 Section 13 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy, Volume 2 by John Tulloch. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 4. Ralph Cudworth, Christian Philosophy in Conflict with Materialism, Part 4. The essential core of all his thought, the reality of mind or spiritual existence, Cudworth vindicates on many grounds, some of them far from satisfactory, as, for example, apparitions and miracles. It is strange how much stress even philosophical theologians in the seventeenth century were inclined to lay upon the supposed fact of apparitions as a direct confutation of atheism. Our author is less credulous than his friend Moore or Glanville. He does not give a series of ghost stories in proof of the supernatural. He admits even that there is much of fabulosity in many of the relations of such appearances. Still, he is very indignant with men like Hobbes who had ventured to explain them by the mere force of imagination, quote, as if the strength of imagination were such that it could not only create fancies but also real sensible objects and that at a distance, too, from the imaginers. From which prodigious paradox, he adds, we may take notice of the fanaticism of some atheists and that there is nothing so monstrously absurd which men infected with atheistic incredulity will not rather entertain into their belief than admit of anything that shall the least hazard or endanger the existence of a God. For if there be once any invisible ghosts or spirits acknowledged as things permanent, it will not be easy for any to give a reason why there might not be one supreme ghost also presiding over them all and the whole world, close quote. The ideas of miracle and prophecy, again, already presuppose a higher spiritual intelligence. Supernatural results are only intelligible on a basis of supernaturalism. But seeing that this is the very point in question, it is plainly invalid to argue from an effect which can only be conceived in connection with a supernatural intelligence back to the reality of such an intelligence as its cause. The supposed effect can only come from such a cause, but the effect itself, however extraordinary, could never have been pronounced miraculous without the presumption of the very thing which it is alleged to prove. Miracles in short, being only provable on the presupposition of supernatural intelligence, it is clear we can never prove the fact of such intelligence by supposed miraculous occurrences. But Cudworth urges stronger evidence than anything of this kind for his main position. He sees very well that the question is really one as to the philosophical interpretation of human nature. Could we any conceptions except those that we derive through sense and the objects of which are essentially subject to sense conditions? If we have not, then whatever is not sensible must be to us nothing. If we cannot validly conceive, but only feign or imagine spiritual existence, then it can have no reality to us. This is the position which he ascribes to Hobbes, although unhappily he seldom quotes his great opponent quite accurately, and the reader has to be cautious as to the conclusions which he draws. He makes Hobbes an extreme sensationalist, and represents him as not only deriving all our knowledge from sense, but as denying that there can be any proof of anything apart from sense. Upon the whole, this representation is not unjust, even if it be somewhat loosely drawn in Cudworth's pages. Hobbes certainly taught that all our mental conceptions are born from sense, that quote, there is no conception in a man's mind which hath not at first totally or by parts, then begotten upon the organs of sense, close quote. Nor can it well be disputed that he denied the reality of any existence other than corporeal, although he does not use the exact words attributed to him by our author, quote, that the only evidence which we have of the existence of anything is from sense, close quote. He does not say so directly, but he plainly implies that pure incorporeal existence is an absurdity without any valid ground of evidence. Speaking of invisible agents, he says, in a passage already so far quoted in a preceding note, quote, the opinion that such spirits were incorporeal or immaterial could never enter into the mind of any man by nature, because, though men may put together words of contradictory signification as spirit and incorporeal, yet they can never have the imagination of anything answering to them, close quote. End of footnote. The fourth answer to all this is the common one, that sense could never give us cognition nor originate thought or the conscious distinction betwixt nature and ourselves. If sense were our highest and indeed only ultimate faculty, all discrimination of the objects of our sensations and of ourselves in relation to them would have been impossible, quote, since one sense cannot judge of another or correct the error of it, all sense as such, that is, as fancy and apparition, being alike true, close quote. He quotes even Democritus as supporting two kinds of knowledge, one by the senses and another by the mind, and appeals to the atomic philosophy itself, misinterpreted, he says, by the notorious dunces who so much pretend to it, in proof of certain supposed qualities of matter, the so-called secondary qualities, such as heat and cold, bitter and sweet, red and green, not being real qualities in the objects without, but only our own fancies, in other words, the contribution of our minds in sensitive perception. To make sense everything seems to him to destroy the very basis of the supposed knowledge derived from it. Upon such a hypothesis sense itself could hardly escape from becoming a non-entity, quote, for as much as neither fancy nor sense falls under sense, but only the objects of them. We neither seeing vision nor feeling taxion, nor hearing audition, much less hearing sight or seeing taste or the like. Wherefore, though God be never so much corporeal as some theists have conceived him to be, yet since the chief of his essence, and as it were his inside, must by these be acknowledged to consist in mind, wisdom, and understanding, he could not possibly, as to goodness, fall under corporeal sense, sight or touch, any more than thought can, close quote. Again, quote, were existence to be allowed to nothing that doth not fall under corporeal sense, then must we deny the existence of soul and mind in ourselves and others, because we can neither feel nor see any such thing. Whereas we are certain of the existence of our own souls, partly from an inward consciousness of our own cogitations, and partly from that principle of reason that nothing cannot act. And the existence of other individual souls is manifest to us from their effects upon their respective bodies, their motions, actions, and discourse. Wherefore, since the atheists cannot deny the existence of soul or mind in men, though no such thing fall under external sense, they have as little reason to deny the existence of a perfect mind, presiding over the universe, without which it cannot be conceived whence our imperfect ones should be derived. Close quote. To this subject of the reality and nature of spiritual existence, Cudworth reverts again and again. In addition to all that he says in the opening section of his final chapter, he devotes two further sections virtually to the same subject. He discusses at special length the nature of spirit, the difficulties of exempting it from the idea of extension, and particularly the question whether any created spirit can be conceived as entirely incorporeal or, as he says, without a corporeal indument. And here it is he runs off into his digression as to the doctrine of the resurrection. He discusses also, with great keenness, the question of the origin of life, and pronounces, it is needless to say, very strongly against the possibility of its springing out of what he calls dead and senseless matter. It is curious to notice how closely he here approaches the recent phases of such discussions and how little of essential novelty there is even in the most startling theories of the modern scientific world. In speaking, for example, of certain speculations which attributed the origin of life, not only the sensitive in brutes but also the rational in men, to modifications of matter by organization alone, he might be supposed characterizing the theory of evolution in its latest form. Whether he can be supposed as giving any satisfactory answer to it in what he says by way of exposing its absurdity is another question. This hyelozoic atheism, for so he calls it, quote, thus bringing all conscious and reflexive life or animality out of a supposed senseless, stupid, and unconscious life of nature in matter, and that merely from a different accidental modification thereof or contexture of parts, does plainly bring something out of nothing which is an absolute impossibility. If matter, as such, had life, perception and understanding belonging to it, then of necessity must every atom or smallest particle thereof be a distinct recipient by itself. From whence it will follow that there could not possibly be any such men and animals as now are, compounded out of them, but every man and animal would be a heap of innumerable recipients and innumerable perceptions and intellectuals, whereas it is plain that there is but one life and understanding, one soul or mind, one perceiver or thinker in every one, and to say that these innumerable particles of matter do all confederate together, that is, to make every man and animal to be a multitude or commonwealth of recipients and persons as it were clubbing together, is a thing so absurd and ridiculous that one would wonder the hyelozoists should not rather choose to recant their fundamental error of the life of matter than endeavour to seek shelter and sanctuary for the same under such a pretense. For though voluntary agents and persons may many of them resign up their wills to one, and by that means have all but as it were one artificial will, yet can they not possibly resign up their sense and understanding too, so as to have all but one artificial life sense and understanding. Much less could this be done by senseless atoms or particles of matter supposed to be devoid of all consciousness or animality." Life and understanding cannot be conceived as mere accidents of matter, or as possibly evolved or generated from it by any process. That which understandeth in us is not, quote, blood or brains, but an incorporeal soul or mind vitally united to a terrestrial organized body, and the most perfect mind or intellect of all is not the soul of any body but complete in itself without such vital union and sympathy with matter. We conclude, therefore, he adds, with what he no doubt felt to be an effective slap at Hobbes, that this passage of a modern writer, we worms cannot conceive how God can understand without brains, is Vox Picutis, the language and philosophy rather of worms or brute animals than of men, close quote. He pursues in effect the same discussion in the following or fourth section regarding the phenomena of motion and cogitation. He can only conceive of motion as originating in some primal self-activity or uncreated mind. Whatever is moved is moved by something else. But the world is an eternal moved. It presents nothing but a course of endless changes. There is no break or beginning in the Infinite Series. He supposes the democratic atheist to urge this as an argument against any first cause or original self-moving power. But admitting the fact of motion to be as represented, this is no reason but the contrary he urges in favor of its endless continuity. For were all the motion that is in the world a passion from something else, and no first unmoved active mover, then must it be a passion from no agent or without an action, and consequently proceed from nothing and either cause itself or be made without a cause. The very idea of motion as a translation of influence from one body to another, or what we now call the correlation of forces, seems to him to prove undeniably an original self-moving force or intelligence, or in his own words, that there is some other substance besides body, something incorporeal, which is self-moving and self-active, and was the first unmoved mover of the heavens or world. The movement of one body upon another, or the mere translation of force, he calls hetero-kinesi. But we can only rest in self-activity or autokinesi, that is to say, in the action of, quote, some cogitative or thinking being which not acted upon by anything without it, nor at all locally moved, but only mentally, is the immovable mover of the heaven, close quote. And so he returns to the primary and essential