Ralph Cudworth

Ralph Cudworth
Born	1617 (1617) Aller, Somerset, Kingdom of England
Died	June 26, 1688(1688-06-26) (aged 70–71)
Alma mater	Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Occupation(s)	Classicist, theologian, philosopher

Ralph Cudworth (1617 – 26 June 1688) was an English classicist, theologian and philosopher, a leading figure among the Cambridge Platonists. From a family background embedded in the early nonconformist environment of Emmanuel College in the University of Cambridge, where he studied, he became Regius Professor of Hebrew 1645–88, Master of Clare Hall 1645–54 and Master of Christ's College 1654–88. His great work, entitled The True Intellectual System of the Universe, was published in 1678. He was a leading opponent of Thomas Hobbes.

Life

Origins and early life

Ralph Cudworth's father, Dr. Ralph Cudworth (born 1572), derived from the Cudworths of Werneth Hall in Lancashire. The family originated in Cudworth near Barnsley, Yorkshire, and came to Werneth by the marriage of John Cudworth to Margaret, daughter and coheiress of Richard Oldham, during the early 15th century. Ralph Cudworth the elder matriculated from Emmanuel College in the University of Cambridge in 1588/89, and graduating B.A. (1592/93), M.A. (1596), and B.D. (1603) became a Fellow of the college. In 1606 he was instituted to the Perpetual Vicarage of Coggeshall, Essex, at the presentation of Baron Rich, to replace Thomas Stoughton, who had been deprived by High Commission for nonconformism. He was presented to the rectory of Aller, Somerset by his college (which held the advowson) in c. 1609 or 1610. On 18 June 1611 at Southwark he married Mary Machell (who had been nurse to Prince Henry the son of James I) and their children were christened at Aller over the following decade.

One of at least five children, Ralph was born at Aller in 1617. His father, having been awarded Doctor of Divinity in 1619, died at Aller in autumn 1624, and John Stoughton (son of Thomas Stoughton of Coggeshall), also Fellow of Emmanuel College, who succeeded him as Rector, took Mary Cudworth as his own wife. Dr. Stoughton paid careful attention to the education of his stepchildren, and in 1632 when Stoughton received preferment to St Mary Aldermanbury in the City of London and the family left Aller, Ralph matriculated from Emmanuel to begin his university career. His elder brother James Cudworth married and emigrated permanently to Scituate, Plymouth Colony in New England in 1634. Their mother died in 1635 and Dr. Stoughton married a daughter of John Browne of Frampton and Dorchester. Dr. Stoughton died in 1639.

Career and marriage

A diligent student, Ralph graduated B.A. 1636 and M.A. 1639, whereupon he was elected Fellow and became a successful tutor. In 1642 he published A Discourse concerning the true Notion of the Lord's Supper and a tract entitled The Union of Christ and the Church. In 1645 he was appointed Master of Clare Hall and the same year was elected Regius professor of Hebrew. In 1650 he was presented to the college living of North Cadbury, Somerset. From the correspondence of his friend John Worthington we learn that Cudworth was nearly compelled, through poverty, to leave the University, but in 1654 he was elected master of Christ's College.

This appointment coincided with Cudworth's marriage, a very advantageous alliance which secured his position in the University. His wife was Damaris, daughter of Damaris and Matthew Cradock, a London merchant and first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company (which he never visited) who died in 1641. Her stepmother Rebeccah Cradock in 1643 married Benjamin Whichcote, eminent Platonist, of Emmanuel College, where Samuel Cradock (nephew of Mathew Cradock and pupil of Whichcote) was also undergraduate and Fellow, 1637–1656. Damaris married first (by 1646) the London citizen Thomas Andrewes of London and Feltham (son of Sir Thomas Andrewes, Lord Mayor of London in 1649 and 1651–52, d. 1659), who predeceased his notable father in 1653 having produced several children. She then became the wife of Ralph Cudworth in Cambridge, and overlived him, dying in 1695.

He now became recognized as a leader among the remarkable group known as the Cambridge Platonists. The whole party was more or less in sympathy with the Commonwealth: during the late 1650s Dr. Cudworth was consulted by John Thurloe, Cromwell's secretary to the council of state, in regard to university and government appointments, and in other matters. At the Restoration Dr. Cudworth's Mastership of his college was challenged, but he retained it until his death.

