activists overthrew the crown. Drawing on the resources of his intellectual
network, Hobbes radicalized the “mechanical philosophy” and constructed a
scientific materialism as a support for government authority and for the su-
premacy of the state over faith. In this mood of political showdown, he had
no desire to compromise with a soul substance; simultaneously he carved out
a distinctive intellectual space for himself against Descartes and against the
religiously oriented scientists then forming the Invisible College.
Hobbes’s connections with the king after the Restoration gave him protec-
tion, but his position was too offensive to religious policies to be accepted
(Shapin and Schaffer, 1985: 133, 293–296). Hobbes’s creativity reflected the
period of exile in the somewhat cynical atmosphere of Richelieu and Mazarin’s
Paris. But it was English politics that anchored him, as we can see by compari-
son with La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes, which were germinated around the
same time, in the late 1650s. La Rochefoucauld had much the same viewpoint
on self-interest as the springs of action; but he made no effort to develop his
argument into a system, and he ignored its consequences for politics. The
French version is a literary amusement, politely accepting the religious status
quo; the English version makes claims for an intellectual and political reor-
ganization.
In counterpoint to this materialism was the upsurge of mystical Neopla-
tonism at Cambridge. This circle was organized in 1633, as relations between
Parliament and king broke down and hysteria grew over the possible reestab-
lishment of Catholicism. The Platonists, like Cambridge University gener-
ally, were strongly identified with Puritans and the Commonwealth. Their
intellectual distinction was that they were a moderate offshoot of the Calvin-
ists, inclined to Latitudinarianism and tolerance, downplaying doctrinal ques-
tions in favor of morality and Plotinine contemplation of divine reality. Neo-
platonism did not make for very orthodox theology, since it undercut the
particularistic elements of dogma; and its previous appearance in Italy with
Ficino had a decidedly cosmopolitan slant. Under current conditions, though,
the Platonists came to occupy a defensive stance against secular intellectual
currents.
The philosophical creativity of the group did not appear until after the
Restoration, in the 1660s and 1670s. An impetus was the growing fame of
Hobbes’s materialism. Ralph Cudworth, in The True Intellectual System of the
Universe (1678), took the offensive against Hobbes and Gassendi, declaring
that materialism reduces to sensationalism, and that the senses are too decep-
tive, as Plato showed, to be the basis of knowledge. Our true ideas are of things
imperceptible to the senses, including the idea of a perfect Being. Earlier,
Cudworth and More had been relatively favorable to the Cartesians, with
whom they had had friendly correspondence; but now they turned against596 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths