What if the World Is Run by Spirits?

Imagine you’re sitting in your room, trying to figure out whether something is right or wrong. Maybe your friend just told a lie to avoid getting in trouble, and now you’re wondering: is lying always wrong, or does it depend on the situation? Now imagine someone says, “It’s wrong because God says so.” But then you think: wait—does God say it’s wrong because it’s already wrong, or is it wrong only because God says so?

That’s a puzzle that philosophers argue about even today. And a group of thinkers in seventeenth-century England—the Cambridge Platonists—had a very strong opinion about it. They believed that goodness and truth don’t depend on anyone’s commands, not even God’s. Right and wrong are real things, built into the universe itself. And they thought the way we know this is through reason—the same kind of thinking you use to solve a math problem or figure out a strategy in a game.

But they went even further. They also thought the entire world is run by spirits. Not ghosts in the scary sense, but invisible, intelligent forces that give life and order to everything. This wasn’t just a religious idea to them—it was a philosophical argument against people who said that everything in the universe is just dead matter bumping into other dead matter. The Cambridge Platonists thought that if you look closely enough at the world, you’ll see that mind comes before matter. And that changes everything about how you understand right and wrong, freedom, and even what it means to be human.

The Big Problem: Are Goodness and Truth Real?

The seventeenth century was a time of huge turmoil in England. There was a civil war, a king was executed, and people were arguing violently about religion and politics. Into this chaos came a group of thinkers at Cambridge University who wanted to defend a simple but radical idea: reason and faith are not enemies. You don’t have to switch off your brain to believe in God or to know what’s right.

Their main target was a view called “voluntarism.” That’s the idea that something is good simply because God commands it. If God commanded murder, it would be good. If he commanded lying, that would be good too. According to this view, right and wrong have no reality of their own—they’re just whatever a powerful being decides.

The Cambridge Platonists thought this was disastrous. Benjamin Whichcote, the oldest member of the group, put it this way: God is supremely perfect, which means he is necessarily good and wise and loving. He can’t command evil because that would go against his own nature. Goodness isn’t something God makes up—it’s part of what God is. And because God made the universe to reflect his wisdom, goodness and truth are built into the world itself.

Ralph Cudworth, another key figure in the group, pushed this argument even further. In his book A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, he argued that moral principles don’t depend on anyone’s will—not even God’s. The criteria of right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice are not matters of convention. They’re as real as mathematical truths. Two plus two equals four whether God wills it or not. And cruelty is wrong whether God wills it or not.

This reminds me of an ancient puzzle in philosophy called the Euthyphro dilemma (named after a dialogue by Plato). It goes like this: either something is good because God commands it, or God commands it because it’s good. If the first option is true, then good is arbitrary—God could command anything and it would be good. If the second option is true, then good exists independently of God, which raises the question of where it comes from. The Cambridge Platonists chose a third path: they said that goodness is part of God’s own nature, so there’s no conflict. God’s commands and goodness are the same thing, but not because God just decides what’s good. Goodness flows from God’s very being.

How Do We Know What’s Right and True?

Okay, so goodness is real. But how do we know it? If moral truths exist independently, we need some way to access them. The Cambridge Platonists had a very specific answer: we’re born with the ability to recognize them.

This is called “innatism”—the idea that the mind is not a blank slate. You don’t learn everything from experience. You come into the world already equipped with certain ideas and principles, like tools in a toolbox. According to Cudworth, human minds contain the imprint of Divine wisdom and knowledge. When you recognize that something is wrong, you’re not just following rules you were taught. You’re using an innate sense that mirrors the mind of God.

This doesn’t mean you’re born knowing everything. Cudworth compared it to learning to read. You can’t read a book unless you already know how to read—you need the skill before you can use it. In the same way, you can’t make sense of the world unless your mind already has the basic tools for understanding. The world is like a book written by God, and our minds are designed to read it.

Henry More, the most prolific of the Cambridge Platonists, developed this idea further. He argued that the concept of “spirit” or “soul” is just as intelligible as the concept of “body.” Materialists—people who think only physical matter exists—claim that bodies are easy to understand because they’re extended in space, solid, and divisible. But More turned this around. He said that spirit is also extended in space, but in the opposite way: it’s active, penetrable, and indivisible. So if you can understand body, you can understand spirit too. They’re two sides of the same coin.

This part gets a bit technical, but here’s what it accomplishes: More wanted to show that believing in invisible, intelligent forces isn’t less rational than believing in matter. Both are concepts we can grasp. And once you accept that spiritual substances exist, it’s a short step to accepting an infinite spirit—which is what we call God.

The Spirit of Nature and the Plastic Life

So the world is full of spirits. But what does that mean in practice? The Cambridge Platonists thought it explained a lot of things that mechanical physics couldn’t.

Henry More proposed something he called the “Spirit of Nature” (or the “Hylarchic Principle”). This is an invisible, intelligent force that acts as an interface between God and the material world. It’s responsible for making sure the universe runs smoothly according to God’s plan. It unites souls with bodies, ensures the regular operation of non-living nature, and accounts for phenomena that seem to defy purely mechanical laws—like the motion of comets, the sympathetic vibration of strings on a musical instrument, or the rise and fall of tides.