strain of all his thought that cogitation is in order of nature before what he calls local motion, and incorporeal before corporeal substance, the former having a natural imperium upon the latter, in other words that mind is before matter and superior to it. As he elsewhere expresses it, knowledge is older than all sensible things, mind senior to the world and the architect thereof. This, he says, was the doctrine of the pagan theists, and the essential controversy betwixt them and their atheistic opponents. Whereas to the former, mind was, quote, the oldest of all things, senior to the world and elements, and by nature hath a princely and lordly dominion over all, close quote. To the latter, matter or body was the first principle, and mind merely, quote, a post-nate thing, younger than the world, a weak, umber-tile and avanted image, and next to nothing, close quote. And the controversy thus stated may be also, as he supposes, clearly and satisfactorily decided. Dead and senseless matter, he says, quote, could never have created or generated mind and understanding, but a perfectly omnipotent mind could create matter. There must be something self-active and hierarchical, something that can act both from itself and upon matter as having a natural imperium or command over it. Life and understanding, soul and mind, are no syllables or complexions of things, secondary and derivative, but simple, primitive, and uncompounded natures. Moreover, nothing can be more evident than this, that mind and understanding have a higher degree of entity or perfection in it, and is a greater reality in nature than mere senseless matter or bulky extension. If the sun be nothing but a mass of fire or inanimate, subtle matter agitated, then hath the most contemptible animal that can see the sun, and hath consciousness and self-enjoyment a higher degree of entity and perfection in it than that whole fiery globe, close quote. Before he concludes, quote, a perfect understanding being is the beginning and head of the scale of entity. An omnipotent understanding being, which is itself its own intelligible, is the first original of all things, close quote. B. But while Cudworth thus clearly maintains mind or noce at the head of the universe, he has difficulty in conceiving the translation of mind into nature. The conception of God on the one side, and a series of material phenomena on the other, acting under their own laws, by no means satisfy him. Such a philosophy appeared to exclude from nature the operation of any safe material causes, and indeed, quote, any other vitality acting in it than only the production of a certain quantity of local motion and the conservation of it according to some general laws, close quote. Hence his theory of a plastic nature, which is defined in his own language, quote, has an inferior and subordinate instrument drudgingly executing that part of providence which consists in the regular and orderly motion of matter, yet so as there is besides a higher providence which, presiding over it, doth often supply the defects of it, and sometimes overrule it, for as much as this plastic nature cannot act electively or with discretion, close quote. B. Unless we recognize such a medium for the divine action, we must, he supposes, either conclude with the democratic atheists, against the reality of this action altogether, or else hold that, quote, God himself doth all immediately, and as it were with his own hands, form the body of every gnat and fly, insect and might, close quote. The Cartesian notion of a supreme mover originally starting the machine of the world, and holding all its final springs in his hand, while it moves onwards unceasingly in obedience to its original impress, was uncongenial to the platonic type of thought. A God thus standing at a distance from the world was very much the same as no God at all, and hence the tang of mechanic atheism which he found in Cartesianism. It seemed to him, as well as to more, to banish the presence of mental and consequently divine causality from the world. Moreover many natural phenomena were to him inexplicable on the principle of mere mechanical law. On the other hand, the idea of God himself acting in all things immediately served to, quote, render divine providence operose, solicitous, and distractious, and thereby to make the belief of it to be entertained with great difficulty and give advantage to atheists, close quote. Such an idea, according to him, was inconsistent with the actual course of nature, the slow and gradual process by which the generation of things proceeds, and, quote, those errors and bungles which may be supposed to be the result of some agency less than the highest, and therefore capable of being sometimes frustrated and disappointed by the interposition of matter. Whereas an omnipotent agent, as it could dispatch its work in a moment, so it would always do it infallibly and irresistibly. No inaptitude or stubbornness of matter being ever able to hinder such a one, or make him bungle or fumble in anything, close quote. Earth's plastic nature is an embodied art or reason, quote, reason immersed and plunged into matter and, as it were, fuddled in it and confounded with it, close quote. It is not the divine, not archetypal, but only ectypal. It is a dull unconscious soul animating all things and working in all, a living yet blind power carrying out the purposes of the divine architect, and insensibly clothing and making manifest the divine mind. It is curious how he insists on its vital and even spiritual character, and yet on the fact that it is without definite consciousness or self-possession. He illustrates its action by reference to the force of habit, according to which we execute so many spontaneous movements without any deliberation or conscious purpose. As there is thus, so to speak, a subordinate and secondary soul in us, which carries out unreflectively the behests of the higher intelligent nature, so is there such a soul in the world, constantly executive of the divine plans, a dumb, patient, sleepless energy, ever obedient to the divine will, and unceasingly translating it into form and action. It is something like the ancient distinction of the divine reason in itself and in manifestation. FUT-NOTE The logos endiathitos and the logos profóricos, the reason of the mind and the reason uttered. END OF FUT-NOTE Or again it is like the instinct of animals, which, directly or without knowledge in the ordinary sense, accomplishes all the ends of knowledge. But instinct is in this sense superior to the plastic nature, that while it moves blindly it moves sensitively, whereas the soul which he supposes to be resident in matter is destitute alike of sensation and intelligence, a purely motive organic principle in the hands of a higher agent. Nor is Cudworth content with asserting the existence of such a general principle or power animating the world, an anima-mundi everywhere diffused and taking various forms in plants, animals, and human beings. He seems to recognize something of a special plastic force in plants and animals and the various orders of being, forming them as so many little worlds. Although it be unreasonable, he says, to think that every plant, herb, and pile of grass hath a plastic or vegetative soul of its own, yet there may possibly be one plastic unconscious nature in the whole toraqueous globe by which vegetables may be severally organized and framed, and all things performed which transcend the power of fortuitous mechanism." And so there may be in the ascending orders of creation a series of higher plastic principles governing their formation and molding them to their special ends. It is unnecessary to enlarge our exposition. Cudworth's general idea of a plastic nature is nothing else than the old platonic dream of a soul of the world adopted in his case from affinity with this type of thought and also in distinct reaction against the mechanical theory of Descartes. It is plainly this spirit of antagonism which prompts his minor adaptations of the idea to the several orders of animals and plants. Descartes, it is well known, carried out his mechanical theory so as to deny all special animal life in men or in brutes. Thought on one side and extension on the other made up for him the sum of the universe. The simplicity of the Cartesian conception seemed bald and empty of divine meaning to the Cambridge school. They wished to feel the breath of the divine in every part of nature and to bring it before them in all its movements as animated and full of life. But in doing this Cudworth ceased to philosophize. He lost sight of facts as his school was too apt to do and yielded to the mere fantasies of imagination in suggesting such a number and variety of intermediary principles. The Cartesian generalization may or may not be able to vindicate itself, but the theory of a general plastic nature with distinct plastic principles in the progressive orders of being is condemned by that law of parsimony which is the first and most imperative canon of all genuine philosophical investigations. C. In carrying out his lengthened analysis of the idea of the divine unity as underlying both the mythological and philosophical conceptions of antiquity, Cudworth, as we have already said, comes across the subject of the Platonic trinity and its relation to the doctrine of the Christian trinity. This leads him into a special sub-digression which exposed him in his own age and in the age immediately following to much animate version. He was supposed to have so expressed himself in reference to the opinions both of Plato and the Christian Fathers as to indicate not merely a trinity of persons but a trinity of beings. He was accused, in other words, of so conceiving the trinity that while the Son and the Holy Ghost are acknowledged to be of the same substance with the Father, yet they were not numerically or individually the same. They were centered not in one singular or individual, but only one common or universal essence or substance. This and other assertions of a like nature are said to have made so much noise that they were not only often cited in company, but that, quote, hardly a pamphlet or book for some years was written about the blessed trinity, especially in England and in the heterodox way, which did not bring in Dr. Cudworth upon the stage and vouch his name in quotations for its purpose, close, quote. While on the other hand the truly orthodox made his doctrine as a mark of their invective. He was denounced as a tritheist or a tritheistic in the language of the time, and by others as a virtual Aryan in the sense of Dr. Samuel Clark, who, while asserting the divinity of the three persons in the Godhead, yet maintained that the Father alone is truly and properly the Supreme Being. It is unnecessary to enter into any detailed consideration of Cudworth's views on the point, because, first of all, he has nowhere distinctly enunciated his own views, and secondly, the topic is at best a subordinate one to the main structure of his thought as a Christian philosopher. It came before him merely in relation to his exposition of the ancient philosophy, which itself is an expressance upon his true subject, and whatever opinions he expresses are designed solely to expound and illustrate the affinity of the Platonic and Christian thinkers. Having, first of all, in the course of his historical review in the fourth book, brought forward and condemned what he calls the pseudo-Platonic trinity, or the views of several of the later Platonists, who, while speaking of a trinity yet adulterated and deformed the original conception, which he supposes in his usual manner to have been derived from the secret doctrine or cabala of the Hebrews, he proceeds to vindicate the genuine Platonic doctrine and to draw out its affinities with the Christian. Whereas the pseudo-Platonic trinity confounded the difference betwixt God and the creature, and set forth a confused jumble of created and uncreated beings together, Plato and, quote, some of the Platonists retained much of the ancient genuine cabala and made a very near approach to the true Christian trinity, close, quote. Their three divine hypotheses, viz, monad or God, mind and soul, are conceived as numerically distinct, or possessing distinct singular essences of their own, and yet as united in one deity. None of them, quote, are accounted as creations, but all other things whatsoever the creatures of them. They are not only all eternal, but also necessarily existent and absolutely undestroyable, close, quote. And yet they are, quote, all three really but one creator and one God. The three Platonic hypotheses seem to be really nothing else but infinite goodness, infinite wisdom, and