian legis ­ lative ethics . 1 In one other fi eld-m oral ps ychology-Cudw orth' s in­ fl uence was perhaps important, although again the only direct evidence is internal. Even i n the firs t edition of the Essay, there is a clos e s imilarity between Locke's theory of t he will ( not to be found in the earlier drafts of the Essay) and tha t whic h is ma in tained by Cudworth. Locke' s attack on ' indi ffc rency' is ve ry much in Cudworth' s m anner, and the well- known pass age in which Locke ass ert s that not the will but the ma n is free s eems to be an echo of a passage in Cu dworth' s Treatise on Free-will. Cudworth writes : 'To attri­ but e the act of intellecti on and perception to the fa culty of unders tanding and acts of volition to the faculty of wil l, or to s ay that it i s the unders tandi ng that understands , and the wil l that wills : this is all one as if one should s ay that the faculty of walking walks . . . or that the mus ical faculty plays a 1 ess on upon the lute, or s ings this or that tune. . . . It is really the man or the s oul that unders tands , and the man or the s oul that wills , as it is the man that walks . . . and the mus ician that plays a less on on the lute. ' 3 And Locke: 'We may as properly s ay th at it is the s inging faculty s ings , and the dancing faculty dances , as that the will chooses or that 2

1

One cannot rule out the possibility that Cumberland, rather than Cudworth, was Locke's inspiration (see below on Clarke), but it is clear that he was particularly interested in Cudworth at this time. Hume in his Principles of Morals (§ 3, Pi. I I ) suggests that Malebranchc was the first that started 'this abstract theory of morals, which was later adopted by Cudworth'. Dates of publicat ion would leave this possibility open, but, in fact, Cudworth's views were worked out long before Malebranche's. There are interesting resemblances between the two writers, on a number of points, but they can probably be set down to the fact that both men were Cartesian Platonists, although Malebranche's Platonism came through August ine, to whom Cudworth several times refers, but never on vital philosophical questions. 2 Essay, Book I I, Chapter XXI, § 30 in the first edition, § 49 in the fourth edition. The sort of ' ind ifference' which is criticized is not quite the same in the two editions but the attack on indifference remains. One must, of course, reckon with the influence of Whichcote on this point. 3 T.F. vV., 24-5.

93

R A LPH C U DW O R T H

the understa ndi ng concei ves . . . i t i s the mi nd tha t opera tes and exerts these powers; i t i s the ma n tha t d oes the a cti on, i t i s the agent, tha t ha s the power, or i s a ble to d o. '1 Unless there i s a common source2 , the i nferenc e i s i rresi sti ble tha t, even before 1 690 , Cud worth's unpubli shed vi ews were not unknown to Locke. After all, he wa s cond ucti ng a n i nti ma te correspond ence wi th Da mari s Cudworth i n the early 1 68 o's. (The first survi ving letter i s da ted r 68 I , but presupposes previ ous correspond ence.) The cha nges, elabora te i n cha ra cter, whi ch Locke's mora l psychology underwent i n the la ter edi ti ons of the Essay ta ke i t fu rther i n the di recti on of Cud worth's theory. The d efini ti on of voli ti on add ed to the second edi ti on of the Essay ( publi shed i n r 69 4 , three years after Locke bega n to resid e perma nently wi th the Ma shams) i s very much i n Cud worth's ma nner: 'V oli ti on . . . i s an act of the mi nd knowi ngly exerti ng tha t d omi ni on i t ta kes i tself to ha ve over a ny part of the ma n, by employi ng i t i n, or wi thholding i t from, a ny pa rti cular a cti on. ' 3 Agai n, Locke now rej ects the vi ew, a s Cud worth had d one, that we a lwa ys pursue the grea test good 4 ; a nd , li ke Cud worth, he thi nks tha t i f we a sk wha t d etermines the wi ll, the proper answer i s 'the mi nd ', whi le a t the same ti me he stre sses the role of 'unea si ness', or d esi re, 5 i n Cud worth' s manner. H e now find s a contradic ti on, a s Cud worth did , i n the vi ew tha t the wi ll need not follow the pra ctical j ud ge­ ment-'to d eny that a ma n' s wi ll, i n every d etermi nati on, follows hi s own j ud gement, i s to sa y tha t a ma n wi lls a nd ac ts for a n end tha t he would not ha ve, a t the sa me ti me tha t he wi lls and acts for i t. ' 6 Essay I I, XXI, 17- 19. Criticisms of the faculty psychology were, of course, plentiful. Hobbes, to take one case, in his Objections to Descartes' Metaphysics uses some of these very examples . But I do not know of any passage which is really parallel to these two. 3 Essay I I, XXI, 15. 4 ibid. I I, XX I, 3 1 and passim. s ibid. I I, XXI, 2 9 . 6 ibid. I I , XXI, 48. 1

2

94

CUDW ORT H

AND

T H E B R ITIS H MORA LISTS

Yet, o n the other side, Locke never admits any indebted­ ness to Cudworth on these points . In a letter to Molyneux he gives a particular account of the origin of his new views : 'By observing only the mistake of one word (viz . having put "things" for "actions" . . . ) I got into a new view of things, which, if I mistake not, will satisfy you, and give a clearer account of human freedom than hitherto I have done.' r But, to say the least, it is not obvious how the correction of this one word could give rise to such drastic modification ; and perhaps there were reasons why Locke did not wish to emphasize his indebtedness to the Cudworth family : a certain sensitiveness, i n particular, about the character of his friend­ ship for Lady Masham. 2 Furthermore, as becomes parti­ cularly clea,r in his controversy with the Bishop of Worcester, he was always unwilling to admit that he was indebted to anything but introspection for his psychological theories. This is not merely a personal quirk but, in a way, an essential part of his general theory about the nature of philosophizing. The most we can say with certainty3 is something like the following : that in his epistemological writings Locke was not unmindful of Cudworth's True Intellectual System, both as a repository of arguments he would have to answer and of doctrines from which he had something to learn ; that in his writings on religion he carried into a new age the Platonist's emphasis upon reasonableness and tolerance; that in his ethics he was probably influenced by Cudworth's conception of eternal and immutable morality, at least so far as that was already developed in The True Intellectual System; that his moral psychology is in many respects very like Cudworth's, and perhaps derives from it, directly or indirectly. Further investigation might enable some of these points to be more r 1 5 July 1 693. ' Philoclea's' letters have an unmistakably personal note in them. See also the somewhat mysterious remarks of Shaftesbury in his letter to Locke of 26 March 1 692, in Rand, Life, p. 29 1 . 3 A note i n Aaron ( op. cit. p. 2 7 1 ) refers to the parallelism between Locke's views in the second edition and those of the medieval writer, Buridan. This is a further complication which would have to be taken into account. 2

95

RALPH

CU D W O R T H

decisively made, or it might rather show that it was from some common source that even these identities of doctrine derive. It is scarcely less difficult to discover exactly what Shaftes­ bury owed to Cudworth. He was particularly interested in the Cambridge Platonists. His first publication was a preface to an edition of Whichcote's Sermons; there 1 he enunciates what was to be one of the leading ideas of his ethics, and ascribes it to the Platonists : that there is in man a 'principle of good nature' ( a thesis propounded in opposition to that denigration of man which is characteristic of Hobbist and Util itarian theologian alike) . To Cudworth he refers twice in his philosophical works, although, even then, not by name. On the first occasion 2 Cudworth exemplifies 'the common fate of those who dare to appear fair authors', the fate shared by 'that pious and learned man who wrote The Intellectual System of the Universe (sic) ' and that no less pious author of a 'certain fair inqui ry '-Shaftesbury himself. In thus bracket­ ing Cudworth's name with his own, Shaftesbury is pointing not merely to their comradeship in distress, but to their participation in a single religio-philosophical movement . 'Fairness' is not so much an individual character-trait as a particular way-the latitudinarian way-of looking at religion and society. The second reference draws more direct attention to an identity of doctrine. Shaftesbury had been criticized for arguing that 'enthusiasm' ( even to the point of martyrdom) is not a Christian prerogative. There are 'enthusiastical atheists', he had said, as well as enthusiastic bigots and enthusiastic saints. In his reply to his critics, he quotes 'an excellent and learned divine, of highest authority at home and fame abroad' who was of the same opinion; and the quota­ tions are from Cudworth's True Intellectual System.3 Shaftesbury, it must be remembered, carried to an extreme point that tradition of informality in philosophical writing which had been one of Descartes' main innovations in his 1 2

3

Sermons, 3 1 5. The .Moralists, Part II, � 3. Serond l\1iscellm!Y, Ch. I I.