Cudworth had a similar idea he called the “Plastic Life of Nature.” For him, this was a formative principle that acts as an intermediary between the divine and the natural world. It’s the means by which God imprints his presence on creation and makes his wisdom and goodness visible everywhere in nature. Think of it as a kind of living force that shapes and organizes the world without needing to think about it consciously—like your body knows how to heal a cut without you having to command each cell.

Why did they need these ideas? Because they thought the alternative was worse. If you explain everything in the universe as just dead matter bumping into other dead matter by accident, then there’s no room for purpose, meaning, or morality. The universe becomes a pointless machine. The Cambridge Platonists believed that mind comes first—that intelligence and purpose are built into the very fabric of reality.

Freedom and Responsibility

If the world is run by spirits, what does that mean for human beings? One thing it means is that we’re not just puppets. We have free will.

Cudworth wrote extensively about this. He argued that the soul has the power to direct itself toward the good. The will isn’t a separate part of you that just makes random choices. It’s an integrated power of the whole person—combining reason, desire, and the ability to act. He called this the “hegemonikon,” which is Greek for “the governing part.” It’s not just your mind or your soul. It’s you—the whole person, the thing you mean when you say “I.”

This matters because without freedom, there’s no moral responsibility. If your actions are completely determined by forces outside your control—whether physical forces, God’s will, or your own nature—then you can’t be praised or blamed for what you do. You’re just a machine going through the motions. But Cudworth believed that moral conduct is active, not passive. Virtuous action requires internal self-determination, not determination from outside.

Henry More agreed. In his ethics textbook Enchiridion Ethicum (which means “Handbook of Ethics”), he argued that virtue involves controlling your passions through reason. But he also thought we have a special faculty he called the “Boniform Faculty”—a combination of reason and sensation that lets us recognize and love the good directly. It’s not just knowing what’s right; it’s feeling drawn to it.

Why This Matters Now

The Cambridge Platonists were fighting battles that seem ancient—against atheists, materialists, and people who thought religion and reason were enemies. But their ideas still echo today.

Every time someone says that morality is just a matter of personal opinion or cultural convention, they’re taking a position the Cambridge Platonists would have rejected. Every time someone argues that the universe is meaningless and we have to create our own values, they’re disagreeing with the idea that goodness is built into reality itself. And every time you stop and think about whether something is truly right or wrong—not just because someone told you so, but because you can see it for yourself—you’re using the kind of reason the Cambridge Platonists thought was our birthright.

They didn’t win the argument. Materialism and voluntarism are still around. But their challenge remains: if right and wrong aren’t real, what’s to stop anyone from doing anything? And if the universe is just dead matter, why does anything matter at all?

Appendices

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Voluntarism	The view that something is good or true only because God (or some authority) commands it
Innatism	The idea that the mind is born with certain ideas or knowledge, not blank at birth
Materialism	The belief that only physical matter exists—no spirits, souls, or invisible forces
Spirit of Nature / Plastic Life	The Cambridge Platonists’ idea of an invisible intelligent force that organizes the universe
Hegemonikon	The integrated power of the whole person that combines reason, will, and desire into self-directed action
Boniform Faculty	Henry More’s name for a special ability to recognize and love the good, combining reason and feeling

Key People

Benjamin Whichcote – The founding father of the Cambridge Platonists, who argued that God is necessarily good and that reason and faith are compatible
Ralph Cudworth – The most systematic thinker of the group, who argued that moral principles are eternal and that the mind is born with the ability to recognize truth and goodness
Henry More – The most prolific writer of the group, who argued for the existence of spirits and proposed the Spirit of Nature as the force organizing the universe

Things to Think About

If goodness is built into the universe, then anyone with reason should be able to recognize it. But people disagree about what’s right and wrong all the time. Does that mean there’s no single truth? Or does it mean some people just see it more clearly than others?
The Cambridge Platonists believed in free will. But if the universe is run by spirits following God’s plan, are we really free? Or is our freedom just an illusion that makes us feel responsible?
Henry More believed in witches and evil spirits. He thought denying their existence led logically to denying God’s existence. Today, most people don’t believe in witches. Does that mean we’ve lost something important about how we understand the world?
If you were born knowing the difference between right and wrong, where would that knowledge come from? Evolution? God? The structure of the universe? And how could you prove it?

Where This Shows Up

Moral arguments in public debates – When people say “this is just my opinion” versus “this is objectively wrong,” they’re replaying the Cambridge Platonists’ argument about whether morality is real or invented
Arguments about free will – Every time someone debates whether criminals “could have done otherwise” or whether our choices are determined by biology and environment, the same issues arise
The “science vs. religion” debate – The Cambridge Platonists rejected the idea that reason and faith are enemies; that position is still argued today by people who think you don’t have to choose between thinking and believing
Artificial intelligence – If machines can think, do they have minds? Are they just matter acting mechanically? These questions echo More’s and Cudworth’s arguments about whether mind can be reduced to matter