guished into principal and derivative; and with the means by which virtue is attained, this last book including a defence of the doctrine of freewill. He holds that virtue is not a habit but a power-an intellectual power of the soul overruling the passions. His treatment of the passions is based upon that of Descartes, but goes on to show their relation to good and evil. Seeing that the passions are antecedent to deliberation and choice, they come from nature and therefore from God; and consequently they are good, if followed according to the law of nature. This law is a "whisper of the divine law," whose voice is most clear and audible in the intellectual state. Passion, therefore, is subject not only to nature but to right reason. Just as the essence of a thing is taken in by the understanding, and a triangle (for instance) is what right reason conceives it to be, so it is in ethics. There are unchangeable ideas of good and evil, concerning which the mind judges. There are certain first truths of morals-ethical noëmata or axioms. In More's statement, these are mainly formal in character, though they include a classification of duties (to self, others, God, and virtue itself) and an assertion of the 'golden rule.' Good is defined as that which is grateful, pleasant, and congruous to a conscious being and contributory to its preservation. At the same time he holds it mere madness to assert that whatever is grateful or pleasant is therefore good, and that this is the measure of human actions1.

More's doctrine of ethical axioms entitles him to a place among the beginners of the intellectualist tradition in English ethics. He has also been regarded as having anticipated the 'moral sense' school by his doctrine of the 'boniform faculty.' In some respects this is his most characteristic contribution to ethics; but his expressions are misunderstood if held to imply that the boniform faculty is allied to sensibility rather than to intellect. It is true that he says that what is absolutely good is "judged 1 Enchiridion Ethicum, 1, v, 7.

by right reason, but its savour and sweetness are perceived by the boniform faculty of the soul," and that by it relish or savour what is absolutely best and rejoice in it alone." But it is not, like sense, inferior to intellect and its provider with material. Rather is it super-intellectual. "All moral good, properly so called," says More, “is intellectual and divine: intellectual in so far as its essence and truth are defined and known by the intellect; divine, in so far as its sweetness is most pleasant and most effectually enjoyed in that divine faculty in which we cleave unto God-the most pure and absolute good1." The boniform faculty, therefore, would seem to be simply the ethical aspect of the 'divine sagacity' spoken of in the preface to his Philosophical Writings. Like divine sagacity, it is not acknowledged by every one, for some are without the sense of God or divine things; and, on this account, his treatise is designed to show that intellect of itself recognises the first principles of morals.

Ralph Cudworth, who is generally regarded as the leading member of the Cambridge school, was born in 1617 and began residence at Emmanuel College in 1632 -the year following that in which More (his senior in age by three years) matriculated at Christ's. He soon gained a great reputation as a scholar and teacher. He became master of Clare Hall in 1644, professor of Hebrew in 1645, and in 1654 master of Christ's College, where he lived till his death in 1688. His intellectual affinity with More was very close, but their modes of life differed. More was a retired scholar who wrote and published book after book, with new editions of them, new prefaces, and copious annotations-in spite of his leisure, careless of literary form. Cudworth, on the other hand, was immersed in the affairs of his college and the duties of his professorship and was consulted on public business. His earlier publications were not numerous and were not philoso1 Enchiridion Ethicum, I, V, I.

phical in character. But he must have been an unwearied worker, as is shown by the masses of manuscript he left behind him as well as by the one philosophical book published in his life-time.

