This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1867 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER V. THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS. "while the Cartesian philosophy was thus spreading on the Continent and in England, a fresh source of intellectual activity was developing itself in that very remarkable school, which, confined chiefly to our own University, exercised, during a considerable part of the century, no small influence over her most studious and thoughtful minds. At first sight it would seem singular that there should be any sympathy whatever between a school of thought which was little more than a re-construction out of the philosophy of the past, --of that section of ancient philosophy moreover of which most modern thinkers are apt to speak with least tolerance, --and a system professedly hostile to all earlier modes of speculation, and which aimed at effecting a total revolution in the whole domain of philosophic research. Beyond the essentially subjective cha-Neo-putoracter which belonged alike to the philosophy of Descartes nlm and that of Henry More, there would appear indeed to have been little in common save dissatisfaction with the existing state of things. The Platonism of the seventeenth century was not simply a revival of a past school of thought, but it was also an avowed declaration against Calvinistic doctrines and Aristotelian dogmas., More has sufficiently indicated this fact in his own narrative of himself. "But neither there" (at school), says he, "nor yet anywhere else could I ever swallow down that hard doctrine con cerning fate. On the contrary, I remember that upon those words of Epictetas, "Aye fie 3 Zev, teat av ij ire- irpapivt, Lead me, O Jupiter, and thou Fate, I did (with my eldest brother, who then, as it happened, had accompanied my uncle thither), very stoutly and earnestly for my years, ...