CUDWORTH, RALPH (1617-1688), English philosopher, was born at Aller, Somersetshire, the son of Dr. Ralph Cud worth (d. 1624), rector of Aller, formerly fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Cudworth was sent to his father's college, and was elected fellow in 1639. In 1642 he published A Dis course 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. He was now recognized as a leader among the remarkable group known as the Cambridge Platonists (q.v.). The whole party were more or less in sympathy with the Commonwealth, and Cudworth was consulted by John Thur loe, Cromwell's secretary of state, in regard to university and government appointments. His sermons, such as that preached before the House of Commons on March 31, 1647, advocate prin ciples of religious toleration and charity. In 1654 he was elected master of Christ's college, whereupon he married, and in the year 1662 he was presented to the rectory of Ashwell, Herts. In 1678 he completed and published The True Intellectual Sys tem of the Universe: the first part, wherein all the reason and phil osophy of atheism is confuted and its impossibility demonstrated (imprimatur dated 1671). No more was published, perhaps be cause of the theological clamour raised against this first part. He died on June 26, 1688, and was buried in the chapel of Christ's. Much of Cudworth's work still remains in manuscript; A Treatise concerning eternal and immutable Morality was pub lished 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. The im mense fragment dealing with atheism is all that was published by its author. Cudworth criticizes two main forms of material istic atheism, the atomic, adopted by Democritus, Epicurus and Hobbes; and the hylozoic, attributed to Strato, 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. Atomism, in its purely physical application, is a theory that he fully accepts ; he holds that it was taught by nearly all the ancient philosophers, and was only perverted to atheism by Democritus. It is only in conjunc tion with corporatism that it gives rise to atheism.
The only interest of the Intellectual System now is the light it throws upon the state of religious thought after the Restoration. As Bolingbroke said, Cudworth "read too much to think enough, and admired too much to think freely." A much more favourable judgment must be given upon the short Treatise concerning eternal and immutable Morality, which deserves to be read by those interested in the development of British moral philosophy. It was 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 con stant 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. The cardinal weakness of this form of intu itionism is its inability to give a list of the moral ideas that are self-evident like the axioms of geometry.
The Intellectual System was translated into Latin by J. L. Mosheim and furnished with notes and dissertations which were translated into English in J. Harrison's edition (1845) . Our chief biographical authority is T. Birch's "Account," which appears in editions of the Works. There is a good chapter on Cudworth in J. Tulloch's Rational Theology, vol. ii. Consult also P. Janet's Essai sur le mediateur plas tique (186o), W. R. Scott's Introduction to Cudworth's "Treatise," and J. Martineau's Types of Ethical Theory, vol. ii. C. E. Lowrey, The Philosophy of R. Cudworth (1884) .