In 1662 he was presented to the rectory of Ashwell, Herts, by the Bishop of London, Dr Gilbert Sheldon. In 1665 he almost quarrelled with his fellow-Platonist, Henry More, because the latter had written an ethical work which Cudworth feared would interfere with his own long-contemplated treatise on the same subject. To avoid clashing, More brought out his book, the Enchiridion ethicum, in Latin; Cudworth's never appeared. His own majestic work, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, was conceived in three parts of which only the first was brought to completion, being given its Archiepiscopal Imprimatur in 1671 but not published until 1678. Cudworth was installed prebendary of Gloucester in 1678. He died on 26 June 1688, and was buried in the chapel of Christ's College.

Family

Ralph's sons included John Cudworth (c. 1656–1726), who became a Fellow of Christ's College, Charles (d. 1684), who died in India, and probably Thomas, who obtained his M.A. at Christ's College in 1682. His daughter Damaris (1659–1708), a devout and talented woman, became the second wife of Sir Francis Masham of High Laver, Essex. The Lady Masham was distinguished as the friend of John Locke and exchanged letters with Gottfried Leibniz.

His elder brother James Cudworth (1612–1682) became an Assistant Governor of Massachusetts and a Commissioner of the United Colonies, whose descendants form an extensive American branch of the Cudworth family. His younger brother, John Cudworth (1622–1675), of London and of Bentley, Suffolk, became an Alderman of London and Master of the Worshipful Company of Girdlers in 1667–68. In 1675 John left four orphans of whom Thomas (1661–1726) and Benjamin (d. 1725) both attended Christ's College.

His sister Elizabeth (1615–1654) became the second of three wives of Josias Beacham of Broughton, Northamptonshire (Rector of Seaton, Rutland from 1627 to 1676) in 1636, by whom she had several children. Beacham was ejected by the Puritans in 1653 but reinstated by 1662.

A certain Jane or Joan Cudworth living unmarried in 1647 might also have been a sister of Ralph's, but this is not finally confirmed.

Works

His sermons, such as that preached before the House of Commons, on 31 March 1647, advocate principles of religious toleration and charity. In 1678 he published The True Intellectual System of the Universe: the first part, wherein all the reason and philosophy of atheism is confuted and its impossibility demonstrated (imprimatur dated 1671). No more was published, perhaps because of the theological clamour raised against this first part. Much of Cudworth's work still remains in manuscript; A Treatise concerning eternal and immutable Morality was published with a preface by Edward Chandler in 1731; and A Treatise of Freewill, edited by John Allen, in 1838; both are connected with the design of his magnum opus, the Intellectual System.

The Intellectual System arose, so its author tells us, out of a discourse refuting "fatal necessity", or determinism. Enlarging his plan, he proposed to prove three matters:

(a) the existence of God;

(b) the naturalness of moral distinctions; and

(c) the reality of human freedom.

These three together make up the intellectual (as opposed to the physical) system of the universe; and they are opposed respectively by three false principles, atheism, religious fatalism which refers all moral distinctions to the will of God, and thirdly the fatalism of the ancient Stoics, who recognized God and yet identified Him with nature. The immense fragment dealing with atheism is all that was published by its author. Cudworth criticizes two main forms of materialistic atheism, the atomic, adopted by Democritus, Epicurus and Hobbes; and the hylozoic, attributed to Strato of Lampsacus, which explains everything by the supposition of an inward self-organizing life in matter. Atomic atheism is by far the more important, if only because Hobbes, the great antagonist whom Cudworth always has in view, is supposed to have held it. It arises out of the combination of two principles, neither of which is atheistic taken separately, i.e. atomism and corporealism, or the doctrine that nothing exists but body. The example of Stoicism, as Cudworth points out, shows that corporealism may be theistic.

Cudworth plunges into the history of atomism with vast erudition. It is, in its purely physical application, a theory that he fully accepts; he holds that it was taught by Pythagoras, Empedocles, and in fact, nearly all the ancient philosophers, and was only perverted to atheism by Democritus. It was first invented, he believes, before the Trojan war, by a Sidonian thinker named Moschus or Mochus, who is identical with the Moses of the Old Testament. In dealing with atheism Cudworth's method is to marshal the atheistic arguments elaborately, so elaborately that Dryden remarked "he has raised such objections against the being of a God and Providence that many think he has not answered them"; then in his last chapter, which by itself is as long as an ordinary treatise, he confutes them with all the reasons that his reading could supply. A subordinate matter in the book that attracted much attention at the time is the conception of the "Plastic Medium," which is a mere revival of Plato's "World-Soul," and is meant to explain the existence and laws of nature without referring all to the direct operation of God. It occasioned a long-drawn controversy between Pierre Bayle and Le Clerc, the former maintaining, the latter denying, that the Plastic Medium is really favourable to atheism.

