and of Christ's College in 1651, was, as I have already said, the most genuine antagonist of Hobbes, since he descended to no compromise, but steadily maintained the immutable and independent authority of moral right. In doing this, he took the old high Platonic ground on which the battle had in ancient times been fought, although he both modified and fortified the position by a judicious attention to the recent progress of philosophy. Familiar with the writings of the ancient moralists, he at once perceived that all the bold and paradoxical dogmas of Hobbes, strange and monstrous as they sounded in modern ears, were but the repetition of the sophistries of former times. His Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, begins by shewing that there have been some in all ages who have maintained that Good and Evil, Just and Unjust, were not naturally and immutably so, but only by human laws and appointments. This assertion, which had been made by Protagoras and many others, was connected by them with the doctrine that we derive our knowledge from our senses, which cannot give us information of any thing certain and permanent; and that in the ever-flowing stream of the universe nothing can be immutable and eternal. Plato himself had made it one of his most serious tasks to reason against this school. Two tenets of the Protagorean philosophy, that the universe is constituted of atoms, and that all our knowledge is only relative and phantastic, were both rejected by Plato, as alike leading to scepticism. Cudworth, taught by the recent progress and prospects of physical philosophy, takes care not to make the cause of the eternal fixity of truth depend upon the rejection of the mechanical theory of the universe. On the contrary, he turns the battery of the Atomic Theory upon his adversaries and maintains that the genuine result of that Theory is, That Sense alone is not the Judge of what does really and absolutely exist, but that there is ano

ther Principle in us superior to Sense. He further asserts that knowledge is an Inward active Energy of the mind, not arising from things acting from without: that some Ideas of the mind proceed not from sensible objects, but arise from the inward activity of the mind itself: that the intelligible notions of things, though existing only in the mind, are not figments of the mind, but have an immutable nature; and hence he concludes, in an assertion of Origen, that science and knowledge is the only firm thing in the world.

This view of the nature of knowledge is proved, as I have already said, upon the principles which are unfolded so skilfully and agreeably in Plato's Dialogues; the exposition being however materially modified with reference to the state of modern philosophy. But the application of this doctrine of the eternal and immutable nature of truth in general to the particular case of moral truth, is less fully and clearly developed*. After he has proved that "wisdom, knowledge, mind, and intelligence, are no thin shadows or images of corporeal and sensible things, but have an independent and self-subsistent being, which in order of nature is before body;" he contents himself with saying, "Now from hence it naturally follows, that those things which belong to Mind and Intellect, such as are Morality, Ethicks, Politics, and Laws, which Plato calls the offspring of the mind, are no less to be accounted natural things, or real and substantial, than those things which belong to stupid and senseless matter.”

It must, I think, be allowed that the treatise of Immutable Morality produced very little effect on the Hobbian controversy: and though always mentioned as one of our standard works on Morals, even now produces little impression on most of those who view it as an ethical work†.

* Cap. VI. p. 292.

† Mr Hallam, Literature Iv. 300, says: " Cudworth's reasoning is by no means satisfactory, and rests too much on the dogmatic metaphysics which were then going out of use."

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Nor is it difficult to assign reasons for this want of effectiveness in the book. In the first place, this result is almost sufficiently accounted for by what I have stated: namely, the principles of the work are not manifestly brought to bear on the question. It may be well proved, we may suppose, that all truth is independent and immutable, but we want a great deal more than this general principle to satisfy us that moral distinctions are independent and immutable. We require a detailed application of the general reasonings to the particular case. If it be so, we would know how it is so: what form the demonstration assumes when we use the terms of the proposition we would establish how the difficulties and obscurities which seem to hang about it are affected by this demonstration, Men will not be satisfied that there is an adamantine chain, except we can shew them the links of which it consists. They will not believe that moral ideas are determined by eternal laws, except we shew them what these laws are; just as they would not believe that the motions of the planets are governed by fixed laws, till these laws were discovered and stated. Cudworth in moral speculation held the place which Kepler held in the speculations respecting the forces which govern the planetary world. He asserted that there must be some fixed, orderly, constant force, by which all things and their relations are retained in a perpetual and immutable harmony, but he did not succeed in placing before men's eyes the very form and expression of this force; and hence he was hardly listened to, and deemed by most a dreamy and fanciful visionary.

But besides this reason, another may be mentioned, which much impeded the influence of Cudworth's book upon general readers. It was a book written in the fashion of the past rather than of the present; a book of erudition rather than of formal demonstration. I have already noticed that Cumberland's work gained in efficacy by adopting the modern

forms of demonstration. Cumberland, in the character and training of his mind, belonged to the latter half, Cudworth to the former half, of the seventeenth century. Cudworth's learning was great, and he had well pondered and digested it; but still his pages were, for modern readers, too much overloaded with ancient authorities and antiquarian disquisitions. Although this feature is very far from being so much the case in the Immutable Morality as it is in the Intellectual System, (which vast work was written against the supposed atheistical principles of Hobbes's writings, as the Immutable Morality was against their immoral tendency), it still appears even in the former work: as for example, when he traces the doctrine of atoms to Moschus a Phoenician, who lived before the Trojan war, and endeavours to identify this teacher with the Jewish Lawgiver Moses. Speculations such as this, formerly so grateful to the learned, now repelled rather than attracted the common reader. Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, had taught men to look forwards rather than backwards, to future discoveries rather than to past opinions; and even in morals, authority was now of small weight. The reasonings of Plato and Aristotle would formerly have derived additional force from being given in their own words; but now their being presented in such a mode, led to the suspicion that the reasonings would not bear to be delivered in the modern form of demonstration. Thus Cudworth's erudition weakened, rather than enforced, the effect of his arguments, by making his dialect strange, and his proofs suspected, to the audience which he addressed.

But besides these two reasons of the little effect produced by Cudworth's Immutable Morality (reasons residing in the work itself), there was a third, an external cause, which contributed to the same result. The book was, as it were, born out of due time: it did not come before the world till many years after the death of its author, when the contro

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versy had made large advances; several works, which hold a prominent place in this series of speculations, had been published in the mean time, and had preoccupied men's minds. The author died in 1688, and was interred in the chapel of Christ's College; but the Immutable Morality was not published till 1731, when it was edited by Dr Chandler, Bishop of Durham. It may serve to show the progress of opinions, as one generation succeeds another, to remark, that Cudworth's daughter was Lady Masham, the peculiar friend and admirer of Locke, who lived almost constantly, and at last died, at her house at Oates in Essex. Her son, Sir Francis Cudworth Masham, into whose possession Cudworth's papers came, was the person who gave to the world the book of which I have been speaking. And thus Cudworth's work, which was, in spirit, a generation anterior to Locke, was, in its time of publication, a generation later.

Cudworth and Locke are perhaps the two greatest English names on the two contrary sides of the question respecting the nature of knowledge. But these two speculators made their philosophical voyage with very different fortune. They started from the opposite shores of the great ocean of speculation: Cudworth in a vessel of heavy and antique fashion, deeply laden with ancient treasures; Locke in a lighter bark, fitted to skim nearer the surface, and exhibiting in its rigging the improvements of modern times. But this was not all the difference. The breezes of popular favour, which had long veered between the opposite quarters of Ideas and Sense, at last set steadily in favour of the latter; the Lockian theory rushed on before the prosperous wind, with expanded sails and flying colours; while the system of Cudworth, ill suited for such a rivalry, endeavoured in vain to make head against the adverse influences. And thus at this period all seems to be in favour of the ultimate success of the new doctrine.