This academic group forms, as Tulloch points out, not only "one of the most characteristic groups in the history of religious and philosophical thought in England," but one of the most homogeneous. Whichcote's aphorism "There is nothing more unnatural to religion than contentions about it" sums an epoch in religious thought. Questions of Church order and Church policy were left aside, to philosophise; the clash of ecclesiastical parties ceased to trouble, and an academic enquiry into the relation of philosophy to religion takes its place. Neither Puritan nor Presbyterian had brought any such liberating attitude towards theology, for which indeed the early Protestantism cared not one jot, but which has never entirely died out of England since the speculations of the Cambridge Platonists.[417] The Englishman--fed with the crude dogmatism of Luther, the arid ecclesiasticism of Laud, the dull fancy of the Puritan, and the intolerance of all three--now for the first time was called dispassionately to consider the claims of the philosophical reason, the eternal distinction between essential and non-essential--a distinction anathema to the ordinary Protestant--fundamental and non-fundamental, between the reality and the figure; to the claims, in fine, of those ontological verities on which belief in the revealed verities ultimately depends. A "rational Christian eclecticism" was for the first time presented to Protestants, and in so far anticipated the principle upon which the problems of the present day attend for solution. The values to be assigned to the notions of "orthodoxy," of dogma--who around them had ever thought of such things before! At Oxford it has always been a question of form, of Church order; but at Cambridge a question of substance, an enquiry into the criteria of truth, the credentials of theories.
Nevertheless, the Cambridge Platonists were ineffective. Their philosophy lacked a touchstone, concentration; and they allied its fate to a ridiculous bibliology. For More, who taught at the university which gave us our school of biblical critics--Erasmus, Colenso, Westcott, Lightfoot, Hort--the wisdom of the Hebrew had been transmitted to Pythagoras, and from Pythagoras to Plato, who thus becomes the heir of divine (the Hebrew) philosophy. Such a doctrine was a serious embarrassment to a cause in the age of Hobbes; it meant that the rational and critical _criteria_ of the day went unutilised, and no doctrine can withstand such a charge. There was, too, a certain lack of the spirit of adventure, that gallant spirit which is not out of place even in philosophy, and of the courage which belongs to enthusiasm. The appeal to reason made by Hooker had debouched as Latitudinarianism; Laud and George Herbert had both opposed it; but Puritan England was stronger than both and would have none of either. The Platonists stood between them--called upon the Laudian to modify his conception of authority, upon the Puritan to admit the claims of reason, enriched Latitudinism with a philosophy. They were not listened to. None the less the _via media_ they offered has penetrated English thought. The Englishman favours reason but is no Hobbist, he must have his God behind the machine; he likes the supremacy of reason with a nebulous Plato behind it--not the real Plato, but a Plato to hurl as a weapon in the face of the materialist, without understanding too much about it. The 'Cambridge mind' hit on a middle term, a resting place for speculation and for faith, which suits the Englishman in the long run better than either Laud or Hobbes. In Cudworth we have that mind typified--that union of toleration with half lights which triumphs in England. Very bold speculation is not the Englishman's _forte_. His intellect in such _gesta_ is not clear-cut, and his practical sense is always compatible with unturned-out-corners of mysticism, prejudices, reverences false and true--all the haziness made by those useful half lights loved by a people who do not like to be mystified, but do not wish to be too much enlightened.