ABSTRACT
The Cambridge Platonists, or ‘Latitude-men’ as they were sometimes called, were liberal theologians who wished to reconcile the claims of Christianity with the findings of science. The work of the Cambridge Platonists consisted, therefore, in building up a world-picture which would reconcile religion and science. There were those who claimed that not only the mythology, but the truths behind the mythology of the Christian faith, had been invalidated by the science. What Shaftesbury sought to establish was the position that the symbolism of the poetic imagination can be as true as conceptual statement. The quarrel between Platonism and mechanism is important not only for an understanding of seventeenth-century poetry; it had important repercussions on literary criticism. Shaftesbury was a disciple of the Cambridge Platonists and, like them, detested the doctrines propounded by Thomas Hobbes.
