Ralph Cudworth Quotes on Mind
Ralph Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) and the posthumously published Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731) gave the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonist tradition its most ambitious systematic philosophy of mind. The central commitments — against the rising mechanistic materialism of Hobbes and the broader Cartesian tradition — are that the human mind is an active spiritual substance whose innate intellectual constitution supplies the necessary conditions of intelligibility (the natural notions through which experience is structured), and that the broader plastic nature mediating between the divine intellect and the mechanical operations of physical bodies cannot be eliminated from the proper philosophical account of nature. The framework, integrating the Platonic and Plotinian inheritance with the seventeenth-century natural-philosophical context, shaped the subsequent rationalist and idealist traditions and the contemporary historiographical recovery of Cambridge Platonism.
Quotes
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Attributed to Ralph Cudworth:
“Mind is older than matter.”
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Attributed to Ralph Cudworth:
“The wise see God in everything; the foolish see nothing of him at all.”
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“The best assurance any one can have of his interest in God, is doubtless the conformity of his soul to Him. When our heart is once turned into a conformity with the mind of God. when we feel our will conformed to His will, we shall then presently perceive a spirit of adoption within ourselves, teaching us to say, "Abba, Father.”
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 16 -
“The true knowledge or science which exists nowhere but in the mind itself, has no other entity at all besides intelligibility; and therefore whatsoever is clearly intelligible, is absolutely true.”
Ch. 5, sct. 7 -
“Knowledge is not a passion from without the mind, but an active exertion of the inward strength, vigour and power of the mind, displaying itself from within.”
Ch. 1, sct. 1 -
“If intellection and knowledge were mere passion from without, or the bare reception of extraneous and adventitious forms, then no reason could be given at all why a mirror or looking-glass should not understand; whereas it cannot so much as sensibly perceive those images which it receives and reflects to us.”
Ch. 1, sct. 3