The seed of immortal thoughts are not sown to perish, even in the loose soil where they have long lain disregarded. “The Intellectual System” has furnished many writers with their secondary erudition, and possibly may have given rise to that portion of “The Divine Legation” of Warburton, whose ancient learning we admire for its ingenuity, while we retreat from its paradoxes; for there is this difference between this solid and that fanciful erudition, that Warburton has proudly made his subject full of himself, while Cudworth was earnest only to be full of his subject. The glittering edifice of Paradox was raised on moveable sands; but the more awful temple has been hewn out of rocks which time can never displace. Even in our own days, Dugald Stewart has noticed that some German systems, stripped of their deep neological disguise, have borrowed from Cudworth their most valuable materials. The critical decision of Leibnitz must not, however, be rejected; for if there is some severity in its truth, there is truth in its severity. “Dans ‘Le Système Intellectuel’ je trouve beaucoup de savoir, mais non pas assez de méditation.”
Such is the great work of a great mind! We have already shown its hard fate in the neglect of the contemporaries of the author—that thoughtless and thankless world many a great writer is doomed to address; and we must now touch on those human infirmities to which all systems of artificial theology and speculative notions are unhappily obnoxious.
In stating the arguments of the atheists at full, and opposing those of their adversaries, this true inquirer suffered the odium of Atheism itself! “It is pleasant enough,” says Lord Shaftesbury, “that the pious Cudworth was accused of giving the upper hand to the atheist for having only stated their reasons and those of their adversaries fairly together.” The truth seems, that our learned and profound author was not orthodox in his notions. To explain the difficulty of the Resurrection of bodies which in death resolve themselves into their separate elements, Cudworth assumed that they would not appear in their substance as a body of flesh, but in some ethereal form. In his researches he discovered the Trinity of Plato, of Pythagoras, and of Parmenides, and that of the Persian Mithra of three Hypostases, numerically distinct, in the unity of the Godhead; this spread an alarm among his brothers the clergy, and Cudworth was perpetually referred to as an unquestionable authority by the heterodox writers on the mystery of the Christian Trinity. Even his great principle, that the Unity of the Deity was known to the polytheists, was impugned by a catholic divine as derogatory of revelation, he insisting that the Pagan divinities were only a commemoration of human beings. Yet the notion of Cudworth, so amply illustrated, was not peculiar to him, for it had already been promulgated by Lord Herbert, and by the ancients themselves.
As all such results contradicted received opinions, this pious and learned man was condemned by some as “an Arian, a Socinian, or at best a deist.” Some praised his prudence, while others intimated his dissimulation; on several dogmas he delivers himself with great reserve, and even so ambiguously, that his own opinions are not easily ascertained, and are sometimes even contradictory. There have been more recent philosophers, who, from their prejudices, have hardly done justice to the search for truth of Cudworth; he is depreciated by Lord Bolingbroke, who, judging the philosopher by the colour of his coat, has treated the divine with his keenest severity, as “one who read too much to think enough, and admired too much to think freely.” Bolingbroke might envy the learning which he could not rival, and borrow from those recondite stores the knowledge which otherwise might not have reached him.
Our great author had indeed the heel of Achilles. Exercising the most nervous logic, and the most subtle metaphysics, he was also deeply imbued with Platonic reveries. Ambitious, in his inquiries, to discuss subjects placed far beyond the reach of human faculties, he delighted, with his eager imagination, to hover about those impassable precincts which Providence and Nature have eternally closed against the human footstep. It was this disposition of his mind which gave birth to the wild hypothesis of the plastic life of Nature, to unfold the inscrutable operations of Providence in the changeless forms of existence. There is nothing more embarrassing to atheism, in deriving the uninterrupted phenomena of nature from a fortuitous mechanism of inert matter, than to be compelled to ascribe the unvaried formation of animals to a cause which has no idea of what it performs, although its end denotes an intention; executing an undeviating system without any intelligence of the laws which govern it. We cannot indeed conceive every mite, or gnat, or fly, to be the immediate handwork of the ceaseless labours of the Deity, though so perfectly artificial is even its wing or its leg that the Divine Artificer seems visible in the minutest production. Cudworth, to solve the enigma, fancifully concluded that the Deity had given a plastic faculty to matter—“A vital and spiritual, but unintelligent and necessary, agent to execute its purposes.” He raised up a sort of middle substance between matter and spirit—it seemed both or neither; and our philosopher, roving through the whole creation, sometimes describes it as an inferior subordinate agent of the Deity, doing the drudgery, without consciousness; lower than animal life; a kind of drowsy unawakened mind, not knowing, but only doing, according to commands and laws impressed upon it.
The consequence deduced by the subtle Bayle from this fanciful system was, that, had the Deity ever given such a plastic faculty, it was an evidence that it is not repugnant to the nature of things, that unintelligent and necessary agents should operate, and therefore a motive power might be essential to matter, and things thus might exist of themselves.[5] It weakened the great objection against atheism. Philosophers, to extricate themselves from occult phenomena, have too often flung over the gaping chasms which they cannot fill up, the slight plank of a vague conjecture, or have constructed the temporary bridge of an artificial hypothesis; and thus they have hazarded what yields no sure footing. Of this “folly of the wise,” the inexplicable ether of Newton, the whirling worlds or vortices of Descartes, and the vibrations and the vibratiuncles of Hartley, among so many similar fancies of other philosophers, furnish a memorable evidence. The plastic life of Nature, as explained by Cudworth, only substituted a novel term for a blind, unintelligent agent, and could neither endure the ridicule of Bolingbroke nor the logic of Bayle, and is thrown aside among the deceitful fancies of scholastic dreamers.