96

CUD W O R T H AND T H E B R I T I S H M O R A L I S T S

Meditations. It is not 'good breedi ng' to make a display of one' s learning , nor is it consonant with stylistic elegance. Hence we shall not find many ex plicit references, in Shaftes­ bu ry's writing s, to the intellectu al influ ences which mou lded his thoug ht-- two references is qu ite a concession-and we may easily be misle d by the comparativ e frequ ency of the qu otations from L atin literatu re; this was a form of reference to the past which the ru les of elegance still permitted. From the fact that Cicero is qu oted more frequ ently than Cu dworth, and that Whichcote is qu oted not at all, nothing follows abou t the relativ e importance of Cu dworth and Cicero, or Cicero and Whichcote, in the formation of Shaftesbu ry' s ideas. There is plenty of internal ev idence that Shaftesbu ry deriv ed his leading ideas from the Cambridg e Platonists. The facts are concealed, in J. M. Robertson' s edition, by the editor' s determination to link Shaftesbury with Spinoz a, although there is no positiv e ev idence that Shaftesbu ry had ev en read Spinoz a. Roberts on misses entirely the signifi­ cance of Shaftesbu ry's early interest in Whichcote; most of the v iews which he attribu tes to the influ ence of Spinoz a cou ld hav e been read by Shaftesbu ry in his own edition of Whichcote. Thu s that ' sin and evil are not positiv e' (in any case, a Cartesian doctrine), that 'blessedness is not the reward of virtu e bu t the state of v irtu e' , that 'angry passions constitu te a state of misery' ( the qu otations are from Robert­ son) are all of them characteristically P latonist teachings; and Whichcote also wrote that sin 'is u nnatu ral to the state of a creatu re' 1, that ' it is not a v irtu ou s action if it is not done because the thing is good, and avoided because it is evil' 2, to qu ote only two more of what we re to be the most character­ istic teaching s of Shaftesbu ry. If Shaftesbu ry read the manu scripts of Cu dworth, he wou ld have fou nd there an ethical theory still more congenial to his tastes. Cou ld he have done so? One can only say that it is not imp oss ible. Shaftesbu ry was obv iou sly on friendly terms with Lady Masham; his letters to Locke make that 1 2

Sermons, 1 , 1 40 . ibid. I , 247.

97

R A L PH CU D W O RTH

perfectly clear. It is not merely that he so regu larly requ es ts that his respec ts be paid to Lady Masham. That cou ld eas ily be explained as the c ondu ct befitting a gen tleman, or perhaps if one chooses to be malic iou s ( and there is some evidence1 that these requests dis comfited Locke) as the gentle tilt of an ex- pupil at an ex-tu tor. Bu t when Shaftesbu ry writes : 'As for what my notions are, I mus t beg you r pardon for not c ommu nic ating them. I might whisper them in you r ear, perhaps, or I might ventu re to tru st another pers on near you with the impertinenc e of them'2 , this indirect referenc e to Lady Masham arous es the su spicion that he wou ld in fa ct rather have commu nic ated his ideas to her than to Loc ke. Lady Masham c ertain ly lent Shaftesbu ry books3 and not improbably the manusc ripts. Bu t Shaftesbu ry as well as Cudworth had read his Whic hcote, his Plato, his Cicero, his Aristotle; i t is impossible to say that this or that doc trine must have come from the manusc ripts and cou ld not possibly have derived from Shaftesbu ry's own reflections u pon Cu dworth's s piritual ancestors. On e of Shaftesbu ry's leading ideas, however, almos t certainly derived from Cu dworth; the view that, in Shaftes­ bu ry's words, 'V irtu e is . . . really somethi ng in itself, and in th e natu re of things; not arbitrary or factitiou s ( if I may so s peak); not constituted from withou t, or dependent on cu stom, fancy, or will; not even on the su preme will itself, which can no way govern it; bu t being neces sarily good, is governed by it and ever u niform with it. '4 The word 'fac titiou s' is here a clu e, over and above the iden tity of doctrine. This word was one of Cu dworth's fa vou rites ; the Oxford English Dictionary thin ks that he was the first to us e it, in this sense; that Shaftes­ bu ry sh ould employ it in su ch a c ontext and apologetically, as it were a technical term, suffi ciently reveals his indebtedness on this point to Cu dworth. A s ec ond, les s c ertain, borrowing is the idea of s ystem, r The letter cited in note 2, page 95 . 2 8 September I 694, in Rand, op. cit. p. 297. 3 ibid. p. 299. 4 The .Moralists, Part II § 3.

98

CU D WORTH A N D

THE

B R I T ISH MORALISTS

or order. Shaftesbury argues, like Cudworth, that a thing discovers its real nature only through its participation in a system, so that a concern for 'the good of the system' is not artificially constructed out of ' natural' egoism, but is itself perfectly natural to the individual. Even if Shaftesbury knew no more of Cudworth's ethics than the concluding sections of The True Intellectual S y stem, that might well have set him thinking along these lines, but it is difficult to resist the con­ clusion that he had read at least Eternal and Immutable A1oraliry in manuscript. And when we find not merely that both emphasize order, but that they both see in selfishness the root of evil, that both distinguish, and in the same manner, ' noble' from 'fanatical' enthusiasm, that both emphasize the beauty of goodness and define beauty as unity amidst variety, that both think that it is the 'spirit' or 'affection' which is good, that both speak of goodness as a 'taste' or 'savour' , it becomes difficult not to believe that Shaftesbury had either read the manuscripts carefully or had spoken with those who knew Cudworth's theories well. This much at least we can assert without qualification, that Shaftesbury was fundamentally a Cambridge Platonist. Between the devotion of the Cambridge Platonists to religion and the devotion of Shaftesbury to good breeding there seems, at first sight, to be an unbridgeable gap. But the ethics of the Cambridge Platonists, so we have already suggested, was a humanistic ethics, a fact which Shaftesbury's develop­ ment of their views makes more apparent; it was aristocratic, intellectualist, for all its formulation within a Christian frame­ work. At the same time, the intellectualism of the Platonists, at least as Cudworth and Smith interpreted Platonism, did not involve them in the rejection, as ethically undesirable, of passion. Sidgwick is simply mistaken when he writes that ' No moralist before Shaftesbury . . . had yet definitely transferred the centre of ethical interest from the Reason, conceived as apprehending either abstract moral distinctions or laws of divine legislation, to the emotional impulses that prompt to social duty.' 1 The traditional picture of British 1

History of Ethics, p. 1 84 .

99

RALPH

CUDWORTH

ethics which sets Shaftesbury on the one side, as the enemy of rationalism, and the Platonists, on the other, as its leading exponents, is quite erroneous. Shaftesbury is not an opponent of the Platonists but their disciple. Cassirer 1 has already made this point with regard to Shaftesbury's views on religion : the same must now be said of his ethics. There are points of difference, which it would be interesting to study, but the differences are the more interesting because they appear as diverging emphases within a single movement. At the same time, which only serves further to emphasize the historical significance of Cambridge Platonism, it is perfectly true that the leading exponent of rationalism, Richard Price, derived his main inspiration from this same source. Only the Utilitarians, indeed, broke sharply away from the teachings of the Platonists. But first, before we turn to Price, something must be said about Samuel Clarke, because it is so often assumed that he is the direct inheritor of Cudworth's teachings. Martineau, it is true, notices the differences between the two men, a differ­ ence noticeable even in comparing their published work: ' In Cudworth the disposition to intellectualize morals was not inconsistent with a large survival of Puritan enthusiasm and devout fervour. The rights of Reason were asserted by him, not as a check upon faith too unflinching and feeling too intense, but in resistance to the pretensions of Sense and the dogmatism of instituted Law . . . . The theory, at its next stage, loses much of its early glow, and, in the person of Dr Samuel Clarke, assumes some of the harder features of what is called Rationalism. ' 2 Even in this unusually percep­ tive comparison, Martineau still assumes that Clarke is 'the next stage' to Cudworth. But when we come to read Clarke's

Discourse concerning the Being and A ttribute of God, the Obliga­ tions of Natural Religion and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Religion, we notice that, fecund as it is with references, there

is not so much as one to Cudworth, or, indeed, to any of the 1 2

Die Platonisclte Renaissance , Ch. G. Types of Ethical Theory, Vol. I I, p. 459. I OO

C U D W O RTH A N D TH E

B R IT I S H M O R A LISTS

Cambridge Platonists, even though Clarke was himself a Cambridge man. On the whole, he prefers to quote classical writers, but his reticence about the Platonists cannot be ex­ plained as an indifference to the rights of his contemporaries; there are references in plenty to Hobbes, to Cumberland, to Newton, and even to such minor luminaries as John Ray. More plausibly, one might see reflected in this silence the unfashionableness of, and indeed the current hostility to, Cudworth's True Intellectual System . As Warburton puts it, ' there wanted not country clergymen to lead the cry, and tell the world- That, under the pretence of defending Revelation, he wrote in the very manner that an artful infidel might naturally be supposed to use in writing against it' 1, and, writing to Birch just before the appearance of Birch's edition, he says that 'about thirty years ago it might have been bought for a crown' 2 • Clarke was an 'up-to-date' man : a mathematician of more than ordinary ability, 3 a disciple of Newton, an opponent of Cartesianism in all its forms. He would share the prejudice against the 'old-fashioned' metaphysics of Cudworth . And Clarke himself was suspected of Unitarianism, and was notably cautious. 4 Thus we should not lay much stress upon his not associating his own philosophy in any way with that of Cudworth. Still, Cumberland, rather than Cudworth, is Clarke's man. Cumberland, too, came from Cambridge, and his biographer tells us of 'his journeys to Cambridge which he made frequently in order to preserve an acquaintance with his The Divine Legation of .A,1oses Demonstrated, Preface to the first edition of Books 4, 5, 6. 2 Mr Warburton to the Rev. Mr Birch (Letter XXVI ) quoted in Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, Vol. I I, p. 1 27. 3 cf. William Whiston's Historical Memoirs of the Life of Samuel Clarke, London, 1730 : ' I was greatly surprised that so young a man as Mr Clarke then was, not much, I think, above twenty-two years of age, should know so much of those sublime discoveries, which were then almost a secret to all, but to a few particular mathematicians' (p. 7) . 4 ibid . 1

IOI

R A L P H CUD W O R T H

learned acquaintance in that place' 1 ; he perhaps absorbed there the doctrine that morality is eternal and immutable. P rimarily, however, his is an ethics of 'natural law' , with its roots in Grotius and the Greek and medieval tradition; natural and divine law coincide; the divine legislator provides sanctions for natural law by his system of rewards and punish­ ments. Neither Cumberland nor Clarke after him felt Cudworth' s difficulty in working out a theory of immutable morality within a theological framework, for their ethics is legislative through-and- through. Thus, in Clarke, what is eternal and immutable is a system of duties, not the goodness of a certain way of life. If any of the P latonists particularly influenced Clarke, it was Whichcote. Shaftesbury' s edition of Whichcote' s Sermons may not have pleased all Whichcote' s friends; at any rate, a new edition appeared in the early years of the eighteenth century, and the fourth volume in this edition was apparently Clarke' s responsibility. 2 Bu t the Whichcote who influenced Clarke was the Whichcote who wrote that ' the rule of right is the reason of things, ' 3 'to go against Reason is to go against God: it is the self-same thing, t o do what the Reason of the case does require and that which God himsel f does appoint' 4 ; it is the Whichcote who describes ' the suit­ ableness and fi tness that is in one thing to accommodate another,' 5 who preaches that 'there is a rule of right in all cases' and particularizes by referring to the relation between parents and children6 , who moralizes about the need for 1 Archdeacon Payne's Life of Bishop Cumberland, published as Part IV, Appendix IV, of John Tower's translation and edition of Cumberland's Philosophical Inquiry into the Laws of Nature , I 7 50. 2 On the authority of Samuel Salter, the editor of the 1 7 53 edition of Whichcote's A phorisms. Clarke's name does not appear on the title­ page. According to Salter, Dr Jeffreys, the editor of the first three volumes, did not relish Clarke's intervention. But Clarke obviously felt a special sense of responsibility towards \Vhichcote 's writings. 3 Aphorism , 33. 4 A phorism, 76 . s Sermons, 2, 222. 6 Sermons , 1, 253.

l 02

CUD W O R T H A N D T H E B R I T I S H M O R A L I S T S

'giving place to our betters' 1 • But this, of course, is not the creative Whichcote, who inspired Cudworth and Shaftesbury. John of Salisbury had long ago complained of his contem­ poraries that ' They gloried in a mode of expression and a jargon all their own . . . no statement was complete with­ out a stereotyped reference to " reason" ( ratio) or to what was "fitting" (conveniens) .' 2 Perhaps it was from Whichcote, interpreted in a certain way, that Clarke absorbed doctrines of this sort. But he might certainly have thought himself not obliged to give references for doctrines so well known. And it was from Cumberland, not from the Platonists, that Clarke learnt to compare moral and mathematical relations. 3 Like the Platonists, he thought that morality was eternal and immutable, and like the Platonists he emphasized the impor­ tance of Reason: that is as far as we can go. Neither the epistemology nor the 'spiritual' ethics of the Cambridge Platonists, of Cudworth in particular, had the least attrac­ tion for him. The case is otherwise with Richard Price. Unlike Clarke, Price had read Eternal and Immutable Morality, which was pub­ lished twenty-five years before the Review of the Principal Q,uestions in �{orals, although he obviously had not read Cudworth's manuscripts . His indebtedness to Cudworth he several times acknowledges, but even then not in such a way as to bring out its full extent. For it is no exaggeration to say that Price' s philosophy, as distinct from the details of his ethical theory, is simply appropriated from Cudworth. His acknowledgements come at six points: on sense and thought, 4 on abstraction, 5 on Protagoreanism, 6 on pantheism, 7 on the goodness of God, 8 on the trustworthiness of our Sermons, 2, 2 I g. Metalogicon, 829d, edited C. C. J. Webb. 3 cf. his reference to Cumberland on this point, at p. 206 of the ninth edition of his Discourse. 4 Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, ed. D. D. Raphael, p. 20. s ibid. p. 3 m. 6 ibid . pp. 54-5. 7 ibid . p. 88n. 8 ibid . p. go. 1

2

R A LP H

CU D W O R T H

faculties. 1 But, to take one example, Price's footnote on sense and thought quotes Cudworth on only a single doctrine : that the conception of unity or wholeness cannot be derived from sensory perception . In fact, however, the preceding passage, in its entirety, is a paraphrase, or sometimes a quotation, from Cudworth. Thus Price's phrases 'knowledge is an active and vital energy of the mind' , 'sense . . . lies prostrate under its object' are simply Cudworth's. Quite apart from these explicit, or semi-explicit, references, other long passages in the Review derive directly from Cudworth. Thus Price's account of the manner in which acts previously indifferent come to be obligatory upon us is exactly Cudworth's 2 and so is his discussion of eternal and immutable morality. 3 At times, however, he does not care to stand out quite boldly against the empiricist fashions of his own time; this has led his latest editor, D . D . Raphael, to underestimate the extent of Price's allegiance to Cudworth. Thus, to take one case, Raphael comments : ' Price gives sound reasons for rejecting nominalism, but is not therefore prepared to embrace a theory of innate ideas such as Cudworth's . . . . It is not clear j ust what view Price himself took. His final thoughts on the subject are given in Note C in the Appendix, and he there refers to his theology, but I do not see how his theology would account for universals of con­ tingent things. ' 4 Now, Price certainly says that 'many will very freely condemn as whimsical and extravagant' Cud­ worth's theory of innate ideas ; but he adds that 'I have, I own, a different opinion of it. ' 5 And the point he makes in his Appendix is that 'the j ust answer to this enquiry' (on the reality of ideas) 'would carry us higher than we are willing to go, and imply a presence of the Deity with us and depen­ dence upon him more close and constant and necessary, than we are apt to suspect or can easily believe. ' 6 It 'would carry 1

Review of the Principal Qu estions in Morals, ed . D . D . Raphael, p. g 1 .

ibid . pp. 50-52. ibid. pp. I 05-6. -4 ibid . pp. xiv-xv. s ibid . p. 30n. 6 ibid. p. 2 8 1 . 2

3

1 04

CUDWO R T H

AND T H E

BR I T IS H

M ORAL ISTS

us', in short , t o the metaphysic s of C udworth; and his lac k of c ourage, not his disbelief, is what prevents Pr ic e from c ommitt ing himself t o t hat 'j ust answer'. In his epist emology, t hen, Pric e simply r est ates C udworth's Eternal and Immutable Morality . It does not follow t hat his ethic s is at a ll like C udworth's. Pric e would no doubt have been surprised at t he divergenc ies had he t urned to the C udworth manuscript s. He stands muc h c loser to C lar ke t han he does t o C udw orth, on ethic al issues. (To Whic hc ot e he never r efers.) Thus he ex plic itly asserts t hat 'instincts are not necessary t o t he c hoic e of ends'1; his moral psyc hology, indeed, is a t horough-going r ationalism. And with t he differ­ enc e in moral psyc hology goes a differenc e in ethic al t heory; like Kant , but quit e unlike C udworth, Pric e thinks t hat we do not act morally unless we act out of regard for r ectitude. 2 In short , Pric e's ethic s is very muc h li ke t he sort of view whic h tradit ion ascribes t o C udworth, but not like t he sort of view whic h he act ually taught . To c arry further t he study of C udworth's influenc e, t o trac e it i n a mult itude of minor thinkers, in Warburton, in Ray, in Harris, in Glanvill, t o see how it operated on Ber keley's Siris, t o follow it t hr ough t he apologetic s of t he eight eenth c entury, and t he P lat onism of t hat same period, t o cross t o t he C ont inent, t o est imate exactly what Leibniz owed t o C udworth, t o c onsider why Dider ot and D'Alembert devote suc h c onsiderable spac e t o him in t heir E ncyclopaedia, and whet her it was through Paul Janet's study of C udworth that his more famous nephew was led t o think in terms of 'the unc onsc ious', would be a task so diffic ult that I have not dared t o undertake it . I have been c ontent to maintain that t he C ambridge Platonists, and C udworth in part ic ular, st imulated and profoundly affected the two main non­ Ut ilitarian ethic al movement s of t he eight eenth c entury, r ationalism and sentiment alism. The r ationalists took over, primarily, t he c onc eption of an et ernal and immut able morality, but some of t hem, Pric e espec ially , absorbed the 1

2

Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, ed . D. D. Raphael, p. I 87. ibid. p . 1 9 1 . 1 05

RALP H CUDWORTH

philosophical and epistemological theories by which that conception of morality was sustained : what interested the sentimentalists ( although they also maintained that morality was eternal and immutable) was rather the Platonists' emphasis upon the naturalness of affection, their opposition to egoism, their emphasis upon goodness as distinct from duty, their emphasis upon ways of life as distinct from obedience to creeds. The Platonic way of thinking worked itself out in a diversity of manners, led sometimes to sterility, sometimes to fresh discovery, but kept its vitality in a way which is a testimony to its perennial attractiveness.

1 06

A P P EN D I X

TH E C U D W O RTH MANU S C R I PTS

I

N his life of Cudworth, which was first published i n 1 743, as a preface to the second edition of The True Intellectual System, Birch describes in some detail certain of Cudworth's unpublished writings : ( 1 ) A Discourse of Moral Good and Evil. (2) A Discourse of Liberty and Necessity . ( 3 ) Daniel's Prophecy of the Seventy Weeks. (4) Of the Verity of the Christian Religion against the Jews . (5) A Di�course of the Creation of the World, and Immortality of the Soul. (6) Hebrew Learning . (7) An explanation of Hobbes's notion of God and of the extension of spirits. At this time, the manuscripts were apparently in the possession of the Masham family 1 • Thereafter, their history is more than a little peculiar. In I 762, the last Lord Masham (not a descendant of Damaris Cudworth, who became Lady Masham, but of her husband's first wife) sold the MSS, along with a part of Locke's library, which Locke had bequeathed to the Masham family, to a bookseller, Mr Robert Davies of Piccadilly. Davies decided to assume that Locke was the author of the MSS, a point on which he remained obdurately fixed,2 for motives which it is not difficult to understand. Although at first he failed to find a purchaser, and took the manuscripts with him on his retirement to the country, his investment was not to prove entirely unfruitful. A certain Rev . Mr Dodd, later to be executed for forgery, 3 was at that time preparing a Commentary on the Bible, in which Davies had a pecuniary interest; the appearance in this Commentary of a number of 'notes by Mr Locke' served, as the Critical Review puts it, ' to give an extraordinary &lat to that work'. But Dodd was no more successful than Davies in finding a purchaser-� and the MSS returned to their country garret 'exposed to the rats, and the depreda­ tions of the maid'. They were finally rescued by 'a gentleman, who had a veneration for the name of Mr Locke' (the British Museum has no record of his name) who bought them, soon discovered their real authorship, and arranged for their purchase by the British Museum- 'at last, after many perils and mutilations, they are safely lodged in that noble reposi­ tory.' 1

Critical Review, LV, p. 39 I . cf. Nichols, Litermy Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, Vol . IX, p. 2 76. 3 cf. Boswell, Life of Johnson. 4 cf. , for one of his attempts, an MS letter in Addit. MSS 4984, I I . 2

