Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/725

CUDWORTH necessarily, including necessary and eternal self-existence in its own nature. There is nothing, however, it is argued, which contains necessary eternal existence in its own nature or essence, but only an absolutely perfect Being, all imperfect things being in their nature contingently possible, either to be or not to be. Hence a perfect Being, or God, existed of himself from eternity. The third argu ment is founded on the very nature of knowledge. It is that knowledge is possible only through ideas which must have their source in an eternal reason. Sense is not only not the whole of knowledge, but is in itself not at all knowledge; it is wholly relative and individual, and not knowledge until the mind adds to it what is absolute and universal. Knowledge does not begin with what is individual but with what is universal. The individual is known by being brought under a universal instead of the universal being gathered from a multitude of individuals. And these universals, vo?;/xara, or i 7 .eas, which underlie all the knowledge of all men, which originate it, and do not originate in it, have existed eternally in the only mode is. which truths can be said to be eternal, in an eternal mind. They come to us from an Eternal Mind, which is their proper home, and of which human reason is an emanation. " From whence it cometh to pass, that all minds, in the several places and ages of the world, have ideas or notions of things exactly alike, and truths indivisibly the same. Truths are not multiplied by the diversity of minds that apprehend them ; because they are all but ectypal partici pations of one and the same original or archetypal mind and truth. As the same face may be reflected in several glasses, and the image of the same sun may be in a thousand eyes at once beholding it, and one and the same voice may be in a thousand ears listening to it, so when innumerable created minds have the same ideas of things, and understand the same truths, it is but one and the same eternal light that is rcflecte:! in them all ( that light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world ), or the same voice of that one everlasting Word, that is never silent, re-echoed by them." In different forms and with different references this argument is to be found in Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Malebranche, Bossuet, Fenelon, Cousin, and Ferrier. The Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality deals with the second form of fatalism. Over against the assertion that all moral good and evil ii arbitrary and fac titious, not by nature but by law, there 13 placed the directly contradictory proposition, nothing is morally good or evil by mere will without nature. Whatever b at all must be what it is not by will but by nature. Omnipotence itself cannot set aside this condition, cannot do what is contra dictory ; and contradictory it is that things should be what they are not, should be indifferently anything, either this or that, round or square, white or black, according to mere will and pleasure. And " things may as well be made white or black by mere will without whiteness or blackness, equal and unequal without equality and inequality, as morally good and evil, just and unjust, honest and dishonest, by raere will, without any nature of goodness, justice, honesty." The existence of merely positive duties, the fact that certain commands carry with them an obliga tory force, and that it u often wrong to do a thing which Las been forbidden although it would have been otherwise quite legitimate, is argued to be no exception to this truth, since in all such cases the obligation springs not from mere will but from a deeper source, from an underly ing natural justice or equity, which is the true foundation both of the right in a superior to command and of obliga tion in an inferior to obey. Cudworth is thus led to dis criminate precisely natural from positive right. Things naturally good are those which the reason obliges us to immediately, absolutely, and perpetually, and on no con dition of any voluntary act that may be done or omitted intervening ; things positively good are those which the reason obliges to only through the intervention of some such act bringing them under some rule of natural justice. But even the things which thus pass from being indifferent to being positively right or wrong are strictly speaking only brought into r. new relation to us, and have not a new nature bestowed on themselves. They remain in themselves what they were, indifferent, neither good nor evil. And any moral character vhich may be ascribed to the doing of them consists not in v.-hat is done, but in a regard to the natural right which dictates fidelity to engagements and submission to just authorities. Will thus carries with it no creative moral force, as mere will, indeed, no moral force whatever. Cudworth completes his proof of this position by a refutation of the opinion that rectitude, although not dependent on the will of the creature, depends on the mere will of the Creator. He argues that it represents what is really a contradiction to be the object of divine power. He further insists that there is in God a wisdom superior to His will and a good ness superior to His wisdom ; that the perfection of will is to be thus twice determined, first by wisdom and then by goodness, first by truth and then by righteousness. That moral distinctions are arbitrary, grounded not in reality but in will, Cudworth saw was the necessary consequence of a belief that all cognizable distinctions are arbitrary, that all being and knowledge are relative, having no real existence in themselves but only an existence of appearance relative to something else. He perceived with perfect clearness that unless there is an absolute in knowledge there can be no absolute in morals. The larger portion of his treatise is, in consequence, an examination into the nature of sense and knowledge, designed to prove that sense is not knowledge ; that sense is a confused percep tion obtruded on the soul from without, whereas knowledge is an inward native energy of the mind, not arising from things acting from without ; that even simple corporeal things, passively perceived by sense, are known or under stood only by the active power of the mind ; that some ideas of the mind proceed not from outward sensible things, but arise from the inward activity of the mind itself ; that the intelligible notions of things, though existing only in the mind, are not figments of the mind, but have an immutable nature ; that science or knowledge is the only firm thing in the universe. Among the ideas not drawn from sense but imposed by reason on particular acts, Cudworth places the conceptions of moral good and evil. These, like other noemata, are necessary, eternal, and immutable. They are not created by reason but essential to reason. Reason does not find them, but brings them with it. Reason, however, and not sense or feeling of any kind, is their organon. Sense apprehends in the imperfect way it does only through the working of reason ; feeling is ever varying and individual. Sense is altogether blind to whatever partakes of the necessary ; feeling is in no direct contact with what really and absolutely is. Adam Smith and many others have pronounced this conclusion absurd and unintelligible, without attending to the cir cumstance that Cudworth has at least endeavoured, and laboriously endeavoured, to show by his examination of sense and knowledge that what is really altogether absurd and unintelligible is that mere sense should give u& any knowledge whatever, that sense should ever rise to the rank of perception until reason has brought its object under some universal category. In the tractate on free-will he endeavours to establish that man possesses a contingent or fortuitous liberty of self -

determination when there is a perfect equality of objects