Master of Christ's College, Cambridge, he led the Cambridge Platonists, a circle that defended reason as a gift of God in the middle of England's religious wars. Against Hobbes and the materialists of his day, he wrote a huge defense of a spiritual, intelligible universe, and argued that right and wrong are fixed by the nature of things, not by power or command.
Core ideas
Moral truths are eternal and unchangeable, like the truths of mathematics.
The universe is the work of a mind, not the blind clash of atoms.
Human freedom is real: we can direct ourselves toward the good.
The tradition: Cambridge Platonism
Cambridge Platonism joined Christian faith with the reason of Plato and Plotinus in 17th century England. Cudworth was its most systematic thinker.