infinite active love and power, not as mere qualities or accidents, but as substantial things that have some kind of subordination one to another, all concurring together to make up one theon or divinity, just as the center, immovable distance, and movable circumference can currently make up one sphere, close, quote. So far, therefore, he argues, there is an undoubted congruity betwixt the Platonic and the Christian trinities. They are alike at least in these three fundamentals, quote, first in not making a mere trinity of names and words or of logical notions and inadequate conceptions of one and the same thing, but a trinity of hypostases or subsistences or persons, secondly in making none of the three hypostases to be creatures but all eternal, necessarily existent and universal, infinite, omnipotent, and creators of the whole world, which is all one in the sense of the ancients as if they should have affirmed them to be homo-usian. Lastly, in supposing these three divine hypostases, however sometimes paganically called three gods, to be essentially one divinity. From whence it may be concluded, he adds, that Platonism is undoubtedly more agreeable to Christianity than Arianism. It being a certain middle thing betwixt that and Sibelianism, which, in general, was that mark which the Nicene Council also aimed at, close, quote. From this very condensed summary of Cudworth's exposition it is at least evident that he did not wish to depart in any respect from the orthodox doctrine of the trinity, if he Platonized, according to his manner of speaking, he certainly did not mean to Arianize. On the contrary, Arianism is spoken of throughout as a distinct system from Platonism. And again, the Platonic doctrine of the trinity, near as it seemed to him to the Christian doctrine, is in two important respects discriminated from it and pronounced so far deficient. Quote. First, because the Platonists dreamed of no such thing at all as one and the same universal essence or substance of the three divine hypostases. And secondly, because though they acknowledged none of these hypostases to be creatures but all God, yet did they assert an essential dependence of the second and third upon the first, together with a certain gradual subordination, and therefore no absolute co-equality, close quote. These features of the Platonic doctrine, in which it came short of the full Catholic doctrine, have led many late writers to symbolize it with Arianism, but wrongly so. For they are plainly separated on the essential and testing point of the eternity of the second hypostasis, which the Arians denied, hence receiving the name of exucontians, and the Platonists affirmed. Quote. Ex uke onton, of a substance that once was not, one of the Arian catchphrases, hence the name exucontians. End of Quote. The real affinity of Platonism is not with Arianism, but with the undeveloped doctrine of the first three centuries, which hesitated to assert the absolute oneness in essence of the Father and Son, and, Quote, did not so much as determine that the Holy Ghost was an hypostasis, much less that he was God, close Quote. This clear recognition on the part of Cudworth of a process of development in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity was evidently his main point of difference from the common orthodoxy of his time. Speaking in the name of a Christian Platonist or Platonic Christian, he apologizes for Plato and the genuine Platonists that while approaching so near the Christian doctrine of the Trinity they yet fell short of it, which, however, was not to be wondered at seeing that the generality of Christian doctors for the first three centuries failed in the same manner to reach its full meaning and statement. This he points out and illustrates at length by quotations, and discovers plainly a certain measure of sympathy with the less systematized and less articulated doctrine of the early church. It is in connection with this that he reverts to the distinction between a singular essence numerically and one common and universal essence or substance, and shows further how the early Fathers commonly did not distinguish betwixt Uziah and hypostasis. But while freely pointing out this and tracing the steps in the development of the Christian doctrine, he nowhere avows his own opinions in any definite manner, nor lays himself open to any charge of heterodoxy. He may be mistaken in his historical analysis of the opinions of the early church, or in some of the definite statements he makes on the subject, but his conception of the Christian doctrine as only attaining gradually to its full expression in the consciousness of the church is now a common place in all schools of theological thought. It was a distinct merit of Cudworth to have seized the conception so clearly as he did in his time. The affinity of the Christian and Platonic doctrines was overdone by him, and there is much vagueness and uncertainty in many points of the analogy which he draws betwixt to them, as there is in all the details of his historical sketch. Throughout there is the usual lack of criticism and historical perspective. But there were few minds, after all, but his own, which had then conceived the idea of such analogy at all, or sought to trace and unfold those correspondences of thought that constitute the basis of a philosophy of religion. Cudworth's views of the resurrection are in a similar manner a mere appendix to his general line of argument. They occur in the third section of the fifth or concluding chapter in relation to his discussion of the nature of incorporeal and unextended being. With unnecessary minuteness he tries to meet all the objections that may be urged against the idea of such being, and, amongst others, the inference which seems to follow from it as to the illocality and immobility of human souls and other spirits. But how can such finite spirits be conceived as thus illocal and immovable, nowhere and everywhere? This is inconsistent with their finiteness, and, moreover, opposed to the very principles of religionists themselves, which imply that the souls of men departing out of the body do move from one place to another. With this clue in his hand he leaves off the general discussion in which he has been engaged, and enters upon a prolonged consideration of the state of the soul after death. Is it, after all, divested of all outward vehicle or body? On the contrary, he holds it to be plainly the teaching of the old philosophic cabala, through which every element of truth appears to him always filtered, that while the soul quits the earthly body it is yet by no means stripped of all bodily shape. The gross, earthy part is put off as an outer garment, but there is an interior instrument or vestment hanging about it even in this life which remains and serves to give to the departed soul locality and capacity of motion. Nay, there is not only, according to the ancient opinion, such a spirituous and airy body surrounding the terrestrial, but yet a third kind of body, of a higher rank than either, luciform and celestial, the special clothing of those souls that have become purged and cleansed from all corporeal affections. Our author explains at length the agreement betwixt this ancient philosophic doctrine and the Christian doctrine of the resurrection. They resemble each other in the two points of acknowledging, first, that the supreme happiness of the soul is not to be found in disjunction from all body, and secondly that its future bodily investment cannot be of a gross, earthy nature. The doctrine of the resurrection is the response to the intellectual instinct which associates enjoyment with definiteness and locality of being, and at the same time to the spiritual aspiration which seeks for an emancipation from all grosser affections and passions. The spiritual resurrection doctrine of St. Paul is an inspired affirmation of the neoclatonic dream of a luciform and celestial vehicle for the purified soul. This present body, according to the inspired expositor, is to be looked upon as merely, quote, a dead seed of the future resurrection body, which, therefore, is in some sense the same, and in some sense not the same with it, close, quote. The sowing in corruption and the raising in incorruption represents closely the idea of the Pythagoric Kabbalah. The change will consist not in merely gilding and varnishing over of the outside, but in a spiritual transformation whereby we shall be fashioned in the likeness of Christ's glorious body. This is very much the sum of his expanded exposition, which leads us, however, through many winding paths and special discussions as to the immediate state of the dead and as to whether angels and even ghosts have bodies. His opinion clearly is that there is no finite spirit can be conceived as entirely bodiless. This is the exclusive property of the Supreme Spirit, who alone can be absolutely and purely incorporeal, quote, whose essence is complete and life and tire within itself without the conjunction or appendage of any body, close, quote. And so also is this spirit, or God himself, alone ubiquitous, being, quote, peculiar to that incorporeal essence which is infinite to quicken and actuate all things and take cognizance of all, close, quote. End of Chapter 4, Part 4. Section 14 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy, Volume 2 by John Tulloch. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 4. Ralph Cudworth, Christian Philosophy in Conflict with Materialism, Part 5. 3. It now only remains to us, before endeavouring to sum up our estimate of Cudworth as a thinker, to consider him specially as a moralist. So far we have seen the ethical interest that lies at the root of all his thinking. It was this interest more than anything else which inspired his first labours in philosophy and which continued his highest inspiration. The vindication of man's distinctive position in the universe as a rational and moral creature formed the centre of his whole system of speculation, around which all its most elaborated reasonings revolved. Man is divine if there is any divinity at all. All the lines of argument for Christian Theism go forth from the recognition of the human soul as a spiritual reality distinct from nature, absolute amidst its accidents, the true life of all its apparent and reflected life. Such a view already implies a definite moral doctrine. Or if the soul be thus a reality, distinct in being and supreme in character, it must in itself be an organ and source and not merely a receptacle of truth. What is true or false, good or evil, just or unjust, must be determined not from without, but from within, and the determinations will partake of the absolute character of the source whence they proceed. Morality in its full contents and development may be an eductive experience, just as every branch of knowledge in its details must be. But the moral no less than the intellectual judgment is from the soul itself, the spiritual affirmation of a spiritual subject going forth into the world of experience and conditioning it in no sense derived from it or conditioned by it. This is the essential point in Cudworth's moral system, which implies and rests upon a distinct theory of knowledge. A treatise on eternal and immutable morality is, in fact, mainly a discussion of the source of knowledge. It sets out with laying down very clearly the question from the author's point of view. Is morality a thing in itself? Are the ideas of good and evil, justice and injustice, absolute or only relative, real or factitious, eternal and immutable or only positive and arbitrary? Are they what they are, in short, as he often says, they, by nature, or they say, by institution? After enumerating the various defenders of the latter opinion amongst the ancient philosophers, Artagoras in the Theetetus, Polis and Calakles in the Gorgias, Thrasymachus and Glaucon in the politics, and Epicurus, quote, the reviver of the democratic philosophy, the frame of whose principles must needs lead him to deny justice and injustice to be natural things, close quote. He brings forward, in his usual manner, Hobbes, not by name but under the general appellation that late writer of ethics and politics, as the modern exponent of the same views. He has revived, in this latter age, not only the physiological hypotheses of Democritus and Epicurus, but also the moral paradoxes of the same philosophers. Good and evil are represented by him as only authentic in respect of the human laws defining and constituting them. It belongs to the Christian state to determine what is right and what is wrong. The passages quoted are from Hobbes' original treatise, Decivet, and will be found below. Footnote. Libre Decivet, Capitulum 