"Sense is a line, the mind is a circle. Sense is like a line which is the flux of a point running out from itself, but intellect like a circle that keeps within itself"
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Cudworth draws a geometry lesson with a theological edge: sense moves, intellect holds. The line is his image for sensation because sensation is essentially outward-bound. It starts at a point - the self - and races into the world, chasing novelty, impact, data. A line can extend forever, but it never returns; it’s progress without possession. That’s the quiet indictment. If you live by sense alone, you’re always in transit, always reactive, always dependent on what’s next.
The circle, by contrast, is intellect as self-contained form. It “keeps within itself,” not in the modern, self-help way, but in the Platonic way: the mind can grasp truths that don’t need constant refreshing by external stimuli. A circle is complete, a boundary that also encloses. Cudworth is signaling that real understanding isn’t just accumulation; it’s integration. You don’t merely add impressions. You organize them into a coherent whole.
The subtext is a defense of rational spirituality in an age being reshaped by the new science and by stark theological camps. As a Cambridge Platonist, Cudworth opposed both the puritan suspicion of “pagan” reason and the emerging mechanistic picture that reduces humans to sensory machines. His metaphor argues for an inner faculty capable of moral and metaphysical knowledge - a mind that can recognize goodness and God not as sensory facts, but as intelligible realities.
It’s persuasive because the shapes do the argument’s work: the line feels restless; the circle feels finished. The reader doesn’t just understand the hierarchy Cudworth wants. They inhabit it.
The circle, by contrast, is intellect as self-contained form. It “keeps within itself,” not in the modern, self-help way, but in the Platonic way: the mind can grasp truths that don’t need constant refreshing by external stimuli. A circle is complete, a boundary that also encloses. Cudworth is signaling that real understanding isn’t just accumulation; it’s integration. You don’t merely add impressions. You organize them into a coherent whole.
The subtext is a defense of rational spirituality in an age being reshaped by the new science and by stark theological camps. As a Cambridge Platonist, Cudworth opposed both the puritan suspicion of “pagan” reason and the emerging mechanistic picture that reduces humans to sensory machines. His metaphor argues for an inner faculty capable of moral and metaphysical knowledge - a mind that can recognize goodness and God not as sensory facts, but as intelligible realities.
It’s persuasive because the shapes do the argument’s work: the line feels restless; the circle feels finished. The reader doesn’t just understand the hierarchy Cudworth wants. They inhabit it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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