Page "Ralph Cudworth" Paragraph 11

These three together make up the intellectual ( as opposed to the physical ) system of the universe ; and they are opposed respectively by three false principles, atheism, religious fatalism which refers all moral distinctions to the will of God, and thirdly the fatalism of the ancient Stoics, who recognized God and yet identified Him with nature.

The immense fragment dealing with atheism is all that was published by its author.

Cudworth criticizes two main forms of materialistic atheism, the atomic, adopted by Democritus, Epicurus and Hobbes ; and the hylozoic, attributed to Strato of Lampsacus, which explains everything by the supposition of an inward self-organizing life in matter.

Atomic atheism is by far the more important, if only because Hobbes, the great antagonist whom Cudworth always has in view, is supposed to have held it.

It arises out of the combination of two principles, neither of which is atheistic taken separately, i. e. atomism and corporealism, or the doctrine that nothing exists but body.

The example of Stoicism, as Cudworth points out, shows that corporealism may be theistic.