Descartes as the enemy of religious faith. Cudworth rejected Descartes’s di-
chotomy between spiritual and material worlds, in favor of a “ladder of
perfections in the universe” through which things are produced by a descent
from higher to lower (quoted in Copleston, 1950–1977: 5:60). Henry More,
who wrote in the form of poetic allegories, described the world as animated
by a world-soul, God’s instrument. This was not a rejection of scientific
explanations but a rival to the mechanistic philosophy then coming to the fore;
the world-soul offered a non-materialist explanation of magnetism and gravity.
More argued in 1671 that Descartes’s geometric interpretation of nature im-
plies the existence of an absolute space; and this cannot be an attribute of
things but is an intelligible reality in itself, a shadow counterpart of the Divine.
Contrary to Descartes’s definitions, More asserts that not only matter but also
spirits are extended (Copleston, 1950–1977: 5:64; Funkenstein, 1986: 77–80).
The Cambridge Platonists are structurally one of the pivot points of British
intellectual life. From them we can trace the network in Figure 10.1 in several
directions: on one side, Locke’s sensualist empiricism as well as Shaftesbury’s
revival of innate moral ideas; on the other, the series of reconceptualizations
of religious turf represented by Newton and Berkeley. These trains of develop-
ment should not be too surprising, for the Platonists formulated most of the
issues which Locke and Newton would develop, if with the significant reversals
of emphasis which are characteristic of chains of intellectual creativity. Cud-
worth pointedly raised the issue of sensualism; and he explicitly denied, using
the very image that Locke was to make famous, that the mind is merely a
“white sheet of paper that hath nothing at all in it, but what was scribbled
upon it by the objects of sense” (quoted in Copleston, 1950–1977: 5:61). Ideas
are not abstracted from objects but are merely awakened by them; nor does
sensation give the essence of things or of scientific laws. Locke was to agree
with the last point but in a moderated form, giving up essences in favor of the
probabilistic knowledge yielded by the senses; for the other points, Locke could
have found many of his formulations by reversing Cudworth’s position.^14
Creativity is structured by opposition.
Locke was personally connected to the Platonist circle. Its leader, Whichcote
(61 in Figure 10.1), was Locke’s favorite preacher in London. His friends
during exile in Holland were their friends. In his later years Locke lived with
Cudworth’s daughter, Lady Masham (Fraser, [1894] 1959: xxxiii–xxxv). Like
them, Locke strongly favored religious moderation and toleration and opposed
doctrinal strife. This political stance shaped Locke’s entire career. Locke was
associated with the innovative milieu of Boyle and the Invisible College at
Oxford in the 1650s, but these early scientific contacts did not arouse his
energy, and his academic career was undistinguished; he left in 1667 to become
personal physician to the first earl of Shaftesbury, a position he held until
Secularization and Philosophical Meta-territoriality • 597