107

R A LP H

CUDWORTH

I t has always been assumed by writers on Cudworth that the British Museum MSS are precisely those described by Birch. Even Muirhead, who quotes from one of the manuscripts, refers his readers to Birch for a general description of them. But, in fact-and naturally enough after all their misadventur-es-the MSS which Birch describes do not survive entire. As well, and this is rather more surprising, certain of the British Museum MSS have no analogue in Birch's l ist. It has seemed desirable, therefore, to describe the MSS in some detail, although the task is by no means an easy one. The manuscripts are undated, but if we adopt a certain hypothesis about the development of Cudworth's handwriting, it is possible to work out their relative order and even to suggest, with the help of other evidence, an approximate date of composition. Certain of the manuscripts are written in an Elizabethan (or 'secretary') hand, with the characteristic 'c' and 'e'. Cudworth, typically, retained this hand even after the I talian­ ate style had come into general use. But, in the end, he succumbed. At first with some hesitation-many of the manuscripts are written in a transitional style-he finally adopted an I talian hand. If we make this natural assumption that the Elizabethan hand was the earlier one and the I talian hand the later one, an assumption confirmed by such correspon­ dence as survives, 1 we can work out the order of composition of the manuscripts. It is true that certain difficulties remain ; Cudworth was an inveterate reviser, and a particular volume may contain passages of varying date. And his habits of composition were some­ what strange. Quite often, a section begins at the bottom of a page, so that in some cases a passage in an older hand ( on this hypothesis) is surrounded by passages in the I talian style. Further­ more, he sometimes wrote a modified script, and the I talian letters appear in this hand before they were taken over into his ordinary, cursive style. But granted that we may still hesitate about the date of separate passages, the general conclusions we derive from this hypothesis about the develop­ ment of his handwriting are confirmed by other evidence. The letters 'c' and 'e' will serve as a test of earliness. I n the manuscript Commentary on the Seventy Weeks of Daniel, the Elizabethan 'c' and the Elizabethan 'e' appear throughout. Now, we know that this work was composed, in its Latin form, before 1 659 2 and it is reasonable to assume that the translation is also an early work. At the other extreme, Cudworth's Commonplace Book (Addit. MSS 4984) employs both the Italian 'c' and the I talian 'e' ; and it contains a discussion of Abbadie's Verite de la religion chretienne, which was first published in 1 684. These results are mainly of importance in enabling us to date the various surviving versions of his 1 These do not cover the whole period of his life ; and it is probable that the Italian hand appeared in his official correspondence before it became the regular style of the manuscripts. But the transition can be noted from the semi-Eliza­ bethan style of the 1 65o's to the Italian hand of 1678. 2 See Birch's Life in T.I.S., 1 , Preface, xiii.

1 08

A P P E NDIX

theory of free-will, but we shall first describe the other, less difficult, manuscripts. 4896-7 . Commentary on the Seventy Weeks of Daniel. This is the work which Henry More described as 'of much price and worth in theology, as either the circulation of the blood in physic, or the motion of the earth in natural philosophy' 1 • Perhaps that is why it still survives entire ; I doubt whether anyone would now echo More's exuberant praise of it. 4984-5. The British Museum has linked these two works together under the single head Loci Communes Morales, but they are somewhat different in character, although both late in the order of composition. 4985 is a miscellaneous and disordered collection of extracts from Cudworth's reading, principally from Erasmus, Grotius, Taylor, Hales and Baxter. I t is of very slight intrinsic interest, although it helps to illustrate Cud­ worth's indebtedness to Renaissance scholars, as well as to latitudinarian and Puritan divines. 4984 is as systematic as 4985 is disorderly, even if the purpose of the system is beyond all comprehension. It is numbered in sets, thus : 1 - 1 2, 1 - 1 3, 1 -8, 1 - 1 4, etc. At the end, there is an elaborate index, prepared by Cudworth himself, the value of which is somewhat dimin­ ished by the fact that references are provided to, say, 'page 8', without any indication which 'page 8' is intended. And why there should be an index at all is not very clear, since the contents are arranged in alpha­ betical order; at least, they are so arranged up to page 1 1 6 (in the librarian's revised numbering) , at which point (after supplying a welcome l ist of abbreviations) Cudworth begins the alphabet again, and continues it as far as page 1 28. The contents, arranged under specific heads, are in part quotations, in part short essays on a variety of subjects. I shall mention only the longer essays. The page-numbering is the librarian's, but it can only be approximate, because Cudworth writes on both sides of the paper, and the librarian-another man with a system-has numbered only the consecutive leaves : (a) Defence of Christianity against the Jews, pp. 1 1 - 1 4. This is probably a fragment of Birch's Manuscript No. 4. ( b) Criticism of Deism, pp. 1 7-9 1 . (The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1 682 as the first recorded use of the word 'Deism'--further evidence of the lateness of these Commonplace Books.) (c) Proofs of the Existence of God, pp. 29-36. (d) Criticism of 'Pyrrhonism', pp. 67-70. (e) Defence of Scripture, pp. 84-90, 92-98. 4983 begins with a Collection of Confused Thoughts, Memorandums relating to the Eternity of Torments collected out of my little Book, and the British Museum has taken this to be the title of the whole work. The handwriting is mostly in the I talian style, but it varies considerably in manner. There are only 1 08 pages all told, of which 3 1 are blank, but in the original (Cudworth's) 1 In the preface to his Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness as quoted by Birch, loc. cit.

1 09

RALPH C U D W OR T H

numbering there i s a page 649 , pages 425-39, etc. I n short, this is a collec­ tion of fragments , some of them contai ning his most mature ethical reflec­ tions , others mere jottings , others drafts of sermons. I shall mention the more interesting-(the numbering is again the librarian's) : (a) A criticism of the traditional theory of Eternal Torments (pp. 1 -5, 26-2 7, 35-43 , 6 I -70) . (b) A set of problems , sometimes merely enunciated, sometimes briefly discussed, all of them bearing on moral and theological issues , and some of them particularly enticing. (For example , ' Whether or no the fancy , or imagination , are not the great ruling principles oflife'.) These fill pp. 5- I o . (c) Virtue and Happiness (pp. 5-6 , 8- 1 0) . ( e) Motives to virtue (pp. I 4- 1 7) . (f) Arguments for and against 'natural good and evil' (pp. 7 1 -2 ) . (g) The nature of good (pp. 79-86) . One is naturally inclined to think of these essays, or certain of them , as fragments of the Discourse of Moral Good and Evil mentioned by Birch. By comparison of page-numbers we can show that they are not fragments of those two books of the Discourse, the headings of which are detailed by Birch (with page references ) , but their original pagination makes it fairly certain that they were once part of some more ambitious work , to which, indeed , the section on the nature of good specifically refers , although not by name. It is impossible to pin them down more definitely. 4978-82 are the manuscripts on free-will. They do not together con­ stitute a continuous work, and it is hard to make out how they are related to one another, particularly as we know from Birch that there are other writings by Cudworth on the same subject , which we do not now possess. None of the existing volumes corresponds to the first book of the Discourse on Liberty and Necessity, as Birch describes it. On our hypothesis about the development of Cudworth's handwriting, the order of their composition is as follows : Group I ( old 'c' and 'e') , 4982 Book I I , 4980. Group II (erratic 'c' and old 'e') , 4982 , Book I I I , 4979 , 498 1 . Group I I I (new 'c' and old 'e') , 4978. Group IV (new 'c' and erratic 'e') , 4982 , Book I . Of course , w e must not identify the logical order of the parts with the order of composition : it is quite conceivable (indeed I believe this to be the case) that 4982 I , though the latest to be written , was meant to stand quite early in the Discourse of Liberty and Necessity. But if we combine the evidence from handwriting with certain internal evidence , the following conclusions suggest themselves :(a) 4978 , published in 1838 as A Treatise on Free-will was probably composed as a short summary of the Discourse, bearing the same sort of relation to that ambitious project as Eternal and Immutable Morality does to the Discourse on Moral Good and Evil. ' It is probable' , writes the Bishop of Durham in his introduction to Eternal and Immutable Morality, ' that , fore­ seeing the leng th of the work, and some of the hindrances that afterwards 1 10

