Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, is often regarded as a curious and eccentric figure occupying an uncertain position in the first half of the seventeenth century. He asserted the chivalric, military, and philosophical ideals of an earlier age, while at the same time laying the groundwork for an apparently untimely body of thought on epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of religion that had its fullest expression after his time. In his public career he was an intimate of important writers and scholars such as John Donne, Ben Jonson, Hugo Grotius, Daniel Tilenus, Marin Mersenne, and Pierre Gassendi. He corresponded with René Descartes. In his philosophical writings Herbert frequently anticipated the concerns of the Cambridge Platonists later in the seventeenth century, and his work has been seen to foreshadow that of Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Reid and his followers in the Scottish...