ABSTRACT
In Ralph Cudworth’s philosophy of it there is much that already in his own time was an anachronism and is entirely foreign to modern modes of thought. His own solution was to conceive of nature as the repository of a plastic energy, akin to what writers have called a nisus, horme, or elan vital—an organizing principle in things, ever integrating and reintegrating them in a manner wholly transcending the powers of mechanism. Coleridge criticizes the whole school of Cambridge Platonists, Cudworth included, for its want of “a pre-inquisition into the mind, as part organ, part constituent of all knowledge, an examination of the scales, weights, and measures themselves, abstracted from their objects”. The not a priori was the enterprise on which he embarked in his work on The True Intellectual System of the Universe. Cudworth is specially careful to avoid all allusion to innate ideas.