APP E N D I X

fell out to retard and defeat it, he thought i t best to contract his under­ taking, and to treat in smaller volumes of those points he judged to be most material and principal in this controversy.' Like Eternal and Immut­ able Morality, and in a manner most untypical of the earlier works and of the other manuscripts , the Treatise on Free-will is broken up into short chapters , obviously with an eye to publication; and , again like Eternal and Immutable Morality, it concentrates on those general philosophical points which Cudworth took to be fundamental in the struggle against atheism, not on the new psychology or the new ethics. Complete in itself, it covers much the same ground as some of the other manuscripts , but it lacks the penetration and originality of his more mature work. If one can take the letters as a guide , this M S was probably written in the 167o's. ( b) Group I I form a sequence. 498 I refers back, at several places, to 4979 , most explicitly in its reference to 'the second chapter' in which it is shown that free-will is not a divine prerogative; 4979 contains such a second chapter. For the most part , 4979 and 498 1 are an attempt to defend the doctrine of human freedom against certain of its critics; the critics considered in 4979 are particularly the 'mechanical fatalists' and in 498 1 the 'divine fatalists'. 4979 begins with a general statement of Cudworth's psychological views , and refers us back to an earlier and fuller statement. Such a statement is contained in 4982 I I I , which seems to be directly continuous in the direction of its argument as well as in the style of i ts handwriting with the other members of i ts group. But it is hard to be quite confident on this point , for the 'new psychology' is presented in different guises in several of the surviving manuscripts . One might be tempted by_ the view that 4982 I I I was meant to be the opening section of the Discourse (Part I I I of the whole Intellectual System) , but this cannot be the explanation of the ' I I I' , for this section begins with a reference to what has previously been shown concerning ' the vulgar doctrine of free-will which makes the essence of it to consist in nothing but indifferency'. On the fly-leaf of 4979 and 498 1 is the note 'meant I think to be the fifth and sixth' and 498 1 ends with a summary of the new psych­ ology. Perhaps this group was meant either as the conclusion of the Discourse as a whole or of some large part of it. 4982 I I I contains 55 pages, 4979 contains 267 pages , and 498 1 (excluding the summary) has 10 1 , so that the entire group would constitute quite a considerable part of even a large book. There is a reference in 4979 to 'what we have already demon­ strated in the sixth chapter, that there being local motion in the world, no body being able to move itself, there must of necessity be granted some other being in the world which is not body. ' 1 No existing chapter six takes up this topic, but it may well have been the subject of that chapter 'of motion and sense' which, according to Birch, was the sixth chapter of one (probably the first) book of the Discourse. 2 Cudworth was obviously 2

p. 1 50 .

Life, I, xxv. III

R A L P H CU D W O R T H

writing this sequence of books with the larger plan before his eyes, but what the plan was, it is hard to tell. These MSS were probably written before the appearance of the True Intellectual System, perhaps a good many years earlier. The earliest MSS correspondence, dating back to 1 655, has a modern ' c', although, as we suggested earlier, the I talian style may well have been employed in Cudworth's correspondence before it became his regular private hand. (c) 4980 presents the anti-indifferentist psychology in considerable detail, and it is earlier in date of composition than Group I I I, but it can­ not be the volume to which Group I I I refers us, for it, too, professes to be merely summarizing a more detailed psychology. It begins thus : 'We have now propounded such an hypothesis of the soul as may render this thing called free-will possible and very intelligible.' In a number of respects 4980 is unique amongst the manuscripts. It is written through­ out in a single style of handwriting, with very little in the way of revision : it could be sent, just as it stands, to the printer ; it alone can be identified as one of the volumes of the Discourse described by Birch, being the second of the volumes he describes in detail. It contains the fly-leaf note, ' this, I believe, was designed for the last book' . On the whole, we can best think of it as an early draft of the last book of the Discourse, probably written before Cudworth began to have those qualms about his theory of liberty which prevented the Discourse from ever seeing the light of day. To j udge from the letters, it is a very early work ( cf. my remarks on (b) ) . (d) 4982 Book I , though the latest of all in point of composition (it must have been written in the 1 68o's), logically precedes all the other frag­ ments, except 4982 Book I I . It presents the new psychology ab initio, and in its fullest and most mature form. There is a reference in it to criticisms of free-will which have at some earlier stage been stated and considered. This may be a reference to an earlier book of the Discourse on Liberty (perhaps the first book described by Birch) , or, alternatively, to the Discourse on Moral Good, in which this same question was to be discussed ; on this latter showing, 4982 Book I was probably the first section i n the latest version of the Discourse on Liberty. It contains 50 pages, with a some­ what confusing pagination ; the present p. 22 ought to follow the middle of p. 38. The main text is surrounded by emendations and corrections. (e) 4982 Book II has been sandwiched by the librarian between a section entitled Book I I I and another which we have called Book I , but which in fact bears no such numbering. 'Book II' has no immediate connexion with what immediately precedes or follows it. Very obviously, it is the opening section of Book II of Cudworth's whole scheme, i.e. of the Discourse on Moral Good and Evil. As we should expect, it is a criticism of Calvinism. Its philosophical style, heavy with the weight of quotation, is precisely that of The True Intellectual System, although the references are not, now, to the Greeks but to Wycliffe, Zwingli and Calvin. The con­ trast in style with 4982 I is most marked, and helps to confirm our hypothesis about their order of composition ; 4982 I is as close to a 1 12

APPENDIX

scientific treatise a s Cudworth was ever t o approach, 4982 I I has all the faults for which his contemporaries rebuked him. It contains only twenty pages ; this early fragment is all that we can be sure we possess of the huge Discourse on Moral Good and Evil which Birch describes. To sum up, of the manuscripts which Birch details, only No. 3 remains entire; Nos. 5, 6, 7 have completely disappeared ; of No. 1 there only remain 4982 Book I I and (perhaps) parts of 4983 ; possibly there is a fragment of No. 4 in 4984 ; and various drafts survive of parts, at least, of No. 2 . What chiefly remain outside of Birch's list are brief essays and fragments from Commonplace Books : as well, there are letters of Cud­ worth's in the British Museum, the Bodleian, and other manuscript reposi­ tories. Perhaps other manuscripts still survive, but this is improbable, because the British Museum collection itself contains so many fragments ; certainly I have not been able to find any other manuscripts, and 'Indigator' had no better fortune in 1 788. 1

1 He inquired after the manuscripts m Gentleman's Magazine, Jul y 1 788, Vol. 58.

1 13

A C U D W O R T H B IB L IO G R A P H Y A.

WORKS PUBLISHED BY C UDWORTH

1 . In Decembrem lllus trissime Principis Natalitium. A Latin poem in the collection Carmen Natalitium, 1 Cambridge, 1 635. 2 . The Union of Chris t and the Church; in a Shadow, London, 1 642 . 3. A Discourse Concerning the True Notion of the Lord's Supper, London, 1 642 . Reprinted with (4) and (8) in 1 670, 1 676; with (g) in 1 743, 1 82 0. Both (2) and (3) were published as by R. C. 2 4. A Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons, at Wes t­ minster, 31 March 1647, on 1 John, ii, 3, 4, Cambridge, 1 647. Reprinted 1 8 1 2, 1 8 1 9, 1 830, 1 832, 1 842, 1 843, 1 846, 1 850 (in extract) , 1 852, 1 856, 1 858, 1 864; with (3) and (8) in 1 670, 1 6 76; with (8) in 1 83 7 ; with (g) in 1 743, 1 820. 5 . I. D antur bani et mali rationes aeternae et indispensabiles : II. D antur substantiae incorporeae sua natura immortales. Theses delivered for the degree of Bachelor of Divinity in 1 644. Printed as Latin verses, Cambridge, 30 June 1 65 1 . Reprinted in ( 1 1 ) . 6 . In Pacem Auspiciis Celsissimi Domini Olivari D omini Protectoris Angliae. A Latin poem in the collection Oliva Pacis, Cambridge, 1 654. 7. In Serenissimi Caroli I infandwn parricidium Threnodia: et de A uspica­ tissimo Caroli II reditu gratulatio. A Hebrew poem in the collection Academiae Cantab�igiensis �O�'l' PA, Cambridge, 1 660. 8. A Sermon Preached to the Honourable Society of Lincolnes-Inne, on I Corinth. xv, 57. London, 1 664. Reprinted 1 8 1 3 ; with (4) in 1 6 70, 1 676, 1 830, 1 83 7 ; with (g) in 1 743, 1 812 0. g . The True Intellectual System of the Universe, wherein all the Reason and Philosophy of A theism is Confuted, and its impossibility Demonstrated. London, 1 678, with an imprimatur dated 1 67 1 . Published in an abbreviated and modified version, edited by Thomas Wise, as A Confutation of the Reason and Philosophy of A theism, in 1 706. Translated into Latin, with Notes and Dissertations by Mosheim, Jena, 1 733 ; Leyden, 1 7 73. Second English edition, ed. Thomas Birch, with a Life, and including (3) , (4) and ( 8 ) , London, 1 743 ; reprinted 1 820. Translated into Italian b y L. Benedetti as part of the Collezione dei classici metafisici in 1 823. The Mosheim edition was translated into English by J.J. Harrison, London, 1 845 . 1 This is the work referred to in the D.N.B., article ' Cudworth', as ' Carmen Nobilitatium' . 2 In the catalogue of the Bodleian Library the pamphlet entitled A Scholasticale Discourse written in reply to Erastus, London, 1663, which is also signed ' R.C.', is tentatively ascribed to Ralph Cudworth. Neither the style nor the content of this work is compatible with this ascription.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

w

ORKS B. P O S T H U M O US LY P U B L I S H E D I O. A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality with a preface by Edward ( Chandler) , Bishop of Durham, London, 173 1 . Reprinted with (9) in I 845 ; and, in an abbreviated form, in Selby-Bigge, British Moralists, 1 89 7 , Vol. I I. I I . A Treatise of Free- will, ed. by John Allen, London, 1838. Printed from Addit. MSS 4978 in the British Museum Collection.

