Ralph Cudworth, Cambridge Platonist, born in 1617 at Aller in Somerset, where his father was rector, Cudworth was brought up as a Puritan.  He became Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, was later Master of Clare Hall, Regius professor of Hebrew, and in 1654 Master of Christ's College - a position he held until his death in 1688.  He also held the livings of North Cadbury from 1650, and of Ashwell from 1622.

Cudworth is considered perhaps the most distinguished representative of the Cambridge Platonists. His chief work is "The True Intellectual System of the Universe".  Here he argued that religious truth was embodied in three great principles: the reality of the supreme Divine intelligence and the spiritual world which that intelligence has created, the eternal reality of moral ideas, and the reality of moral freedom and responsibility. 

Soul and Body:
    "The ancient philosophers were induced to assert the soul's immortality, together with its incorporeality or distinctness from body.  No substantial entity ever vanisheth of itself into nothing.  But the soul is a substantial entity, really distinct from the body, and not the mere modification of it; and therefore when a man dies, his soul must still have being...

That soul and life that is now fled and gone from a lifeless carcass, is only a loss to that particular body or compages of matter, which by means thereof is now disanimated; but it is no loss to the whole, it being transposed in the universe, and lodged somewhere else.

     It is further evident that this same principle which thus led the ancients to hold the soul's immortality, or its future permanency after death, must needs determine them likewise to maintain its pre-existence, for these two things were always included together in that one opinion of the soul's immortality, namely its pre-existence as well as its post-existence..."

©   The Shrine of Wisdom, extract from The Shrine of Wisdom magazine No.106, 1945 

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