ABSTRACT
Ralph Cudworth’s claim for the priority of goodness in “the scale of being”, even as the essence of being itself, is an anticipation of what may be said to contain the central contention of idealism as represented by such writers as T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, and Bradley. Although Cudworth’s whole philosophy had for its motive the vindication of moral distinctions, and although, after his failure to come to a detailed application to them of his long argument in the Intellectual System, he succeeded in leaving in the end only the merest fragment with direct bearing on the subject. History has in a sense compensated by causing Cudworth’s name to be chiefly associated with the plea for an “eternal and immutable morality”. Everything, Cudworth declares, must be determined necessarily and immutably by its own nature, over which mere will “can have no control”. Will is only an efficient cause; its action presupposes entities with a nature of their own.
