The Mind Precedes Matter

When the seventeenth century began to look at the universe as a vast, ticking machine, a group of thinkers in Cambridge looked at the same gears and cogs and saw an existential threat. The rising mechanical view of nature reduced the physical world to matter in motion. To the Cambridge Platonists, this threatened to sweep spirit, morality, and God entirely out of existence.

Their defense was not to deny science, but to insist that matter is merely a shadow. Moral and mathematical principles, they argued, are eternal, self-subsistent entities that exist quite independently of physical atoms. When a human mind grasps a universal truth, it is not recording data from the senses. It is touching something permanent.

This innatist view meant that humans are born with pre-existing knowledge and mental structures already waiting in the mind. Ralph Cudworth took this a step further, proposing that individual minds are in direct contact with God's own ideas, which allows different people to perceive the exact same eternal wisdom. Henry More applied a similar logic to the living world, balking at the Cartesian notion that animals were mere clockwork automata. To More, any entity capable of initiating motion had to possess an immaterial component.

This put them at direct odds with thinkers like John Locke, who viewed the newborn mind as a blank slate waiting to be written on by experience. But for the Platonists, experience was not the author of knowledge. It was merely the occasion for the mind to remember what it already knew, keeping the eternal world firmly ahead of the physical one.