17.10. End of footnote. But he gives the same over again in English our author adds as follows. In the state of nature, quote, nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law. Where no law, no transgression. Footnote. Hobbes' words are, quote, where no law, no injustice. Close quote. End of footnote. No law can be unjust. Nay, he continues, temperance is no more fusée, naturally, according to this civil, or rather uncivil, philosopher, than justice. Sensuality, in that sense in which it is condemned, hath no place till there be laws. Close quote. Footnote. Hobbes' exact words are, quote, the word sensual as it is used by those only that condemn them, pleasures of sense, having no place till there be laws. Close quote. They are used parenthetically. End of footnote. From this attitude of philosophical paradox, he turns to the views of diverse modern theologers who, in like manner, deny the absolute and intrinsic character of the ideas of good and evil by attributing them solely to the positive enactment or command of God. Whatever may be the true meaning of the philosophers, he says, as if himself in some degree doubtful whether he had rightly interpreted them, there can be no doubt that there have been theologians who have thus referred all morality to the arbitrary will and pleasure of God. The ancient fathers of the church were indeed very abhorrent from this doctrine, but it crept up afterward in the scholastic age and has maintained itself from the time of Achim under the pretense of being a necessary corollary from the conception of an almighty divine will. As nothing can be supposed apart from such a will or as existing independently of it, so good and evil, justice and injustice can only be as derived from or constituted by God. Curiously enough, he afterwards distinguishes Descartes as the chief advocate of such a doctrine. The question being thus stated, he sets forth for him very briefly the grounds on which the higher view of morality as in itself something or a distinct and absolute reality, apart from all human statute or special divine command, appears demonstrable. It is so, one, because it is universally true that things are what they are, not by will but by nature. A thing, for example, is white by whiteness and black by blackness, triangular by triangularity and round by rotundity, like by likeness and equal by equality, that is, by such certain natures of their own. Such properties cannot be changed even by omnipotence without abstracting the things. We cannot have a thing white or black without whiteness or blackness, nor a body triangular without having the nature and properties of a triangle in it. Mere will does not and cannot constitute such things, which are what they are in themselves. And so good and evil, justice and injustice, debita and elicita cannot be by mere will, without the nature of goodness, justice, lawfulness. He has no suspicion that he is here merely stating an identical proposition, that what is moral is moral, that a thing cannot be both moral and without morality, a proposition which no one would deny. But such a proposition throws no light on the question why a thing is moral and not immoral, which is the real question betwixt him and his opponents. Two. Since things are what they are by nature and not mere will, they are, quote, immutably and necessarily what they are. There is no such thing as an arbitrary essence, mode or relation that may be made indifferently anything at pleasure. For such an essence is a being without a nature, a contradiction and therefore a non-entity, close quote. Undoubtedly, as a thing cannot be and not be at the same time, it is immutably what it is according to its nature. Take away its nature and the thing itself disappears. A just act can never be anything but just, but this does not explain why it is just or rather why a particular act is pronounced just and another unjust. Three. While it is true that a divine or human command in the form of statute may make something which was before indifferent moral in the sense of obligatory or unlawful, yet the real element of morality, even in such a case, has not come from the mere assertion of will, but from, quote, the right or authority of the commander which is founded in natural justice and equity and an antecedent obligation to obedience in the subjects, close quote. Any law without this natural foundation in right or for the mere purpose of enforcing the will of one upon others is properly esteemed, ridiculous and absurd. No true obligation can be constituted in this manner. For the obligation to obey all positive laws is older than all laws and previous or antecedent to them. The bare will of God himself cannot beget the obligation to do anything which is not in itself or in its own nature morally good and just. Here our author seems to deal with Hobbes's position more directly, but still too much in the form of mere affirmation without analysis are going to the root of the matter. Four. While therefore there is such a thing as positive morality, the moral quality of the things which it enjoins transcends the mere will or pleasure that enjoins them. The obligation is not in the mere command, but in the relation of the authority to the intellectual nature commanded. If, for example, a father should order a son to do something, the duty of the son is not constituted by the mere will of the father, but by the fact that it is the very nature of the filial relation to be beautiful and obedient. Or again, the obligation may arise out of our own voluntary act whereby something in itself indifferent may become to us sacredly obligatory. As when we make a promise to do something which we needed not to have done, the thing promised assumes to us a new relation and becomes binding on us in the highest degree. It falls under the general law of keeping faith and acquires all the sanction arising out of the obvious dictates of natural morality. The thing is not changed, it remains in its nature indifferent as before, but to us it is changed, and the motive for doing it consists not in the matter of the action, but in the principle of keeping faith. Quote, wherefore in positive commands, the will of the commander doth not create any new moral entity, but only divinely modifies and determines that general duty or obligation of natural justice to obey lawful authority and to keep oaths and covenants as our own will in promising doth but produce several modifications of keeping faith. Close quote. But while moral good and evil are admitted to be independent of any created will, there are those who contend that they must needs depend upon the arbitrary will of God. Otherwise there would be something that was not God or did not take its being from him. This is plainly asserted, our author adds, by that ingenious philosopher Renatis Descartes from whose answer to the sixth objection to his meditations he quotes in proof a passage of some length. The aim of Descartes and the passage is plainly enough to connect everything, including the ideas of good and evil, with the determination of the divine will. It is a contradiction, he says, to imagine anything prior to this determination. Elsewhere in the same answer, he maintains that it is manifest in the view of the divine immensity that quote, there can be nothing at all which does not depend upon God. Not only nothing subsisting, but also no order, no law, no reason of truth and goodness, close quote, footnote. These passages will be found in page 160 to 162 of the third edition of Meditations with Answers to Objections, Amsterdam 1650, end of footnote. The analysis of the relation of the divine understanding or wisdom to the divine will is one of those subjects which possessed a fascination for the older schools of philosophy, but which is really quite beyond our penetration or logic. It may be doubted whether substantially there was, after all, such a difference betwixt Descartes and Cudworth has admits of being clearly apprehended. For the latter, no less than the former, of course, traces the ideas of good and evil and all those necessary truths of which he makes so much to a divine source. They exist for us because they are in the mind of God, necessary forms of a perfect and immutable wisdom in which we imperfectly share. Only he contends that they are before rather than behind the divine will. That is to say, not even the divine will can be conceived unmaking what necessarily is according to the divine mind, converting, for example, two into three or square or triangular into round or truth into falsehood or good into evil. But Descartes did not or could not assert this. All that he asserted was that these things were so because God had made them so. All possible truth has its source in the divine. Only Cudworth conceives the divine more on the side of mind, aluminous and eternal order, and Descartes, in this case at least, more on the side of will or creative cause. The conception of Cudworth appears the higher and juster of the two so far as it is possible to separate and compare them. The contemplation of the divine as a bare will is inferior in grandeur and far more liable to abuse than the contemplation of it as an infinite mind at once wise and good. The former, we agree with our author, is a contracted idea of God. The neoplatonic representation of a divine circle of which the center is goodness, the radii wisdom and the circumference will is, however mystical and enigmatical, more sublime and probably also nearer to the truth. The most absolute freedom of the divine will or activity can only be rationally conceived in union with these other attributes and executive of them. It is the very perfection of this freedom to be determined by infinite wisdom and goodness. Having thus dealt directly with the problem of morality and vindicated to his satisfaction its absolute character, Kudworth expands with his usual amplitude far beyond the limits of the special question. He sees clearly that the real difference of thought in such a case is not merely as to the character and origin of moral ideas, but the character and origin of all ideas. The essential problem is, in fact, the problem of knowledge altogether, whence derived and whence authenticated. Has our knowledge and element of universal certainty derived from within innate and co-divine or is it only particular, such as it appears to every man, gathered and elaborated by the senses or at most by the strange chemistry of some intelectus agens or obscure power acting upon the materials of sense? It is needless to say which side he espouses in this world-old controversy. The remaining three books of the treatise on eternal and immutable morality are devoted to its discussion and the moral interest which is yet supreme with him everywhere as a source of inspiration falls behind the widespread historical and psychological inquiry into which it carries him. He treats first of the protagory and skepticism which made all being and knowledge alike fantastical and relative only. This brings him again in front of the sensational philosophy which he has combated at such length in the true intellectual system and he explains once more how it is a degenerate and not a true form of the old anatomical and Phoenician philosophy derived from Muscus or Moses. The same field which we have already traversed is gone over with the same result. In the second book he considers the whole question as betwixt sense and intellection, their different natures and the impossibility of explaining all our knowledge by the former. The fact of knowledge, distinctively so-called or science, cannot, he contends, emerge from sense. Even outward things or bodies cannot be understood without the cooperation of reason and intellect judging of the appearances of sense. It follows from hence in his own language, quote, that knowledge is an inward and active energy of the mind itself and the displaying of its own innate vigor from within whereby it doth conquer, master, and command its objects. The mind cannot know anything but by something of its own that is native, domestic, and familiar to it. Close quote. This leads him in the concluding book to explain more fully this innate faculty and its appropriate ideas, intellectual and moral. The faculty is clearly distinct from any mere organ of sense and passion and marks the whole diameter of difference betwixt man and the brute. The latter is governed solely by its relation to the outer world and the activities of appetite thence arising. It can have no sense of anything beyond the impression which corporeal objects make upon it. But man discriminates betwixt himself and the constant flux of outward impressions and penetrates to their meaning and