ABSTRACT
His monumental True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) was intended to be merely the first part of a much larger examination and refutation of three kinds of fatalism: atheistic, pantheistic, and Calvinistic. It is a major study of intellectual, or philosophical, irreligion. Cudworth sought to refute several kinds of atheism, all of which assumed some principle of activity within matter, by insisting that it was a logical requirement for matter to be totally passive and inert. Although it followed from this that these forms of atheism were contradictory, it left mechanical atheism, with its assumption of inert matter, unharmed. But Cudworth went on to argue that a mechanical philosophy based upon the behavior of particles of matter that are supposedly devoid of all capacity to act is equally untenable. While rejecting the atheistic atomism of the mechanical philosophy, Cudworth insisted that there was a pre-Democritean form of atomism, deriving from a shadowy Phoenician philosopher called Moschus whom Cudworth, following a minor exegetical tradition, tentatively identified with Moses. This form of atomism, needless to say, was regarded as the true natural philosophy. Far from being atheistic, this atomism, when correctly understood, pointed to the need for an active (and, for Cudworth, necessarily spiritual) principle at work in the world to account for the interactions, motions, and other activities of inert matter. Cudworth referred to this spiritual principle as the plastic nature and saw it as a real entity, a universal secondary cause responsible for blindly carrying out the laws of nature ordained by God. There are a number of very close similarities between Cudworth’s philosophy and that of his friend Henry More (1614-1687); both advocated a strict dualist distinction between active spirit and passive matter, and Cudworth’s plastic nature serves the same philosophical and theological function as More’s Spirit of Nature.
