Dryden, John, 1631-1700; English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism
In sharp contrast to Locke and his school stand the small knot of
Cambridge Platonists and their allies--Cudworth, Henry More, Culverwell,
Cumberland, Glanvil, and Whichcote, which last may indeed be regarded as
a connecting link between the rival thinkers. His place is rather with
the divines, and Henry More (1614-1657) belongs more properly to the
period of Vaughan in virtue of his poetry, though continuing to write to
a late date. Culverwell and Cumberland scarcely rank in a literary
history; so that the school is chiefly represented by Ralph Cudworth
(1617-1688). Cudworth's life was uneventful. One of those moderate men
whom the excesses of party provoke to opposition, he sided mainly with
the Puritans during the Civil War, but was no Puritan himself, and
protested energetically against Puritan disparagement of sweetness and
light. He had no difficulty in conforming to the Restoration, and
accepting a living from Archbishop Sheldon, but his life was mainly
spent in his study, in the production of vast folios, where the ingots
of philosophy lay stored while Locke's current coin passed nimbly from
hand to hand. The contrast between the men and the systems is complete
at every point; and it is assuredly one of the strangest ironies of fate
that Cudworth's daughter should have become the good angel of Locke's
old age. Cudworth is no doubt by much the more attractive figure to
imaginative minds; but it must be conceded as an indisputable truth that
his way of thinking could not possibly have produced nearly so much
good, have so profoundly leavened men's ideas on legislation and
education, or have so contributed to build up the national character for
sound common sense. This admitted, Cudworth may be heartily praised as a
sublime and refined thinker, epithets inappropriate to Locke. His great
work is _The Intellectual System_, published in 1678, only the first
part of which ever appeared. A _Treatise on Immutable Morality_ remained
in manuscript until 1731. Cudworth's purpose may briefly be defined as
the expulsion of all materialistic and mechanical notions from theology,
metaphysics, and ethics. He wages war upon atheism, fatalism,
utilitarianism, whatsoever is opposed to elevating and poetical
conceptions of the order of things. His erudition is only too extensive,
and he is very candid. Dryden thought that he had stated the atheistic
objections more powerfully than he had answered them; and his doctrine
of plastic force in nature verges upon Pantheism, as indeed religious
philosophies usually do. He is finely analyzed in the _Types of Ethical
Theory_ of Dr. Martineau, who says of his philosophy:
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