reality, their harmony, beauty, and music. All the plenitude of nature, its interior symmetry, proportions, aptitudes, and correspondences, which suggested to the ancients the idea of pan, that is nature, playing upon and harp, are undissurnable to mere sense, which in the brute only perceives particular objects and hears nothing but mere noise and sound and clatter, no music or harmony at all, having no active principle or anticipation within itself whereby to comprehend all, quote, whereas the mind of a rational and intellectual being will be ravished and enthusiastically transported in the contemplation and of its own accord dance to this pipe of pan, nature's intellectual music and harmony, those quote. There is a whole sphere of being in man, therefore, distinct from the brute, and all the characteristic ideas of metaphysics, mathematics, aesthetics, and morality belong to this sphere. They are noeta and not estheta, the immediate objects of intellect and science, eternal and immutable as the source whence they come. And so he returns in the end to the central thought of all his thinking, the nature of the human soul. Its divine nature and origin make it distinctive and an organ of higher truth than the mere world of nature can convey or create. It is no mere passive or receptive thing, quickened and formed from without, an educt of matter finally and laboriously organized, but a living divine power formed from above and endowed with the divine image. This is the only basis of all higher knowledge. And so morality and divinity meet and find a common center. The one cannot be destroyed without destroying the other. Let all knowledge spring from sense and all morality from utilitarian experience, then man loses the higher side of his being and sinks back into the world of nature. He loses all foothold of the divine, and, quote, there cannot possibly be the least shadow of argument to prove a deity by, close, quote. Four, the mass and texture of Cudworth's thought are sufficiently before our readers. We must now rapidly gather up the threads of our exposition and endeavor to estimate his value as a thinker, both for his own time and with reference to the present aspect of the great questions with which he deals. His relations to Hobbes and Descartes have appeared with ample clearness. He is the reactionary creation of the former in the shadow of whose speculations all his own live and move. If the Decivet and Leviathan had never been written, neither probably would have the true intellectual system of the universe nor the treatise on immutable morality. The special substance and color of their thought would certainly never have been what they are. In a lesser but sufficiently distinct manner he stands in contrast to Descartes, or at least to the more specific and detailed form which Cartesian speculation assumed in the principles of philosophy and objections and replies. To the more spiritual phase of this speculation, the famous doctrine of consciousness with the principle of certitude based upon it, expounded in the discourse on method and the second meditation, there is singularly no allusion either in Cudworth or more. Footnote, none that we have traced. End of footnote. It is impossible not to feel Cudworth's inferiority in originality, clearness, and brightness of conception to both the contemporary thinkers with whom he is thus brought in contrast. It is not only that he comes behind them in the line of his thought, which, but for them, would not have been laid down, that they are the originators of new methods, pioneers in the freshly opened tract of speculative enterprise, while he is only the reviver and defender of an old position. This would not necessarily place them above him, for it is possible, as in the case of Hobbes, to strike into new paths which only lead to old falsehoods and which, in fact, are, after all, mainly rediscovered traces of old and wrong roots. In the attitude in which Cudworth chiefly contemplates him, Hobbes has no claim to originality. The antagonisms, which once more meet in them, had been drawn out long before in democratism on the one side and Platonism on the other. And if it is different with Descartes, whose whole cast of mind is of an intensely original, as well as powerful kind, it is yet the manner rather than the substance of their thought, to which we refer when we contrast them with our author in point of originality. Both Descartes and Hobbes always think directly, as well as vigorously. They start from a fresh upturned vein of speculation in their own minds and bring its contents at once before their readers. They have none of the pedantry of learning and the involved modes of approaching a subject which the Cambridge philosophers have. They have something to say which they think new and important, which they have got not from books, but from insight and meditation, and they say it out unencumbered by the thought of others or the tramples of scholastic association. Hobbes was aware of this characteristic in his own case and prided himself on what he had got by thinking rather than by reading. Footnote. He was wont to say, according to Aubrey, quote, that if he had read as much as other men, he should have continued still as ignorant as other men. Close quote. End of footnote. Descartes is still more than Hobbes the pure thinker. Of all philosophers, perhaps, he is the most directly personal and original, the most independent of all relation to other minds, the most intrepid builder out of the structure of his own thought. This self-possession and freedom give a singular animation and force to his writings, which read to this day as lightly and freshly as when they came from his pen. The style of the discourse and meditations runs as smoothly, rapidly, and delicately as that of a modern essayist, while yet every sentence is weighted with meaning and the whole compacted and vivified by an intense life of thought. To turn from Descartes and Hobbes as writers to Cudworth is in some degree like turning from the bright and open daylight to an obscure labyrinth. It must be admitted also that Cudworth is hardly fair and certainly not generously fair to either of his opponents. He presses frequently the least favorable interpretation of their meaning and quotes Hobbes as we have already said at times with careless inaccuracy. Footnote. It is unnecessary to enumerate instances. The reader will find them pointed out in Moschheim's elaborated notes. A conspicuous instance of his somewhat ungenerous treatment of Descartes is found, chapter five, page 646, 647, folio edition 1678, in reference to the same passage handled by him in the treatise on immutable morality, which we have considered in the text. End of footnote. Upon the whole he must be pronounced deficient in a cordial appreciation of contemporary thought. His allusions to Bacon in the intellectual system are scarcely more complimentary than those to Hobbes. This may be attributed to the intellectual connection betwixt these philosophers and the manner in which the author of the Leviathan sometimes sheltered himself under the opinions and statements of the author of the Novum Organum. But it was also probably due to an instinctive dislike of Bacon's method and influence and especially his manner of treating the relation of philosophy and religion. The platonic temper could not brook the idea of separation betwixt these two great planes of thought. At the same time, with all Cudworth's dislike of Hobbes and the extreme manner in which he sometimes interprets his meaning, it is not to be granted that he seriously misunderstands his drift or misrepresents the substance of his doctrines. It may be true that theoretically Hobbes did not maintain that the civil authority creates morality and forms its only standard. On the contrary, he frequently speaks of the laws of morality as natural and attributes to them immutability, quote, what they forbid can never be lawful and what they order can never be unlawful, close quote. All the same, the basis of morality is with him, so to speak, an un-moral basis. Un-moral certainly in Cudworth's estimate because the human nature out of which he draws it has no primary moral or divine side. Moral ideas are not, according to him, the translation of divine thought surviving in man and connecting him with his divine original, but only a growth from a rudimentary chaos of craving appetites and passions. Not only so, while it is extreme and so far untrue to say that Hobbes attributes all morality to the sovereign will of the state, it is strictly true that he assigns no security or warrant for its observance, save the supreme civil power. If the idea of morality is not represented by him as absolutely originating with the state, yet its exercise can only be conceived under political sanction and control. Man may be theoretically a moral being without the state, but he cannot be so practically. The civil authority does not create the ideas of right and wrong, they are products of our original dispositions, but without this authority they have no influence and cannot be conceived coming into any orderly development. All moral obligation, in short, comes from without and not from within. From the consensus of political forces which have found an equilibrium in some definite commonwealth and not from any consensus of divine instincts in men or common conscience uttering within them the voice of God. Such a theory was to the Cambridge School radically and entirely false. It implied the denial of a divine side in life. It blotted out at once all true ideas of good and of God. From their point of view it necessarily did so. To Cudworth it was of no consequence that Hobbes spoke of natural principles of morality while he plainly repudiated a spiritual or divine side to human nature. Save as the expression of a higher law than nature in Hobbes's sense, morality was not to him morality. It did not come within the sphere of true obligation or duty which can only find its spring in the divine mind, not divine will, the eternal order or reason which directs and controls all things. This was the essential difference betwixt the two schools of thought. And Cudworth, if he does not sufficiently discriminate Hobbes' position, yet certainly does not misinterpret his essential meaning as the teacher of a comprehensive system which sought to build up morality, politics, and religion on an external basis or an enforced consensus of mere selfish interests originally at war with one another. Of religion, no less than morality, Hobbes speaks with deference and reverence. We have already alluded to the manner in which he studs his pages with scriptural quotations. There are chapters of the Leviathan that look like chapters of biblical exposition more than anything else. But all this is beside the purpose. The question is not as to what Hobbes himself was, a Christian or not, orthodox or heterodox. All such personal questions are impertinent in philosophical discussion. And although Cudworth yields to the temptation of speaking disrespectfully of the consequences of Hobbes' opinions, he was far too enlightened to make anything of such personal matters. The real and only question is not what Hobbes was or professed himself to be, but what is the essential meaning and drift of his thought? What are the principles on which his whole system rests and are they consistent with a rational theory of religion? Can the ideas of morality and the idea of God be rationally sustained on his naturalistic view of human life and society? Is humanity to be primarily and essentially conceived on the side of matter or of mind? This was the question betwixt Cudworth and Hobbes. It included all else. And in supposing Hobbes to occupy one side and himself another on this great question, Cudworth certainly did no injustice to the author of the Leviathan. Nor can it be denied that with all his faults as a writer and his slovenliness and cumbersomeness as a thinker, Cudworth went to the root of his side of the question and has done substantially as much to vindicate it as any writer before or since. Both the penetration and the comprehensiveness of his views are apparent everywhere. At a time when the history of philosophy was still unknown as a science, he cast his glance over all the systems of antiquity and brought their results together, if not critically, yet with an appreciation of their difference and relations which would be in vain sought for in any other writer of the century. Immersed in platonic and pseudo-platonic conceptions which frequently distort his view of the opinions of others, he seldom allowed them to dominate or corrupt his own rational vision. He kept the eye of his own reasons single