verse') contended against
the 'Atheistical Fate' of Epicurus and others, he here attacks the
'Theologick Fate' (the arbitrarily omnipotent Deity) of Hobbes,
charging him with reviving exploded opinions of Protagoras and the
ancient Greeks, that take away the essential and eternal discrimination
of moral good and evil, of just and unjust.

After piling up, out of the store of his classical and scholastic
erudition, a great mass of testimony regarding all who had ever founded
distinctions of Right and Wrong upon mere arbitrary disposition,
whether of God or the State of men in general, he shadows forth his own
view. Moral Good and Evil, Just and Unjust, Honest and Dishonest (if
they be not mere names without any signification, or names for nothing
else but _Willed_ or _Commanded_, but have a reality in respect of the
persons obliged to do and to avoid them), cannot possibly be arbitrary
things, made by Will without nature; because it is universally true
that Things are what they are not by Will, but by nature. As it is the
nature of a triangle to have three angles equal to two right angles, so
it is the nature of 'good things' to have the nature of goodness, and
things just the nature of justice; and Omnipotence is no more able to
make a thing good without the fixed nature of goodness, than to make a
triangular body without the properties of a triangle, or two things
like or equal, without the natures of Likeness and Equality. The Will
of God is the supreme _efficient_ cause of all things, but not the
_formal_ cause of anything besides itself. Nor is this to be understood
as at all derogating from God's perfection; to make natural justice and
right independent of his will is merely to set his Wisdom, which is a
rule or measure, above his Will, which is something indeterminate, but
essentially regulable and measureable; and if it be the case that above
even his wisdom, and determining it in turn, stands his Infinite
Goodness, the greatest perfection of his will must lie in its being
thus twice determined.

By far the largest part of Cudworth's treatise consists of a general
metaphysical argument to establish the independence of the mind's
faculty of Knowledge, with reference to Sense and Experience. In Sense,
according to the doctrine of the old 'Atomical philosophy' (of
Democritus, Protagoras, &c.--but he thinks it must be referred back to
Moses himself!), he sees nothing but _fancies_ excited in us by local
motions in