Cudworth.

Cudworth, one of the eminent men educated or promoted in the English Universities during the Puritan rule, was one of the most distinguished of the Latitudinarian, or Arminian, party who came forth at the Restoration, with a love of Liberty imbibed from their Calvinistic masters, as well as from the writings of antiquity, yet tempered by the experience of their own agitated age; and with a spirit of religious toleration more impartial and mature, though less systematic and professedly comprehensive, than that of the Independents, the first sect who preached that doctrine. Taught by the errors of their time, they considered Religion as consisting, not in vain efforts to explain unsearchable mysteries, but in purity of heart exalted by pious feelings, manifested by virtuous conduct. The government of the Church was placed in their hands by the Revolution, and their influence was long felt among its rulers and luminaries. The first generation of their scholars turned their attention too much from the cultivation of the heart to the mere government of outward action: and in succeeding times the tolerant spirit, not natural to an establishment, was with difficulty kept up by a government whose existence depended on discouraging intolerant pretensions. No sooner had the first sketch of the Hobbian philosophy been privately circulated at Paris, than Cudworth seized the earliest opportunity of sounding the alarm against the most justly odious of the modes of thinking which it cultivates, or forms of expression which it would introduce;—the prelude to a war which occupied the remaining forty years of his life. The Intellectual System, his great production, is directed against the atheistical opinions of Hobbes: it touches ethical questions but occasionally and incidentally. It is a work of stupendous erudition, of much more acuteness than at first appears, of frequent mastery over diction and illustration on subjects where it is most rare; and it is distinguished, perhaps beyond any other volume of controversy, by that best proof of the deepest conviction of the truth of a man’s principles, a fearless statement of the most formidable objections to them;—a fairness rarely practised but by him who is conscious of his power to answer them. In all his writings, it must be owned, that his learning obscures his reasonings, and seems even to repress his powerful intellect. It is an unfortunate effect of the redundant fulness of his mind, that it overflows in endless digressions, which break the chain of argument, and turn aside the thoughts of the reader from the main object. He was educated before usage had limited the naturalization of new words from the learned languages; before the failure of those great men, from Bacon to Milton, who laboured to follow a Latin order in their sentences, and the success of those men of inferior powers, from Cowley to Addison, who were content with the order, as well as the words, of pure and elegant conversation, had, as it were, by a double series of experiments, ascertained that the involutions and inversions of the ancient languages are seldom reconcilable with the genius of ours; and that they are, unless skilfully, as well as sparingly introduced, at variance with the natural beauties of our prose composition. His mind was more that of an ancient than of a modern philosopher. He often indulged in that sort of amalgamation of fancy with speculation, the delight of the Alexandrian doctors, with whom he was most familiarly conversant; and the Intellectual System, both in thought and expression, has an old and foreign air, not unlike a translation from the work of a later Platonist. Large ethical works of this eminent writer are extant in manuscript in the British Museum. One posthumous volume on Morals was published by Dr. Chandler, Bishop of Durham, entitled “A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality.’ But there is the more reason to regret (as far as relates to the history of Opinion) that the larger treatises are still unpublished, because the above volume is not so much an ethical treatise as an introduction to one. Protagoras of old, and Hobbes then alive, having concluded that Right and Wrong were unreal, because they were not perceived by the senses, and because all human knowledge consists only in such perception, Cudworth endeavours to refute them, by disproving that part of their premises which forms the last-stated proposition. The mind has many conceptions (νοηματα) which are not cognizable by the senses; and though they are occasioned by sensible objects, yet they cannot be formed but by a faculty superior to sense. The conceptions of Justice and Duty he places among them. The distinction of Right from Wrong is discerned by Reason; and as soon as these words are defined, it becomes evident that it would be a contradiction in terms to affirm that any power, human or Divine, could change their nature; or, in other words, make the same act to be just and unjust at the same time. They have existed eternally in the only mode in which truths can be said to be eternal, in the Eternal Mind; and they are indestructible and unchangeable like that Supreme Intelligence. Whatever judgment may be formed of this reasoning, it is manifest that it relates merely to the philosophy of the Understanding, and does not attempt any explanation of What constitutes the very essence of Morality,—its relation to the Will. That we perceive a distinction between Right and Wrong, as much as between a triangle and a square, is indeed true; and may possibly lead to an explanation of the reason why men should adhere to the one and avoid the other. But it is not that reason. A command or a precept is not a proposition: it cannot be said that either is true or false. Cudworth, as well as many who succeeded him, confounded the mere apprehension by the Understanding that Right is different from Wrong, with the practical authority of these important conceptions, exercised over voluntary actions, in a totally distinct province of the human soul.

Though his life was devoted to the assertion of Divine Providence, and though his philosophy was imbued with the religious spirit of Platonism, yet he had placed Christianity too purely in the love of God and Man to be considered as having much regard for those controversies about rights and opinions with which zealots disturb the world. They represented him as having fallen into the same heresy with Milton and with Clarke; and some of them even charged him with atheism, for no other reason than that he was not afraid to state the atheistic difficulties in their fullest force. As blind anger heaps inconsistent accusations on each other, they called him at least “an Arian, a Socinian, or a Deist.” The courtiers of Charles II., who were delighted with every part of Hobbes but his integrity, did their utmost to decry his antagonist. They turned the railing of the bigots into a sarcasm against Religion; as we learn from him who represented them with unfortunate fidelity. “He has raised,” says Dryden, “such strong objections against the being of God, that many think he has not answered them;”—“the common fate,” as Lord Shaftesbury tells us, “of those who dare to appear fair authors.” He had, indeed, earned the hatred of some theologians, better than they could know from the writings published during his life; for in his posthumous work he classes with the ancient atheists those of his contemporaries, (whom he forbears to name,) who held “that God may command what is contrary to moral rules; that He has no inclination to the good of His creatures; that He may justly doom an innocent being to eternal torments; and that whatever God does will, for that reason is just, because He wills it.”

It is an interesting incident in the life of a philosopher, that Cudworth’s daughter, Lady Masham, had the honour to nurse the infirmities and to watch the last breath of Mr. Locke, who was opposed to her father in speculative philosophy, but who heartily agreed with him in the love of Truth, Liberty, and Virtue.