and it was a large, open and discerning eye. On the one hand, he sought to purify the conceptions of the popular theology and, on the other hand, to vindicate for man a genuine sphere of religious and moral idea in which he could move freely yet feel securely. The rites of reason and of conscience are alike dear to him. He has no conception of truth which cannot be brought to the test of the former and no indulgence for a philosophy which denies the latter. As religion is not an extravagance, so neither can it be a formality. As it is not a mere dream of pietism, so neither can it be a creation of statecraft. With him, as with Wichcote and Smith, inseparably conjoined with morality, morality again can only be conceived as resting on the divine and authenticating itself in God. Man is the creature of God, made in the divine image and dowed with the divine reason and fitted for divine communion. The intuitions of his reason and the dictates of his conscience are alike indestructible. The ideas of good and evil are as absolute as the axioms of geometry. Both are true and only true, not as constituted by any personal act, even that of the supreme will, but as expressions of eternal mind, the head and ruler of all things. Life, nature, history, thought are only intelligible in the light of such a mind. A central self-consciousness illuminating and controlling all spheres of being, the worlds of matter and of mind. Mind is the originator, matter the originated. To reverse the order and to make thought the issue instead of the source of material organization appeared to Cudworth to blot out all light from the heavens, all hope from man. It is needless to point out how these questions are as living for us and our time as they were for Cudworth and his. The very form of them has been slightly altered. Is man a divine creature or merely the outgrowth of a primitive germ? Is reason a distinct endowment from above or merely a development of nervous life from below? Is the world with all its connected species only a hyelozoic evolution, the ages of which no one can reckon? Or is it the manifestation of a divine mind appointing all things in their season? Is it an order of thought or a blind sequence? And is the original home of man to be sought in a primitive paradise of communion with God or in the primeval forests of the chimpanzee and the ape? Are we the children of a divine father or only the items of a great progress from the unknown to the unknown? These are the questions which Cudworth pondered. They are those which our age still ponders. If he cannot be said to have solved them, he yet steadily and rationally faced them. He has shown, no one has ever shown better, how we cannot work from below upwards and that if we begin with matter and a philosophy of sense, we can never reach conscience and a philosophy of reason. He has exhibited the coordination of the different planes of thought and made it clear how we must stand on the one side or the other. It is not possible perhaps to do more or to fathom the depths of that dualism that meets us everywhere in the last stages of our inquiry. If we learn nothing further from Cudworth, we will learn strength, patience and candor in conducting so great an argument. His form of exposition may be antiquated, but his spirit and reason will never grow old. And if we do not come in his pages nearer to that certainty which some minds are destined never to reach in this world of endless interrogation, we may be helped to trust where we cannot know to tolerate those who differ from us and to welcome light and truth from whatever quarter it may come. End of chapter 4, part 5. Section 15 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy, volume 2 by John Tullock. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 5, Henry Moore, Christian Theosophy and Mysticism, part 1. As the Cambridge movement reached its highest or at least its most elaborate intellectual elevation in Cudworth, so it ripened into its finest personal and religious development in Henry Moore. Cudworth is much less interesting than his writings. Moore is far more interesting than any of his. He was a voluminous author. His writings fill several folio volumes. They are in verse as well as prose. They were much read and admired in their day, but they are now well-knife forgotten. Some of them are hardly any longer readable. Yet Moore himself is at once the most typical and the most vital and interesting of all the Cambridge school. He is the most platonical of the platonic sect and at the same time the most genial, natural and perfect man of them all. We get nearer to him than any of them and can read more intimately his temper, character and manners, the lofty and serene beauty of his personality, one of the most exquisite and charming portraits which the whole history of religion and philosophy presents. Moore was born in 1614, three years before Cudworth, at Grantham in Lincolnshire, and we have happily the means of tracing both his external and internal history more familiarly than that of his great colleague. Footnote. In addition to a life by Richard Ward, rector of Ingoldsby, London, 1710, Octavo, Moore himself has given us many interesting details of his life and the Profatio Generalissima prefixed to his opera Omnia, published in 1679, and also a general account of the manner and scope of his writings in an apology published in 1664. Ward's life is interesting, but vague, uncritical and digressive after the manner of the time. The second part, which was intended to embrace a review of Moore's writings and to consider him more particularly as an author was never published. The manuscript, however, was in existence in 1847 in the possession of John Crossley Esquire of Manchester, editor of Worthington's Diary for the Chatham Society. End of footnote. His father was Alexander Moore Esquire, a gentleman of fair estate and fortune, greatly beloved and esteemed by his son who dedicated to him the collection of his philosophical poems in 1647. He speaks in his dedication of his father's generous openness and veracity and wishes he were a stranger to his blood that he might with a better decorum set out the nobleness of his spirit. He attributes his poetical taste to his father's reading with him in the winter nights, Spencer's rhymes, especially that incomparable piece of his, The Fairy Queen, a poem as richly fraught with divine morality as fancy. We gather from the same source that with all his sense of filial obligation, he had broken away from the old home influences and chosen his career and opinions for himself. Apparently his father had wished him to enter upon some active profession as a road to wealth and influence. But says the son, quote, your early encomiums of learning and philosophy did so fire my credulous youth with the desire of the knowledge of things that your after advertisements, how contemptible learning would prove without riches and what a piece of unmanorliness and incivility it would be held to seem wiser than them that are more wealthy and powerful could never yet restrain my mind from her first pursuit nor quicken my attention to the affairs of the world. Close quote. His change of religious opinion was of more importance. Both my father and uncle and so also my mother, he says, were all earnest followers of Calvin. To the almost 14th year of his age he was bred up in strict Calvinism. His tutor as well as his parents being of this persuasion, great Calvinists, he says again, but with all very pious and good ones. At this age he was sent to eat in school not to learn any new precepts or institutes of religion but for the perfecting of the Greek and Latin tongue. Already, however, he had been the subject of strong religious convictions. Quote. Even in my first childhood an inward sense of the divine presence was so strong upon my mind that I did then believe there could no deed, word or thought be hidden from him nor was I by any others that were older than myself to be otherwise persuaded. Close quote. He has no doubt that this deep religious feeling was an innate sense or notion in him contrary to some witless and sordid philosophers of the age or to the supposition that it was merely extraduce or by way of propagation as being born of parents exceeding pious and religious. In such a case it was inexplicable how he drew not also Calvinism in along with it. So far from doing this he could never swallow that hard doctrine concerning fate. And to no sooner had he gone to eaten than he fell into a violent dispute on the subject with his brother who had accompanied him and his uncle thither. His uncle on being informed of his theological precocity and the untoward turn it had taken chid him very severely, quote, adding menaces with all of correction and a rod for my immature forwardness in philosophizing concerning such matters. Close quote. His religious forwardness however was not to be restrained in this manner. The mystery of predestination had got hold of his mind and so possessed him that, quote, on a certain day in a ground belonging to eaten college where the boys used to play and exercise themselves. Musing concerning these things with myself and recalling to my mind the doctrine of Calvin, I did thus seriously and deliberately conclude within myself, vis, if I am one of those that are predestinated into hell where all things are full of nothing but cursing and blasphemy, yet will I behave myself there patiently and submissively towards God and if there be any one thing more than another that is acceptable to him, that will I set myself to do with a sincere heart and to the utmost of my power. Being certainly persuaded that if I thus demeaned myself, he would hardly keep me long in that place, which meditation of mine is as firmly fixed in my memory and the very place where I stood as if the thing had been transacted but a day or two ago. Close quote. And as to what concerns the existence of God, he adds, quote, though in that ground mentioned walking as my manner was, slowly and with my head on one side and kicking now and then the stones with my feet, I was once sometimes with a sort of musical and melancholic murmur to repeat or rather hum to myself those verses of Claudian. Oft hath my anxious mind divided stood, whether the gods did mind this lower world or whether no such ruler, wise and good we had and all things here by chance were hurled. Yet that exceeding hail and entire sense of God, which nature herself had planted deeply in me, very easily silenced all such slight and poetical dubitations as these. Close quote. Personal as these details are, there is nothing egotistical in them. They are naturally and simply told after the manner of the time. Such moods are for the most part left untold. The reserve of after-years and many experiences seldom permits the veil to be lifted upon the early secrets of the soul. But more, both as a boy and as a man was singularly transparent in his deepest nature. His communings and ecstasies have not the slightest taint of morbid self-illation. They are the natural carriage of his strangely gifted spirit. From the beginning all things in a manner came flowing to him and his mind, according to his own saying, was enlightened with a sense of the noblest theories in the morning of his days. His scholarly progress as a boy seems to have been remarkable, although here we have a few facts related. His master would be at times in admiration at the exercises that were done by him. His anxious and thoughtful genius showed itself in his work as well as in his meditations. And his varied and profuse scholarship could only have been the fruit of diligent study at Eaton as well as afterwards at the university. Having spent about three years at Eaton, he was admitted at Christ's College, Cambridge, 1631, just about the time that Milton was leaving it. He was recommended to the care of a tutor both learned and pious and what he was not a little solicitous about, not at all a Calvinist. Here he says he was possessed with a, quote, mighty and almost immoderate thirst after knowledge, especially that which was natural and above all others that which was said to dive into the deepest cause of things, close quote. He immersed himself, quote, overhead and ears in the study of philosophy, promising himself the most wonderful happiness in the perusal of Aristotle, Cardin, Julius Scaliger and other philosophers of the greatest note, close quote. He professes, however, to have got little satisfaction from the reading of such authors. The result of his four years' studies of this kind was that he fell into a sort of skepticism, not as he carefully tells us regarding the existence of God or the duties of morality, for of these he never