Page:Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography Volume 1.pdf/1224

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position as an original investigator; and his analysis of the blue colouring principles of that dyestuff, though made at a time when the appliances for organic research were inferior to those at present in use, is still regarded and quoted as the most satisfactory yet obtained. Several of his inquiries were directed to the application of chemistry to the industrial arts; and among them his method of examining weak solutions of bleaching powder is deserving of notice as an ingenious instance of chromatic testing. In his last and most elaborate investigation, he described one insoluble hydrate, two insoluble binacetates of alumina, and made known a remarkable allotropic of that base, which is soluble in water, gelatinized by acids, and devoid of power as a mordant. In 1852 he was chosen president of the Glasgow Philosophical Society, and subsequently of the Andersonian University. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of London, and a member of several other scientific bodies. He died on the 4th of May, 1867.—F. P.

CTESIAS, a celebrated physician, a native of Cnidus in Caria, a famed seat of medical knowledge. He was a contemporary of Xenophon. He was for about seventeen years resident at the court of Artaxerxes Mnemon, in Persia, as private physician. How he came there is not certain. Diodorus says he was a prisoner of war, retained and honoured because of his medical s kill. The manner of his leaving, too, is disputed. He states himself that, desiring to return to his native city, he asked and obtained leave of the king. Ctesias wrote a great history of Persia, long since lost—there are fragments of it in Diodorus, Athenæus, Plutarch, &c.; and a treatise on India. Of this, as of the other, there is an abridgment in Photius.—J. B.

CUBIÈRES, Simon Louis Pierre, Marquis de, a French naturalist, was born at Roquemaure on 12th October, 1747, and died at Paris on 10th August, 1821. He was first a page of Louis XV., then a captain of cavalry. He was a man of the world and a courtier, and at the same time devoted attention to science. He had a good mineralogical collection, a chemical laboratory, and a small botanic garden. He made an excursion to Rome and Naples, and descended into the crater of Vesuvius. He also visited Sweden, and examined the scientific collections there. He accompanied Louis XVI. to Paris on 6th October, 1789, and on that occasion his hat was struck by a bullet intended for the king. He was afterwards imprisoned at Versailles. On his release, he went to Rome as one of the commissioners appointed to preside over the conveyance of the works of art in painting and sculpture; and he subsequently was appointed conservator of the statues in the Versailles garden.—J. H. B.