There was indeed from his earliest days a tinge of Platonic refinement in the capacious understanding of this great metaphysician. The theses he maintained at college were the dawn of the genius of his future works. One was on “The Eternal Differences between Good and Evil,” which probably led long after to his treatise on “Eternal and Immutable Morality”—an exposition of the dangerous doctrines of Hobbes and the Antinomians.[6] The other question he disputed was, that “there are incorporeal substances immortal in their own nature”—a topic he afterwards investigated in “The True Intellectual System of the Universe”—against the principles of the Epicurean philosophy. These scholastic exercises are an evidence that the youthful student was already shaping in his mind the matters and the subjects of his future great work. Beautiful is this unity of mind which we discover in every master-genius! Even into his divinity he seems to have carried the same fanciful refinement; he maintained that “the Lord’s Supper was a feast upon a sacrifice;” and such was the charm of this mysterious doctrine, that it was adopted by some of the greatest divines and scholars. It is not therefore surprising that Cudworth was held in the highest estimation by the Platonic Dr. More, of which I give a remarkable instance. Cudworth, as other divines, wrote on Daniel’s prophecy of the seventy weeks, which, he says in a letter, is “A Defence of Christianity against Judaism, the seventy weeks never having yet been sufficiently cleared and improved.” Since the days of Cudworth others have “cleared and improved,” and his “demonstration” is not even noticed among subsequent “demonstrations;” but Judaism still remains. Yet on this theological reverie, Dr. More has used this forcible language:—“Mr. Cudworth has demonstrated the manifestation of the Messiah to have fallen out at the end of the sixty-ninth week, and his passion in the midst of the seventieth. This demonstration is of as much price and worth in theology, as either the circulation of the blood in physic, or the motion of the earth in natural philosophy.” This is not only a curious instance of the argumentative theology of that period, but of the fascination of a most refining genius influencing kindred imaginations.
We now come to record the melancholy fate of this great work, in connexion with its great author. He had arranged it into three elaborate volumes; but we possess only the first—the refutation of atheism; that subject, however, is of itself complete. Although I know not any private correspondence of Cudworth, after the publication of “The Intellectual System,” which might more positively reveal the state of his feelings, and the cause of the suppression of his work, in which he had made considerable progress, yet we are acquainted with circumstances which too clearly describe its unhappy fate. We learn from Warburton that this pious and learned scholar was the victim of calumny, and that, too sensitive to his injuries, he grew disgusted with his work; his ardour slackened, and the mass of his papers lay in cold neglect. The philosophical divine participated in the fate of the few who, like him, searched for truth freed from the manacles of received opinions.
Cudworth left his manuscripts to the care of his daughter, Lady Masham, the friend of Locke, who passed his latter days in her house at Oates. Her ladyship was literary, but the reverse of a Platonical genius; she wrote against the Platonic Norris’ “Love of God,” and admitted in her religion no principles which were not practicable in morals, and seems to have been rather the disciple of the author of “The Human Understanding,” than the daughter of the author of “The Intellectual System.” For the good sense of Lady Masham erudition lost its curiosity, and imagination its charm; and she probably with some had certain misgivings of the tendency of her father’s writings! He had himself been careless of them, for we know of no testamentary direction for their preservation. By her these unvalued manuscripts were not placed in a cabinet, but thrown in a heap into the dark corner of some neglected shelf in the library at Oates. And from thence, after the lapse of half a century, they were turned out, with some old books, by the last Lord Masham, to make room for a fashionable library for his second lady. A bookseller purchased them with a notion that this waste paper contained the writings of Locke, and printing a Bible under the editorship of the famous Dr. Dodd, introduced the scripture notes, found among the heap, in the commentary, under the name of Locke. The papers were accidentally discovered to be parts of “The Intellectual System,” and after having suffered mutilation and much confusion in the various mischances which they passed through, they finally repose among our national collections; fragments on fragments which may yet be inspected by those whose intrepidity would patiently venture on the discoveries which lie amid this mass of theological metaphysics. They are thus described in Ayscough’s “Catalogue,” 4983:—“Collection of Confused Thoughts, Memorandums, &c., relating to the Eternity of Torments—Thoughts on Pleasure—Commonplace Book of Motives to Moral Duties, two volumes; and five volumes on Free-will.” This description is imperfect; and many other subjects, the groundwork of his future inquiries, will be found in these voluminous manuscripts. One volume, still highly valued, was snatched from the wreck, Cudworth’s “Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality,” which was edited by Dr. Chandler many years after the death of the author.
After all, we possess a mighty volume, subject no longer to neglect nor to mischance. “The True Intellectual System of the Universe” exists without a parallel for its matter, its subject, and its manner. Its matter furnishes the unsunned treasures of ancient knowledge, the history of the thoughts, the imaginations, and the creeds of the profoundest intellects of mankind on the Deity. Its subject, though veiled in metaphysics more sublime than human reasoning can pierce, yet shows enough for us to adore. And its manner, brightened by a subdued Platonism, inculcates the immutability of moral distinctions, and vindicates the free agency of the human being against the impious tenets which deliver him over a blind captive to an inexorable “necessity.”