had the least doubt, but regarding the origin and end of life. He was puzzled, like many a young dreamer before him, as to the meaning of existence and what were its shows and what its substance. He expressed his feelings in a Greek epigram under the title aporia, which he afterwards himself translated, quote, no I nor whence nor who I am, poor wretch, nor yet, oh madness, whither I must go, lies, nightdreams, empty toys, fear, fatal love, this is my life, I nothing else do see, close quote. This unhappy state of mental disturbance lasted until he had taken his bachelor's degree in 1635. After that he fell anew to thinking with himself, quote, whether the knowledge of things was really the supreme felicity of man or something greater or more divine was, or supposing it to be so, whether it was to be acquired by such an eagerness and intentness in the reading of authors and contemplating of things, or by the purgation of the mind from all sorts of vices whatsoever. Close quote. This new train of thought was greatly encouraged, if not excited, by his study of the, quote, platonic writers, Marsilius Ficinas, Plotinus himself, Mercurius Trismegistus, and the mystical divines among whom there was frequent mention made of the purification of the soul and of the purgative course that is previous to the illuminative. Close quote. Footnote, Marsilius Ficinas was one of the well-known school of Florentine Platonists who composed the brilliant circle which surrounded the Medici in the 15th century. He translated Plato and Plotinus with other Neoplatonic writers and, like Moore himself, sought to amalgamate their theology with Christianity. Trismegistus was an epithet given to the Egyptian Hermes. Numerous philosophical and astrological works bore this name in the early Christian centuries and purported to be written under divine inspiration. They were mostly written at Alexandria by Gnostic Christians or philosophers of the Neoplatonic school, probably in the fourth century of the Christian era. End of footnote. He was greatly fascinated by these writers and the fascination was one which never left him. They opened up a congenial world of thought to his richly meditative mind while their transcendental pietisms exactly met the aspirations of his mystic and enthusiastic spirit. But amongst all the writings of this kind there was none so pierced and affected him as that golden little book with which Luther is also said to have been wonderfully taken, Viz Theologia Germanica, something of defect he recognized in this marvelous manual, a certain deep melancholy, as also no slight errors in matters of philosophy. But its great lesson of self renunciation aroused and quickened his whole being as it were out of sleep. Henceforth he was, quote, most firmly persuaded, not only concerning the existence of God, but also of his absolute both goodness and power and of his most real will that we should be perfect even as our Father which is in heaven is perfect, close quote. And so a violent conflict was awakened in him betwixt the divine principle and the animal nature, a conflict which he represents as the very punctum saliens or first motion of the new life or birth begun in us. As to other performances, he adds, quote, whether of morality or religion arising from mere self-love, let them be as specious or goodly as you please, they are at best but as preparations or the more refined exercises of a sort of theological hobbyanism, close quote. The result was that all Moore's other studies became of no value in comparison with the course of spiritual discipline upon which he now entered. It was his earnest effort in all things to subdue his own will to the divine will and to cherish within him the seed of the divine life. He felt that, quote, the divine seed alone is that which is acceptable unto God and the sole invincible basis of all true religion, close quote. His former insatiable desire and thirst after the knowledge of things became almost wholly extinguished. He was, quote, solicitous about nothing so much as a more full union with the divine and celestial principle, the inward flowing wellspring of life eternal with the most fervent prayers breathing often unto God that he would be pleased thoroughly to set him free from the dark chains and sordid captivity of his own will, close quote. And no sooner strangely had he entered upon this course and his immoderate desire after mere knowledge been allayed than he began to have a clearer assurance of those very things which he had desired to know. Gradually light as well as peace came to him. Within a few years he got into a most joyous and lucid state of mind, the very antithesis of his former state. As he had described his darkness and embarrassment in an epigram, so now also he describes his relief and satisfaction. Footnote, both epigrams were originally written in Greek, the latter under the title of euphoria as the former under that of aporia. They are both found at the end of his philosophical poems. End of footnote, quote. I come from heaven, am an immortal ray of God, oh joy and back to God shall go and here sweet love on's wings me up doth stay. I live, I'm sure, and joy this life to know. Night and vain dreams be gone. Father of lights we live as thou clad with eternal day. Faith, wisdom, love, fixed joy, free-winged might, this is true life, all else death and decay. Close quote. Moore's period of skepticism seems to have lasted for three or four years following his graduation. All that we distinctly know is the spiritual character of the rest which he reached and that its full attainment was marked by the composition of his first philosophical poem. I was fully convinced, he says, a conviction which lies at the basis of all his higher thought that true holiness was the only safe entrance into divine knowledge and not content with expressing his thoughts in the epigram we have already given, he afterwards, about the beginning of the year 1640, comprised his chief speculations and experiences in a pretty full poem called Psychozoia or The Life of the Soul. He had no intention at first of publishing this poem but at length he yielded, as so many have done before and since, to the instigation of some learned and pious friends who had accidentally come to know of it. It was published accordingly for the first time in 1642 along with another poem of considerable length entitled Psychathanasia or The Second Part of the Song of the Soul treating of the immortality of souls, especially man's soul. Finally, four other poems on kindred subjects along with several minor poems were added and the complete collection of philosophical poems appeared in 1647 when he was 33 years of age. But note, the titles of these four poems which are more or less closely connected with his primary song of the soul may interest the reader. One, Democritus Platonissans or an essay upon the infinity of worlds out of platonic principles annexed to this second part of the song of the soul. Two, Anticycopanechia or The Third Book of the Song of the Soul containing a computation of the sleep of the soul after death. Three, The Pre-Existency of the Soul and Appendix to Third Part of the Song of the Soul. Four, Antimonopsychia or The Fourth Part of the Song of the Soul containing a computation of the unity of souls. End of footnote. More's poems are now hardly known. They have fallen out of the rank which even the poems of Dunn and Davies maintain and are not found in any collection. In some respects they form the most singular attempt in literature to turn metaphysics into poetry. Apart from the notes and interpretation general which he has himself happily furnished they are barely intelligible. Even with such assistance they are a most intricate and perplexing study. Not only the strain of thought and complexities of neoplatonic allusion but the involutions and fantasies of the verse itself contribute to this. Yet there are here and there not a few genuine gleams both of poetic and spiritual insight and the mental picture which the poems present is altogether so curious as to reward the patience of a congenial student. No one unless such a student animated in some degree by the platonic rage from which they powerfully flow forth need attempt them. The eye must be profound as well as clear which would penetrate their deep searching thoughts often renewed. The reader is to expect as he himself duly warns, quote, no tie-in strain, no light wanton lesbian vein, close quote. His is a far nobler function than that of the ordinary poet, quote. Nor ladies' loves nor night's brave martial deeds he wrapped in rolls of hid antiquity. But thenward fountain and the unseen seeds from whence are these and what so under eye doth fall or is record in memory, Psyche I'll sing. Psyche, from thee they sprung. O life of time and all alterity, the life of lives instill his nectar strong, my soul tenebrate while I sing Psyche's song. My task is not to try what's simply true. I only do engage myself to make a fit discovery, to give some fair glimpse of Plato's hid philosophy. What man alive that hath but common wit, when skillful limmer suing his intent shall fairly well portray and wisely hit the true proportion of each lineament, and in right colours to the life to paint the fulvid eagle with her sun-bright eye? Would Wexenroth with inward-collar Brent cause tis no buzzard or discoloured pie? Why man, I meant it not. C'est I found obliquy. So if what's consonant to Plato's school, which well agrees with Lerner Pythagore, Egyptian Trismagist and the antique role of Caldy Wisdom, all which time hath tore, but Plato and Deep Plotin do restore, which is my scope. I sing out lustily. If any twitted me for such strange lore, and me all blameless brand with infamy, God purge that man from fault of foul malignity." The philosophical doctrines of the poems will sufficiently appear as we proceed. For like all his school, More uses up again and again his fundamental ideas, and the Platonic principles, which he turned into song in his early years, were the same which he handled afterwards in various forms of prose. We may give, however, a few further extracts, some of which condense in pregnant fragments the pith of his thought, while others, by a happy chance, attain true poetic form, golden threads of simple thought or feeling tracing the wasteful woods, the harsh involvements of his verse. Footnote. He did not himself estimate his poetic power highly when the fit of composition was over. Quote, a rude confused heap of ashes dead, my verses seem, when that celestial flame, that sacred spirit of life, extinguished in my cold breast, then again I rashly blame my rugged lines, this word is obsolete, that boldly coined, the third too oft doth beat my humorous ears. Close quote. End of footnote. Quote, hence the soul's nature we may plainly see, a beam it is of the intellectual sum, a ray indeed of that eternity, but such a ray as when it first outshone from a free light its shining date begun. If then, said he, the spirit may not be right reason, surely we must deem it sense. Yes, sense it is, this was my short reply. Sense upon which holy intelligence and heavenly reason and comely prudence, oh, beautyous branches of that root divine, do springen up through inly experience of God's hid ways, as he doth hope the iron of our dark souls and in our hearts his light enshrine. If light divine we know by divine light, nor can by any other means it see, this ties their hands from force that have the spirit. But yet, my muse, still take an higher flight. Sing of platonic faith in the first good, that faith that doth our souls to God unite so strongly, tightly, that the rapid flood of this swift flux of things, nor with foul mud can stain nor strike us off from the unity wherein we steadfast stand, unshaked, unmoved, and grafted by a deep vitality, the prop and stay of things in God's benignity. When I myself, from mine own self, do quit and each thing else, then and all spread in love to the vast universe, my soul doth sit, makes me half equal to all seeing jove. My mighty wings, high stretched, then clapping light, I brush the stars and make them shine more bright. Close quote. The following are not without a genuine touch of fancy and poetic skill. Quote, I saw portrayed on this sky-colored silk two lovely lads with wings fully to spread of silver plumes, their skins more white than milk, their lily limbs I greatly admired, their cheery looks and lusty lively head, a thwart their snowy breast, a scarf they wore of azure hue. By this the sun's bright wagon again ascend the eastern hill and draw on cheerful day. So I, full fraught with joy, do homeward wend and fed myself with that that nymph did say, and did so cunningly to