CUDWORTH, the famous philosopher, was born at Aller in Somersetshire in 1617. His father, rector of the parish, having died, his mother was married to Dr. Stoughton, under whose care his young step-son was so well prepared for the university, that in his thirteenth year he was admitted into Emanuel college, Cambridge. In 1632 he matriculated, was created M.A. in 1639, and soon after chosen a fellow. Such was his rising fame, that in a short time the number of his pupils exceeded all precedent, the famous Sir William Temple being one of them; and in 1641 he was presented to the rectory of North Cadbury in Somersetshire. In 1642 he published a discourse concerning "The true nature of the Lord's Supper," and another called "The Union of Christ and the Church Shadowed." In 1648 Cudworth took the degree of B.D., and was chosen master of Clare-hall, his predecessor having been dispossessed by the parliamentary visitors. In the following year he became regius professor of Hebrew, and now devoted himself to academical labours, and especially to the study of Hebrew antiquities. In March, 1647, he preached before the house of commons, and his sermon, on John ii. 3, 4, received the thanks of the house, and was afterwards published. In 1651 he took the degree of D.D. Shortly afterwards he left the university for a season, pecuniary difficulties being usually alleged as the cause; but he returned after three years' absence, having in 1654 been chosen master of Christ's college. In 1657 he was appointed one of a committee for the revision of the English translation of the bible, but, as Whitelocke records in his Memorials, "it became fruitless by the parliament's dissolution." Through his intimacy with Thurloe, Cromwell's private secretary, he was often consulted by the Protector on university matters. But his loyalty was only in suspension, and on the restoration of Charles II. he wrote a Latin ode of welcome. In 1662 the bishop of London presented him to the rectory of Ashwell in Hertfordshire, and in 1678 he was installed a prebendary of Gloucester. It was in this year, 1678, that Cudworth published at London in folio his "True Intellectual System of the Universe, wherein all the reason and philosophy of Atheism is confuted, and its impossibility demonstrated." The imprimatur is dated in 1671, for the publication had been virulently opposed by some parties at court. This huge and erudite work is only a fragment. There are three false theories of the universe, or three prevalent modes of atheism, or as he says, "Fatalists that hold the necessity of human actions may be reduced to three heads: 1st, Such as, asserting the Deity, suppose it irrespectively to decree and determine all things, and thereby make all actions necessary to us. 2nd, Such as suppose a Deity that, acting wisely but necessarily, did contrive the general frame of things in the world, from whence by a series of causes doth unavoidably result whatever is done in it. And lastly. Such as hold the material necessity of all things without a Deity." These propositions are discussed in the inverse order in which the author has stated them; and it is the last of them—atheistic fatalism—which occupies that portion of the "Intellectual System" which was published by its author. The "Treatise on Eternal and Immutable Morality," published after his death, seems to be the sketch of the second division; and the "Discourse on Liberty and Necessity" was apparently the rough outline of the third part. The most important of his works—that on which its author laid the greatest stress, and over which he had longest pondered was thus never completed. In the first chapter of the "Intellectual System" Cudworth describes the old philosophy, affirming it to be theistic prior to the time of Democritus and his atomic physiology, and there is a long and learned history of the theory. In the second are rehearsed the arguments made in defence of it. In the third he passes to what he calls the hylozoic atheism, that especially of Strato, who held that a species of life without intelligence pervaded matter—"whatever is being made by certain inward natural forces and activities." The fourth chapter "swells," as he says himself, "into a disproportionate bigness," and enters into a long and very laboured argument filled with diversified proofs and criticisms, that the unity or "oneliness" of the divine essence was a common belief in antiquity. Many of the exegetical remarks are acute and powerfully supported, though not a few are recondite and fanciful, resting on expressions which are sometimes casual and not to be insisted on, and sometimes poetical and not to be taken as sober and formal avowals of belief or opinion. There may be seen in these discussions the unconscious effort which a theorist often puts forth in tenaciously grasping at what is apparently for him, and in cunningly explaining away what is hostile to his purpose. Some of his most ingenious paragraphs are rather specimens of imposition than exposition, of imposing a sense rather than educing it. The last chapter, which is somewhat miscellaneous, readduces previous objections, and answers them; restating in other forms arguments already employed, but yet giving utterance to more original thought than is found in the previous portions of the work. In the second treatise—"On Eternal and Immutable Morality," Cudworth manifests his hostility to every form of materialism, holding that the mind possesses pure conceptions which are not "phantastical" or derived from the senses, but are themselves eternal truths. Among these are the conceptions of right and wrong, and they are not "unreal," as Hobbes maintained, because they were not perceptible by the senses; but they must have existed for ever in the divine mind, and are, therefore, as little liable to change or destruction as is the Supreme Intelligence. Cudworth, therefore, infers that those are little better than atheists who preach that God may command what is contrary to moral rules; and says truly, "That nothing which is naturally just or unjust can be made so by mere authority." Sound theism must maintain that God is unchangeably good, and holy; and that all his commands must resemble their source, the "law being holy, and just, and good." In all moral as distinct from positive duties, the statute pronounced by the divine will has its deep and immovable foundation in the divine nature. To men the expressed will of God is the rule of duty, but the ultimate basis of obligation lies in his pure and unchanging essence.

The learning in which Cudworth's idealism is set, is vast and multifarious. He was at home in every region of the classics, and he quotes them with a prolix exuberance which often retards