ABSTRACT
Cambridge University had the honour of being the first to welcome the new thought. Between Descartes and the Cambridge writers there was a certain identity of aim in that both sought for a basis in reason for man’s moral and religious experience. Though it is a mistake to represent mystic ecstasy as the centre of its teaching, it is true that the main interest of the school was religious. Its philosophy, however much it might extend to include a theory of knowledge and of nature, was a “philosophy of religion”. “The Platonic theory of knowledge”, writes Professor Perry, “was both retained and reinforced by Christianity”. Wherever, from the author of the Fourth Gospel to St. Augustine, from St. Augustine to Thomas Aquinas, and from Aquinas to Dean Inge, the spirit of Christian theology has been really alive, it has tended to fall back upon Platonism.
