VI.—­With reference to Religion, he professes to abstain entirely from theological questions, and does abstain from mixing up the doctrines of Revelation.  But he attaches a distinctly divine authority to his moral rules, and supplements earthly by supernatural sanctions.

RALPH CUDWORTH. [1617-88.]

Cudworth’s Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, did not appear until 1731, more than forty years after his death.  Having in a former work (’Intellectual system of the Universe’) contended against the ‘Atheistical Fate’ of Epicurus and others, he here attacks the ‘Theologick Fate’ (the arbitrarily omnipotent Deity) of Hobbes, charging him with reviving exploded opinions of Protagoras and the ancient Greeks, that take away the essential and eternal discrimination of moral good and evil, of just and unjust.

After piling up, out of the store of his classical and scholastic erudition, a great mass of testimony regarding all who had ever founded distinctions of Right and Wrong upon mere arbitrary disposition, whether of God or the State of men in general, he shadows forth his own view.  Moral Good and Evil, Just and Unjust, Honest and Dishonest (if they be not mere names without any signification, or names for nothing else but Willed or Commanded, but have a reality in respect of the persons obliged to do and to avoid them), cannot possibly be arbitrary things, made by Will without nature; because it is universally true that Things are what they are not by Will, but by nature.  As it is the nature of a triangle to have three angles equal to two right angles, so it is the nature of ‘good things’ to have the nature of goodness, and things just the nature of justice; and Omnipotence is no more able to make a thing good without the fixed nature of goodness, than to make a triangular body without the properties of a triangle, or two things like or equal, without the natures of Likeness and Equality.  The Will of God is the supreme efficient cause of all things, but not the formal cause of anything besides itself.  Nor is this to be understood as at all derogating from God’s perfection; to make natural justice and right independent of his will is merely to set his Wisdom, which is a rule or measure, above his Will, which is something indeterminate, but essentially regulable and measureable; and if it be the case that above even his wisdom, and determining it in turn, stands his Infinite Goodness, the greatest perfection of his will must lie in its being thus twice determined.

By far the largest part of Cudworth’s treatise consists of a general metaphysical argument to establish the independence of the mind’s faculty of Knowledge, with reference to Sense and Experience.  In Sense, according to the doctrine of the old ‘Atomical philosophy’ (of Democritus, Protagoras, &c.—­but he thinks it must be referred back to Moses himself!), he sees nothing but fancies excited in us by