Ralph Cudworth

Ralph Cudworth 1617-88, English theologian and philosopher. He was a noted representative of the Cambridge Platonists . Cudworth's most ambitious work, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, was never completed. The first part, a critique of atheistic materialism, appeared in 1678, and two parts were published posthumously as A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731) and A Treatise on Freewill (1838). In his works Cudworth attacked the materialistic philosophy of Hobbes and maintained the belief that moral ideas are innate in man.

Bibliography: See study by J. A. Passmore (1951).

Cudworth, Ralph (1617–88), Cambridge Platonist. From 1654 he was Master of Christ's College, Cambridge. Perhaps the most distinguished of the Cambridge Platonists, he opposed both religious dogmatism and the atheism of his day. In The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) he argues that the only real source of knowledge is the Christian religion. Religious truth is embodied in three great principles: the reality of the supreme Divine intelligence and the spiritual world which that intelligence has created, the eternal reality of moral ideas, and the reality of moral freedom and responsibility.