A much more favourable judgment must be given upon the short Treatise on eternal and immutable Morality, which deserves to be read by those who are interested in the historical development of British moral philosophy. It is an answer to Hobbes's famous doctrine that moral distinctions are created by the state, an answer from the standpoint of Platonism. Just as knowledge contains a permanent intelligible element over and above the flux of sense-impressions, so there exist eternal and immutable ideas of morality. Cudworth's ideas, like Plato's, have "a constant and never-failing entity of their own," such as we see in geometrical figures; but, unlike Plato's, they exist in the mind of God, whence they are communicated to finite understandings. Hence "it is evident that wisdom, knowledge and understanding are eternal and self-subsistent things, superior to matter and all sensible beings, and independent upon them"; and so also are moral good and evil. At this point Cudworth stops; he does not attempt to give any list of Moral Ideas. It is, indeed, the cardinal weakness of this form of intuitionism that no satisfactory list can be given and that no moral principles have the "constant and never-failing entity," or the definiteness, of the concepts of geometry (these attacks are not uncontested — see, for example, the "Common Sense" tradition from Thomas Reid to James McCosh and the Oxford Realists Harold Prichard and Sir William David Ross). Henry More, in his Enchiridion ethicum, attempts to enumerate the "noemata moralia"; but, so far from being self-evident, most of his moral axioms are open to serious controversy.

Commentary on Cudworth

Andrew Dickson White wrote in A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896):

In 1678 Ralph Cudworth published his Intellectual System of the Universe. To this day he remains, in breadth of scholarship, in strength of thought, in tolerance, and in honesty, one of the greatest glories of the English Church... He purposed to build a fortress which should protect Christianity against all dangerous theories of the universe, ancient or modern. ...while genius marked every part of it, features appeared which gave the rigidly orthodox serious misgivings. From the old theories of direct personal action on the universe by the Almighty he broke utterly. He dwelt on the action of law, rejected the continuous exercise of miraculous intervention, pointed out the fact that in the natural world there are "errors" and "bungles" and argued vigorously in favor of the origin and maintenance of the universe as a slow and gradual development of Nature in obedience to an inward principle.

Sources

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

Further reading

The Intellectual System was translated into Latin by Johann Lorenz von Mosheim and furnished with notes and dissertations which were translated into English in John J. Harrison's edition (1845). First Latin edition, Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, Radulphi Cudworthi Systema intellectuale hujus universi, 2 Vols (sumtu viduae Meyer, Jena 1733), second (with paginated Mosheimii Praefatio), (Samuel and John Luchtmans, Lugduni Batavorum 1773).

• Thomas Birch's Account (biography), first published in 1743 in the Second Edition (London), and reprinted in subsequent editions. Birch supplied notes and references to Cudworth's text, after Mosheim.
• Paul Alexandre René Janet, Essai sur le médiateur plastique de Cudworth (1860)
• John Tulloch Rational theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the seventeenth century (1874) volume 2, pp. 193–302
• Charles E Lowrey [1] The Philosophy of Ralph Cudworth: a study of the True Intellectual System of the Universe (1884)
• James Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory (1885) volume 2, pp. 396–424
• William Richard Scott, Introduction to Cudworth's Treatise (1891).
• Slawomir Raube, Deus explicatus: Stworzenie i Bóg w myśli Ralpha Cudwortha (Creation and God in Ralph Cudworth’s Thought) (2000), Bialystok (Poland).

External links

• Cambridge Platonists Research Group: Research Portal: Ralph Cudworth Bibliography
• "Cudworth, Ralph" . Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
• H. Sturt, 'Cudworth, Ralph (1617–1688)',
• "Cudworth, Ralph". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Klaus-Gunther Wesseling (1999). "Cudworth {der Jüngere}, Ralph". In Bautz, Traugott (ed.). Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL) (in German). Vol. 16. Herzberg: Bautz. cols. 352–362. ISBN 3-88309-079-4.
• The True Intellectual System of the Universe on Google Books
• The True Intellectual System of the Universe on Internet Archive: 3-volume edition Tegg 1845 Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3
• Sermon before the Commons, at Westminster, 31 March 1647 reprinted 1852
• A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731)
• They know Christ who keep his Commandments (reprinted 1858)