C . M A N U S C R I P T W O R K S (for details see Appendix) B . .A1. A ddit. MSS I . 4978-82. On Liberty and Necessity. 2 . 4983. The Eternity of Torments. 3 · 4984-5. Loci Communes Morales. 4· 4986- 7. Commentary on the Seventy Weeks of Daniel. D. P UBLISHED CORRESPONDENCE I . Diary and CorrcsjJondence of John Worthington, publications of the Chetham Society, Manchester, Vols. 13, 36, 1 14 (Letters to Worthington) . 2. Will, Human and Divine. T. Sol ly, Cambridge, Bell, 1856 (Letters to his step-father). 3. A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, ed. T. Birch, London, 1 72 7 , Vols. 3, 5, 7 (Letters to Thurloe). 4 . John Locke und die Schule uon Cambridge, G. von Bertling, Freiburg, 1 892 (Letter to Limborch). 5. Works, Robert Boyle, London, 1772, Vol. VI ( Letters to Boyle) . E. U N P U B L I S H E D C O R R E S P O N D E N C E The main body of the unpublished correspondence is contained in the Tanner MSS in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Additional Manu­ scripts in the British Museum collection. Other correspondence is mentioned in the Reports of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (Vols . 4, 5, 7, 9 ) . S O M E S E V E N T E E N T H A N D E I G H T E E N T H C E N T U R Y R E F E R­ E N CES TO CUDWORTH I . A nti-Haman, or an Answer to M. Burnet's Mystery of Iniquitie Unveiled, to which is added a letter to R. Cudworth, D.D., by W.E., Student in Divinity. With leave of Superiors, I 679. The first Roman Catholic attack on Cudworth. Relatively sympathetic but it attacks (a) Cudworth's view that the pagans were really mono­ theistic, (b) his criticisms of 'Popery'. 2 . Journal (ed. Aaron and Gibb, Oxford, 1 936) , 1 682 ; Some Thoughts Concerning Education, London, 1 693, John Locke. F.

1 15

RAL P H CU D W O R T H

3 . A Discourse Concerning the Messias, to which is prefixed a large Preface, asserting and explaining the Doctrine of the Blessed Trinity, against the Late Writer of the Intellectual System, John Turner, London, 1 685.

A vicious attack by ' a late fellow of Christ's College in Cambridge' upon T.I.S. in general and Cudworth's theory of the Trinity in particular. 4. Considerations on the Explications of the Doctrine of the Trinity, by Dr Wallis, Dr Sherlock, Dr S--th, Dr Cudworth and Mr Hooker. Written by a Person of Quality, 1 693. [Stephen Nye (?)] . A damagingly sympathetic description by a Unitarian of Cudworth's theory of the Trinity. 5. Bibliotheque Choisie, J. Le Clerc, Amsterdam, 1 703- 1 2 . Extracts and analyses of T.I.S. in Vols. 1 , 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9. 6. Oeuvres Diverses, Vol. 3, Part 1, Vol. 3, Part 2, Vol. 4, The Hague, 1 73 1 , Pierre Bayle. Bayle's critique of Cudworth is scattered through a number of articles and letters in the years 1 704-7 . These are all collected in the Oeuvres Diverses (cf. the Index in Vol . 5) . 7. Considerations sur le Principe de Vie. (Histoire des Ouvrages des Savants, 1 705) : Theodicee, I 7 1 0; New Essays on the Human Understanding, 1 765 ; letters as detailed in G. Grua, Textes lnedits, p. 327, G. Leibniz. B. An answer to Some Things contained in Dr Hicks' Christian Priesthood Assert1d also some Remarks on Dr Cudworth's True Notion of the Sacrament; with an answer to what Dr Hicks has said against it. By a presbyter of the Church of England, London, 1 709. [ John Hancock (?)] g. The Moralists, or the Philosophical R hapsody, London, 1 709 ; Second Miscellany, London, 1 7 1 1 , Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury. I O . History of A1Y Own Times, Gilbert Burnet, London, 1 724-34. 1 1 . Dedication of the Translation of Virgil's Aeneid, John D ryden, London, 1 730. 1 2 . The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, William Warburton, London, 1 738-4 1 . 1 3 . Siris, Bishop Berkeley, London, 1 744. 1 4. Enquiry, David Hume, London, 1 748-57 . 1 5 . Encyclopedie ou Dictionnaire Raisonne des Sciences, D. Diderot and J. D'Alembert, Paris, 1 75 1 -65. Art. 'Somersetshire' contains a biography of Cudworth ; art. ' Plastique', (metaphysique) is a very lengthy summa ry of Cudworth's theory and of the Bayle-Leclerc controversy. 1 6. Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, Richard Price, London, I 758. 1 7 . Literary and Critical Remarks on Sundry Eminent Divines and Philosophers, Anonymous, London, 1 795. 1 8. Philosophy of the Human Mind, Dugald Stewart, Edinburgh, 1 7921 8 1 4. I I6

B I BL I O G R AP H Y

G.

W o R K s O N C U D W O R T H A N D 1-1 1 s A s s o c I A T E S

I • Sir James Mackintosh : Dissertations on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, chiefly during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century, originally prefixed to the Seventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica ( in Miscellaneous Works, London, 1 846, Vol. 1 ) . 2 . Paul Janet : De Plastica naturae vita, Paris, 1 848 ; Essai sur le mediateur plastique de Cudworth, Paris, 1 860. 3. T. Solly : Will, Human and Divine , Cambridge, 1 856. 4. D. Masson : Life of Milton, London, Vol. 6, 1 859. 5 . John Tulloch : Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century , two volumes, Edinburgh and London, 1 87 2 . Still the best account o f the theology o f the Cambridge Platonists . 6 . C . E . Lowry : The. Philosophy of Ralph Cudworth, New York, 1 884. 7. J. Martineau : Types of Ethical Theory , Oxford, 1 885 . 8. Leslie Stephen : art . Cudworth in the Dictionary of National Bio­ graphy, Vol . XIII, 1 888. g. W. R. Scott : An Introduction to Cudworth's Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, London, 1 89 1 . I O . A. Selby-Bigge : British .Aforalists, two volumes, Oxford, 1 89 7 . 1 1 . F. Greenslet : Joseph Glanvill, New York, 1 900. 1 2 . E . T . Campagnac : The Cambridge Platonists, London, 1 90 1 . 1 3. H . Sidgwick : Outlines of the History of Ethics, Macmillan, 1 886. 1 4. D. A. Huebsch : Ralph Cudworth, ein englischer Religionsphilosoph des sieben;:,ehnten Jahrhunderts (Dissertation) , Jena, 1 904. 1 5 . J . A. Stewart : The Cambridge Platonists in The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol . I I I, London, 1 9 1 1 . The best brief account . 1 6. K. J. Schmitz : Cudworth und der Platonismus (Dissertation) , Bonn,

1 7 . E . A. Burtt : The Metaphysical Foundations of Modem Science, London, 1 92 5 . 1 8. S . P. Lamprecht : Innate Ideas i n the Cambridge Platonists (Philos . Rev. XXXV, 1 926) : The Role of Descartes in Seventeenth Century England ( Columbia S tudies in the History of ldeas) , Vol . 3, New York, 1 935. 1 9. F. J. Powicke : The Cambridge Platonists, London, 1 926. 20. T. B . Mullinger : The Cambridge Platonists (in H . B . Masterman, The Age of Milton) , London, I 929.