This book is The True Intellectual System of the Universe, the first part of which-the only part to be completedappeared in 1678. It is an impressive monument of the scholarship of the time; and, unwieldy as it is, it shows a systematic plan carried out in a great manner. It is learning in the interests of thought; and, although the reader may easily go astray among its learned digressions, he feels that the author himself kept the reins of his argument well in hand. Cudworth's object, like that of More, is to establish the spiritual nature of reality. The revival of materialism by Hobbes, and the bearing of that theory on the moral life, gave occasion to his endeavour. Hobbes is to be refuted; but Hobbes is a modern exponent of an ancient theory; materialism must be tracked to its source in antiquity and its faults exposed at their origin. Descartes also, having given a mechanical explanation of the physical world, repeated to that extent the error of Democritus. What Cudworth did not see was that both Descartes and Hobbes had got hold of a method of enquiry which was independent of traditional opinion, and that mere learning was wasted upon them. The view has been held that the ancients were somehow nearer the fountain-head of truth than the moderns, and that sound doctrine should be sought in the past. This view was favoured by ecclesiastical tradition and, although Cudworth did not adopt it, its influence may be traced on his method. At the same time, judged by modern standards, his historical method-and the same may be said of More's-was essentially uncritical. And, where the historical matter bulks so largely, it is difficult to disentangle the elements of value in the work as a whole.

When he first started to write, Cudworth had in view "only a discourse concerning liberty and necessity." But

he saw that this took in other things-so many things indeed that he never reached his intended subject. The fatalism which he set out to refute was of three kinds: first, the materialistic and atheistic fatalism, which he calls 'Democritic'; secondly, the "theistic but immoral fatalism," which refers everything to God and makes the distinction between good and evil rest on arbitrary enactment only; and thirdly, another form of theistic fatalism which, although admitting moral attributes in God, leaves no place for liberty anywhere "and therefore no distributive or retributive justice in the world." Now for Cudworth three doctrines form the essentials of true religion: the being of God; the eternal nature of goodness; and the freedom of man. These three things he has to defend against the three forms of fatalism; and to each he had designed to devote a separate book of his great work. But only the first book-that against atheismwas completed and published.

The ancient atomists before Democritus-so Cudworth thinks he can prove-were theists and believed in incorporeal as well as in corporeal substance. The grounds for his statement are interesting as showing what may be taken for historical evidence. According to Strabo, Pythagoras conversed at Sidon with the successors of one Moschus and introduced their doctrine into Greece. This Moschus lived before the Trojan war; he was a Sidonian or Phoenician-a Semite of sorts; and his name bears some resemblance to Moses-with whom therefore he may be identified. His doctrine-the ancient or "Moschical" philosophy-had two parts: "atomical physiology and theology or pneumatology." Democritus, "being atheistically inclined," adopted the former and discarded the latter; Plato took the reverse course.

Cudworth reviews the various arguments urged against theism, and his review is elaborate, subtle, and fairminded. He distinguishes also four forms of atheism: the "hylopathian or Anaximandrian," which derives all

things from matter in the way of qualities and forms; the atomical or Democritical, which doth the same thing in the way of atoms and figures"; the "cosmoplastic or Stoical," which refers everything to "one plastic or methodical but senseless nature"; and the "hylozoic or Stratonical," which ascribes to matter as such "a certain living and energetic nature, but devoid of all animality, sense, and consciousness.' Cudworth's learning was of course bounded by the opportunities of his time, and it is not surprising that he held that all atheists were materialists or (as he calls them) "corporealists"-that they were afflicted by pneumatophobia or "an irrational but desperate abhorrence from spirits or incorporeal substances." But he shows insight in not limiting materialism to atomism or the mechanical theory. His discussions of hylozoism and of the theory of a plastic nature are of interest by bringing out the critical difficulty for all nontheistic theories-the explanation of the life of mind. On the plastic nature he has a long appendix. He holds that it is a reality, not as taking the place of God, but as a subordinate instrument of the Deity-an incorporeal substance which is the divine art embodied in nature. It acts for ends, but is not conscious of them, and it operates "fatally and sympathetically" according to the laws impressed upon it by perfect intellect. Its business is the orderly disposal of matter, but it works "vitally and magically" and not, like human art, mechanically.

Cudworth's positive argument for theism is prefaced by the postulate that "there must of necessity be something self-existent from eternity." At first he seems to adopt the ontological argument: "the true and proper idea of God, in its most contracted form, is this, a being absolutely perfect; for this is that alone to which necessary existence is essential and of which it is demonstrable1." But afterwards he goes more fully into the matter. He sees that it may be urged against the argument that it 1 True Intellectual System (ed. 1845), I, p. 307.