The next movement in English thought was both religious and philosophical. When Latitudinarianism ceased to be ecclesiastical it passed from Oxford and became identified with the sister university.[412] Here it was handled by a group of men, from the two colleges Emmanuel and Christ’s, so as to embrace a moral and political philosophy, to which the term _Platonist_ is only aptly ascribed if it be meant to stand for the “mass of transcendental thought”; that traditional Platonism of the speculative schools which had succeeded one another down the centuries, always at war with nominalism and constantly asserting the transcendent character of moral ideas and the reality of free will. Hobbism came to assail this position; for Hobbes applied Bacon’s method to the moral and social order, and found the basis for them in certain obvious facts of human nature. The spirit of enquiry set afoot by the Cambridge Platonists was none the less real because it was opposed to such tenets. They set themselves, in fact, to enquire whether authority and tradition should guide men in matters of faith. They asserted that reason was supreme, and they sought to place Christianity again--to place Protestantism for the first time--under the protection of that noble spiritual idealism which the great thinkers of the early Church had chosen for the new faith; to penetrate Christianity with philosophy.[413] The early Latitudinarianism was merely an essay in liberal ecclesiastical polity. The new movement was something more, something finer. Cambridge now gathered up the floating philosophical speculation which existed in the xvii century side by side with the intense absorption in dogmatic wranglings, the rapid growth of sects--of Anabaptists, Antinomians, anti-Trinitarians, Arians. “A kind of moral divinity,” as Whichcote’s tutor, the Puritan Tuckney, cried out in alarm, was to be substituted for theological polemic. The movement indeed was due to the combination of a higher spirituality than the Puritan with the new spirit of bold enquiry in moral and speculative fields[414]--it constituted a Cambridge reaction against the trammels of Puritanism. It was the first of all English religious movements (not excepting Wycliffism) to ally a growth of the religious sentiment with the demand for a wide and liberal theoretical basis to theology. At the head of this theological movement stands Benjamin Whichcote (_b._ 1609) tutor of Emmanuel, who numbered among his pupils Wallis, Smith, and Culverwell, and who was afterwards Provost of King’s. Ralph Cudworth (_b._ in Somersetshire 1617) is perhaps the central figure: he is great as a moral philosopher, great in his impartial statement of an opponent’s case, great even in his freedom from the party and political heat which consumed his contemporaries.[415] In John Smith (_b._ 1616) of Emmanuel[416] the movement becomes more speculative, his was the finest and most richly stored mind, and his “Select Discourses” perhaps