Cudworth, Boethius and the Scale of Nature

Abstract

If frequency of citation is the criterion, Boethius is not a major source for Cudworth, even among the Platonic philosophers he quotes. Cudworth’s sources are famously, even infamously, eclectic: the majority of The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) consists of consensus gentium arguments drawn from a huge range of classical sources. Cudworth was after all one of the leading classical scholars of seventeenth-century England. In terms of the range and detail of his familiarity with classical sources, he may be viewed as a fifth-generation humanist. His humanism is not altogether of the cinquecento mould, for he examines the texts he quotes (Virgil, Euripedes, Stobaeus, Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch and others) not with the eye of a philologist, but with the eye of a philosopher, pillaging them for doctrines and arguments from which to construct the taxonomy of true and false philosophy which constitutes The True Intellectual System. Furthermore, the philosophers with whom Cudworth enters into dialogue include not just the classics of ancient philosophy, Aristotle no less than Plato, but also the new philosophers of the seventeenth century, especially Hobbes and Descartes, but also Spinoza, Bacon, Lord Herbert and other un-named ‘moderns’. Cudworth’s use of modern philosophy is not all negative — though he is unquestionably hostile to Hobbes and Spinoza. His receptivity to the mechanical philosophy, however, is striking, both for his adoption of fundamental tenets of Cartesian natural philosophy and his critical examination of new arguments.