Nevertheless, the Cambridge Platonists were ineffective. Their philosophy lacked a touchstone, concentration; and they allied its fate to a ridiculous bibliology. For More, who taught at the university which gave us our school of biblical critics—Erasmus, Colenso, Westcott, Lightfoot, Hort—the wisdom of the Hebrew had been transmitted to Pythagoras, and from Pythagoras to Plato, who thus becomes the heir of divine (the Hebrew) philosophy. Such a doctrine was a serious embarrassment to a cause in the age of Hobbes; it meant that the rational and critical criteria of the day went unutilised, and no doctrine can withstand such a charge. There was, too, a certain lack of the spirit of adventure, that gallant spirit which is not out of place even in philosophy, and of the courage which belongs to enthusiasm. The appeal to reason made by Hooker had debouched as Latitudinarianism; Laud and George Herbert had both opposed it; but Puritan England was stronger than both and would have none of either. The Platonists stood between them—called upon the Laudian to modify his conception of authority, upon the Puritan to admit the claims of reason, enriched Latitudinism with a philosophy. They were not listened to. None the less the via media they offered has penetrated English thought. The Englishman favours reason but is no Hobbist, he must have his God behind the machine; he likes the supremacy of reason with a nebulous Plato behind it—not the real Plato, but a Plato to hurl as a weapon in the face of the materialist, without understanding too much about it. The ‘Cambridge mind’ hit on a middle term, a resting place for speculation and for faith, which suits the Englishman in the long run better than either Laud or Hobbes. In Cudworth we have that mind typified—that union of toleration with half lights which triumphs in England. Very bold speculation is not the Englishman’s forte. His intellect in such gesta is not clear-cut, and his practical sense is always compatible with unturned-out-corners of mysticism, prejudices, reverences false and true—all the haziness made by those useful half lights loved by a people who do not like to be mystified, but do not wish to be too much enlightened.
And if we ask why Cambridge should be Platonist, the answer is because it always resisted the Aristotelianism of the Schools. Reaction against scholasticism had brought Plato to Florence in the xv century, it made Plato at home in Cambridge in the xviith. We have called Cambridge the laboratory of the Reformation; there too, we see, was made the first attempt to reconcile Protestantism with philosophy: in undoing the servitude of the latter to religion, which had been the mark of the middle ages, the Cambridge Platonists did away with medievalism, joined hands, behind its back, with that Neo-Platonism of the Alexandrine schools which had influenced the early Church, defied, of course, scholasticism, and prepared the place for our modern moral sciences tripos.
Modern science.
We have already seen that Cambridge is the representative in England of the scientific movement which has changed the face of the modern world. It may perhaps be pretended that the stages of its development in Europe have been marked by the great men emanating from this one university. The names of Bacon, Gilbert, Harvey, Flamsteed, Newton, Darwin, are signposts of the direction which science was to take and landmarks of its achievements.
William Gilbert the discoverer of terrestrial magnetism and of the affinity of magnetic and electric action, was praised by Galileo, while Erasmus called him “great to a degree which is enviable.” Flamsteed began that series of observations which initiated modern astronomy, Horrox came still earlier, and they have been followed by such Cantabrigians as Newton, Nevil Maskelyne, Herschell, Airy and Adams. Newton and Darwin are two of the greatest names in the history of the physical and physiological sciences—they stand out as creators of epochs in the march of human knowledge: on Newton’s statue in Trinity chapel are inscribed the words qui genus humanum ingenio superavit—of whom else could they be spoken?—Darwin has revolutionised our thoughts in spheres far removed from those directly affected by his great hypothesis.