2 1 . H. J. Grierson : Cross Currents in English Literature of the Seventeenth Century , London, 1 92 9 . 2 2 . G . P . H . Pawson : The Cambridge Platonists, London, 1 930. 23. J. J. de Boer : The Theory of Knowledge in the Cambridge Platonists, Madras, 1 93 1 . 24. J . H . Muirhead : The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy, London, 1 93 1 . The best account of Cudworth's philosophy .

1 17

R A LPH

CUDWORTH

25. E. Cassirer : Die Platonische Renaissance in England und die Schule z:on Cambridge, Leipzig, 1932. A fundamental piece of historical research. 26. B. Willey : The Seventeenth-Century Background, London, 1934; The Eighteenth-Century Background, London, 1 940. 2 7. J. Bayer : Ralph Cudworth als Ethiker, Staatsphilosoph und Aesthetiker, Dissertation, 1935. 28. L. Rosenfield : From Beast Machine to Man lvlachine, New York, 194 1. 29. G. Aspelin : Ralph Cudworth's interpretation of Greek Philosophy, Acta Universitatis Gotoburgensis, Vol. X LIX, 1943 . 30. G. I . Wade : Thomas Traherne, New Jersey, 1944. 3 1 . A. N. Prior: Logic and the Basis of Ethics, Oxford, 1949. See also the classical commentaries on the philosophers mentioned in (F) and particularly commentaries on John Locke. H. M A T E R I A L S O F S C H O L A R S H I P

1 . Bibliotheca Cudworthiana, a catalogue of the sale of Cudworth's library at Roll's Coffee-House, London, 1690- 1. 2 . An Account of Dr Cudworth's Life and Writings, Thomas Birch, an early draft of the Life, B.M. Addit. MSS, 422 1. 3. A Note on the Purchase of the Cudworth Manuscripts, Dean Kaye, B.M. Addit. MSS, 18355. 4. Communications qf the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, Vol . 1, 1859, pp. 196-9. [On Mosheim's edition.] 5. Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, J. Nichols, London, 18 1 2- 15. 6. Critical Review, Vol. LV, p. 39 1. 7. Gentleman's A1agazine, July 1788, Vol. 58. 8. Chambers's General Biographical Dictionary, 18 13, Vol. I X, art. Cudworth. [Items (5) -(8) are concerned with the history of the Cudworth MSS.]

I I8

INDEX OF NAMES Aaron, R. I . , g 1 , 95n. Alembert, J. L. R. d', 1 05 Anderson, John, 24n . , 42n. , 53n . , 84n . Aristotle, I On . , 1 2 , 20, 46, go, 98 Aspelin, R., 2 Aubrey, John, 1 3 Bacon, Francis, 2-4, 6, I 4 Bayle, Pierre, 2 , 4, 5n. , 2 7 , 9 1 Berkeley, Bishop, 1 , 5 , 25, 30, 32, 36, 37, I 05 Birch, T. , Bon. , 9 1 , I O I , I 07- 1 3 Bosanq uet, B . , 76 Boyle, Robert, 2, 4 Burnet, G., 79 Burtt, E. A., 2 Butler, Bishop, 42, 56 Cassirer, E., 2 , 7, 1 5n., 1 00 Cicero, 97-8 Clarendon, Earl of, 1 1 Clarke, S., 52, 66, go, I Oo-3 Clement of Alexandria, 1 5, go Coleridge, S. T. , 1 4 Cudworth, Damaris, I 1 , 39, 79, 9 I -2 , 94-5, 97-8, 1 0 7 Cumberland, R., 3n . , 93, 1 0 1 -3 Davies, Robert, I 07 Democritus, IO. Descartes, Rene, 2 -3 , 7- 1 4, 23-4, 26, 28-3 I, 35-8, 42, 9 I, 96-7 Diderot, D., 1 05 Dodd, Rev. Wm. , I 07 Ficino, M . , 2, 1 4 Freud, S . , 2 3

Gassendi, P. , 3 Gibson, A. B., 53n. Gibson, James, g 1 Gilson, E., 1 2 Glanvill, J., gn., 1 05 Grotius, H., 1 02 Hegel, G., 35 Hertling, G. V., 6n. Hobbes, Thomas, 3, 1 1 - 1 4, 1 9, 32, 35, 4o, 43-5, 50, 72, 83, 88, 94n., I O I , 1 07 Hooker, R., 46n. Howard, M. F., 1 7 Hume, David, 1 , 3 , 5n. , 52, 93n. Hutcheson, F., 66 Inge, W. R., 1 4n. Janet, Paul, I 05 John, St. , 85, go Kant, Immanuel, 1 9, 5 1 , 1 05 Kristel1er, P. 0., I 4n. Laird, John, 5n. Lamprecht, S. P., 7n. , gn. , 26 Le Clerc, J., 4 Leibniz, G. , 4, I 05 Limborch, P. , 6, 1 m., go Locke, John, 1 , 1 1 , 22, 3 1 -2 , 36, 39, go-5, I o7 Malebranche, N. de, 55, 93n. Martineau, J., 1 00 Mas ham, Lady, v. Cudworth_. Damaris Masham, Lord, the third, I 07

I l9

IND E X O F NA M E S

Masson, D., 1 9 Milton, John, 7 , 8 1 Mirandola, Pico della, 2 Moore, G. E., 1 3, 25, 42 More, H. , 8, 9n. , I 1 , 1 6- 1 8, 26, 40, 69n . , 79, 90, 1 09 Muirhea d, J., 7-8, 1 4, 2 7, 5 1 , 72, 1 08 Newton, Isaac, 2, 1 0 1 Nicolson, M . , 1 5n., 1 7 Ockham, William of, 40 Pawson, G. P. H., 46n. Philoclea, v. Cudworth, Damaris Plato, 1 0n., 1 2, 1 4, 1 5, 22, 29-30, 32, 35, 37, 4 1 , 46, 52, 70- 1 , 73, 85, 90 Plotinus, 1 4 Popper, K . R., 86n. Powicke, F. J., 1 Price, Richard, 98, 1 00, 1 03-5 Prior, A. N., 42n. Protagoras, 1 4, 22, 32 Raphael, D. D., 1 03-4 Ray, John, 4, 1 0 1 , 1 05

Reid, T. , 4811. Robertson, J. M., 9 7 Rosenfield, L. C., 28n. Ross, A. D., 43 Salisbury, John of, 1 03 Salter, Samuel, 1 02n. Schlick, M., 48n. Selby-Bigge, A. S . , 52 Shaftesbury, third Earl of, 52, 66, 83, 95n., 96- 1 00 Sidgwick, H . , 99 Smith, John, 1 5, 92, 99 Spinoza, Benedict de, 2 -6, 9 7 Stephen, Leslie, 2 , 5 Stewart, Dugald, 4 Stewart, J. A., 7 Strato, 5 Thurloe, J., 80 Tulloch, J . , 8, 4 1 Warburton, W . , 1 , 3 , 1 0 1 , 1 05 Whichcote, B., 1 , 5, 7, 1 5, 1 6, 46n . , 5 3 , 69-77, 79-82, 85, 88, go, 92, 9311 . , 96-8, 1 02-4 Whiston, W., 1 0 m. Worthington, John, 1 6, 40

1 20