me convey, solving for to teach all-willing men life's mystery, and quite to chase away mind-mudding mists sprung from low, fulsome fenn. Praise my goodwill, but pardon my weak, faltering pen. It was about this same period of his life that Moore believed himself to have had a curious vision, which he afterwards recounted under the name of Bathinus in his Divine Dialogues. There cannot be any reasonable doubt that he speaks of himself under the name, and there is so much that is characteristic in the story. It gives us such an insight into his clear, confiding and enthusiastic spirit, that we shall quote it at some length for its biographic significance. It occurs in the third of the series of his Divine Dialogues. He is discussing with his interlocutors the subject of the Divine Goodness, when he informs them that he had a strange dream in his youth of an old man with a grave countenance speaking to him in a wood, and on being importuned to tell his dream he agrees to do so as exquisitely and briefly as he can. You must know, then, of what an anxious and thoughtful genius I was from my very childhood, and what a deep and strong sense I had of the existence of God, and what an early conscientiousness of approving myself to him. And how, when I had arrived to riperears of reason, and was imbued with some slender rudiments of philosophy, I was not then content to think of God in the gross only, but began to consider his nature more distinctly, accurately, and to contemplate and compare his attributes. And how, partly from the natural sentiments of my own mind, partly from the countenance and authority of holy scripture, I did confidently conclude that infinite power, wisdom, and goodness were the chiefest and most comprehensive attributes of the divine nature, and that the sovereign of these was his goodness, the summity and power, as I may so speak, of the divinity. In the meantime, being versed in no other natural philosophy nor metaphysics but the vulgar, my mind was for a long time charged with inextricable puzzles and difficulties to make the phenomena of the world and vulgar opinions of men in any tolerable way to comport or suit with these two chiefest attributes of God, his wisdom and his goodness. These meditations closed mine eyes at night. These saluted my memory at first in the morning. These accompanied my remote and solitary walks into fields and woods, sometimes so early as when most of other mortals keep their beds. It came to pass, therefore, that one summer morning, having rose much more early than ordinary, and having walked so long in a certain wood, which I had a good while frequented, that I thought fit to rest myself on the ground, having spent my spirits partly by long motion of my body, but mainly by want of sleep and over-anxious and solicitous thinking of such difficulties as Hilo Barry's, one of the speakers in the dialogues, either has already, or, as I described at first, is likely to propose, I straightway reposed my weary limbs amongst the grass and flowers at the foot of a broad spread, flourishing oak, where the gentle fresh morning air played in the shade on my heated temples, and with unexpressible pleasure refrigerating my blood and spirits, and the industrious bees busily humming round about me upon the dewy honeysuckles, to which nearer noise was most melodiously joined the distant singings of the cheerful birds re-echoed from all parts of the wood. These delights of nature, all conspiring together, you may easily fancy, would quickly charm my weary body into a profound sleep. But my soul was then as much as ever awake, and, as it seems, did most vividly dream that I was still walking in these solitary woods with my thoughts more eagerly intent upon those usual difficulties of providence than ever. But while I was in this great anxiety and earnestness of spirit, accompanied, as frequently when I was awake, with vehement and devout suspirations and ejaculations towards God, of a sudden there appeared at a distance a very grave and venerable person walking slowly towards me. His stature was greater than ordinary. He was clothed with a loose silk garment of a purple color, much like the Indian gowns that are now in fashion, saving that the sleeves were something longer and wider. And it was tied about him with a Levitical girdle also of purple, and he wore a pair of velvet slippers of the same color, but upon his head a Montero of black velvet, as if he were both a traveller and an inhabitant of that place at once. While he was at any distance from me I stood fearless and unmoved. Only in reverence to so venerable a personage I put off my hat and held it in my hand. But when he came up closer to me, the vivid fulgur of his eyes that shone so piercingly bright from under the shadow of his black Montero, and the whole air of his face, though joined with a wonderful deal of mildness and sweetness, did so of a sudden astonish me that I fell into an excessive trembling and had not been able to stand if he had not laid his hand upon my head and spoken comfortably to me, which he did in a paternal manner, saying, Blessed be thou of God, my son, be of good courage and fear not, for I am a messenger of God to thee for thy good. Thy serious aspires and breathings after the true knowledge of thy maker and the ways of his providence, which is the most becoming employment of every rational being, have ascended into the sight of God, and I am appointed to give into thy hands the two keys of providence, that thou mayest thereby be able to open the treasure of that wisdom thus so anxiously and yet so piously seekest after, and wherewithal he put his right hand into his left sleeve, and pulled out two shining bright keys, the one silver, the other of gold, tied together with a sky-coloured ribbon of a pretty breadth, and delivered them into my hands, which I received of him, making low obeisance and professing my thankfulness for so great a gift." By this time he tells us he had acquired so much confidence and familiarity as to be able to converse with the venerable figure which had appeared to him. Having received first the silver key into his hand, he was instructed to observe the letters written on it, which, when formed into a sentence or motto, proved to be Claude Fenestras Ut Lucet Domus. He then, holding the lower part of the key in his left hand, pulled at the handle with his right, when there came out a silver tube with a scroll of thin paper, but as strong as any vellum and as white as driven snow. On this paper was sketched what, according to his somewhat elaborate description, was obviously designed to be a representation of the motions of the planetary bodies round the sun and of the starry hemisphere, a sort of revelation of the Copernican or true system of the universe. His attention was then specially drawn to the motto of the golden key, which was a treasure of itself. It was Amor de Luc's Anime, a golden tube with a similar scroll of paper disclosed itself when he pressed, as before, the handle of this key, on which were inscribed twelve sentences written with letters of gold, to such effect as the following. Divine goodness is commensurate with divine providence, or infinite. Time and space, the thread of time and the expansion of the universe, proceed from a benevolent deity. Intellectual spirits rejoiced with God before creation. In a world of free agents sin must be a possibility. But happiness exceeds sin and misery as much as the light exceeds the shadows. He was proceeding with his analysis of these divine sentences when he was rudely interrupted by the braying of two asses and the bright vision of the aged grave personage, the silver and golden keys and glorious parchment suddenly vanished, when he found himself sitting alone at the bottom of the oak where he had fallen asleep, an ass on each side of him. We confess with one of the interlocutors that we are somewhat at a loss to understand the moral of this singular interruption of his vision, the ludicrous absurdity of which strikes us at first more than anything else, unless it be intended, as he himself half hints, to signify the indifferent noisiness with which the world and even the church often receive and interrupt the speculations of a higher thoughtfulness striving to read from the character's scroll of nature and life, the mysteries of being. More professes that the completed vision would have been too much for him and that he was more gratified at things happening as they did than if he had been all at once put in possession of truth, the continued search for which had been to him a repeated and prolonged pleasure. One of the speakers, a zealous but airy-minded Platonist and Cartesian or Mechanist, suggests that the object of the vision was not merely to attest to the Copernican system of the world but the truth of Descartes' principles. But more, in the name of Bathinus, repudiates this view on the ground that he aspired in one of the sentences or aphorisms of the golden key which he had not time to read in full, the statement that the primordials of the world are not mechanical but spermatical or vital, which he adds is diametrically and fundamentally opposite to Descartes' philosophy. He is convinced further that, if he had had full conference with the Divine Sage, he would have found his philosophy, quote, more Pythagorical or Platonical than Cartesian, for there was also mention of the seminal soul of the world which some modern writers call the spirit of nature, close quote. The aphoristic revelations, both of the silver and the golden key, gave rise to a great deal more discussion amongst the friends assembled in Cufofron's Philosophical Bower, a delightful retreat of the airy-minded Platonist, with the cool evening summer air fanning itself through the leaves of the arbor and a frugal collation spread, a cup of wine, a dish of fruit, and a manchette. Footnote. A small loaf of fine bread, take, says Bacon, a small toast of manchette dipped in oil of sweet almonds, etc. End of footnote. The rest was made up with free discourses in philosophy. The picture is a pleasant one, if the dialogue is sometimes tiresome, and the whole vision and description are strikingly illustrative of the dreamy, ideal enthusiasm with which the young Platonist pursued his studies and inquiries. Moore's poems, we have seen, were first published in 1642. He had previously taken his master's degree in 1639, and immediately afterwards was chosen fellow of his college. This was his first promotion, and it may almost be said to have been his last. Many offers of preferment were subsequently made to him, but he persistently refused them all with one exception. Fifteen years after the restoration, or in 1675, he accepted a pre-bend in Gloucester Cathedral only to resign it almost immediately in favor of Dr. Edward Fowler, afterwards the well-known Bishop of Gloucester. The suspicion was that Moore only accepted the office in order to pass it on to Fowler. He patronized not only Fowler, but Worthington, whom he appointed to the rectory of Ingallsby in Lincolnshire, the advousen of which he had inherited from his father. Apparently he held this living himself for a short time, but he had no love for any work beyond the gates of his college. Ward says, quote, This living he was possessed of, I suppose, for some very short time, for I find his name once to the public register, and of 1642, but whether of his own writing I cannot certainly say. He had no ambition, and steadily declined every attempt to draw him into a public position. He would not even accept the master-ship of his college, to which it is understood he would have been preferred in 1654, when Cudworth was appointed. Other offers of the provost ship of Trinity College Dublin and the denary of St. Patrick's shared the same fate. He had set his heart on the quiet privacy of his life as a fellow, and as such he lived and died. The precincts of Christ's college remained his home, and here it is said he had made a sort of paradise for himself. Noble friends important him, the royal favour even solicited him to accept some office more worthy of his reputation. Pray be not so morose, one noble person is represented as saying, or humorsome as to refuse all things you have not known so long as Christ's college. But he was not to be moved. His friends even got him on a day as far as Whitehall, in order to the kissing of the royal hand. But when he understood that the condition of his doing so was the acceptance of a bishopric, he was not upon any account to be persuaded to it. We have often heard of the Nolo Episcopare, but it is seldom it is exemplified in so simple and honest a way as this, by running away from the unwelcome offer. End of Chapter 5 Part 1