ABSTRACT
The Cambridge Platonists were a loose-knit group of philosophers and theologians associated with Cambridge University around the middle of the seventeenth century, the most prominent among them being Henry More and Ralph Cudworth. Indeed, Henry More actually engaged Descartes directly in one of the most philosophically illuminating correspondences the latter ever had. For instance, More and Cudworth were entirely comfortable with the notion of animal souls, a point on which More pressed Descartes directly in their correspondence. More was basically content to take the old Platonic notion of a tripartite soul on board. With the arguable exception of Culverwell, the Cambridge Platonists were all staunch rationalists, endowing man with a distinct faculty of pure intellect that could not be explicated in empiricist terms. For instance, More had argued that if the whole of a spirit was going to be present in a minutely extended particle of matter, this would entail that its own magnitude should be equally small.
