Ralph Cudworth

“Knowledge is not a passion of the mind, but an active exertion of the intellect.”

“For truth is the most unbending and uncompliable, the most necessary, firm, immutable, and adamantine thing in the world.”

“The soul is not a mere tabula rasa, a rasa tabula, a mere passive thing, but it is an active and energetic being.”

“Justice is not a mere name, but a real thing in nature.”

“For to know a thing is nothing else but to comprehend it by some inward ideas of the mind.”

“Atheism is a certain narrowness of soul, and littleness of mind.”

“Sense is a passion.”

“Wherefore, that which is the measure of all things, must needs be the first and oldest of all things.”

“The first and highest of all beings is a pure, simple, and unmixed mind.”

“It is not possible that things should be made by that which hath not all perfections in it.”

“Things are what they are, not what we fancy them to be; and they will be what they will be, let us imagine what we please.”

“That which is absolutely nothing can have no affections.”

“The understanding is not a mere passive thing, but it is an active and self-acting principle.”

“There is...a certain plastic nature, or vital and spiritual, but unconscious and unself-knowing energy in the world.”