407 COMMONWEALTH. WHEN the term commonwealth deeply occupied the minds of men, they had formed no settled notions about the thing itself; the term became equivocal, of such wide signification that it was misunderstood and misapplied, and always ambiguous; and a confusion of words led many writers into a confusion of notions. The term commonweal, or wealth, indeed appears in our statutes, in the speeches of our monarchs, and in the political works of our writers, long before the idea of a republic, in its popular sense, was promulgated by the votaries of democracy. The term commonweal explains itself; it specifies no particular polity but the public weal; and even the term republic originally meant nothing more than res publicæ, or the affairs of the public." Sir Thomas Smith, the learned secretary to Elizabeth, who has written on the English constitution, entitles his work "The Commonwealth of England." James the First justly called himself "the great servant of the commonwealth." The commonwealth, meaning the kingdom of England, is the style of all the learned in law. The ambiguity of the term commonwealth soon caused it to be perverted by the advocates of popular government, who do not distinguish the state from the people; this appears as early as the days of Rawleigh, who tells us, that "the government of all the common and baser sort is by a usurped nick-name called a COMMONWEALTH.”* It was in the revolutionary period of Charles the First Rawleigh's "Remains." that the terms commonwealth and commonwealthman were adopted by the governing party; as precisely describing their purity of devotion to the public weal. In the temper of the times the commonwealth became opposed to the monarchy, and the commonwealthman to the royalist. Cromwell ironically asked what was a commonwealth? Affecting an ignorance of the term. When Baxter wrote his "Holy Commonwealth" against Harrington's "Heathenish Commonwealth" he had said, “I plead the cause of monarchy as better than democracy or aristocracy." Toland, a commonwealthman in the new sense, referring to Baxter's work, exclaims that "a monarchy is an odd way of modelling a commonwealth." Baxter alluded to an English commonwealth, in its primitive sense, and Toland restricted the term to its modern application. Indeed Toland exults in the British constitution being a commonwealth in the popular sense, in his preface to his edition of Harrington's works, and has the merit of bringing forward as his authority the royal name of James the First, and which afterward seems to have struck Locke as so apposite that he condescended to repeat it. The passage in Toland is curious: "It is undeniably manifest that the English government is already a commonwealth the most free and best constituted in the world. This was frankly acknowledged by King James the First, who styled himself the great servant of the commonwealth." One hardly suspected a republican of gravely citing the authority of the royal sage, on any position! The restoration made the term commonwealthman odious as marking out a class of citizens, in hostility to the government; and commonwealth seems, in any sense, to have long continued such an offensive word that it required the nicest delicacy to handle it. The use of the term has even drawn an apology from Locke himself when writing on "government." "By commonwealth," says our philosophical politician, "I must be understood all along to mean, not a democracy, but any independent community, which the Latins signified by the word civitas, to which the word which best answers in our language is commonwealth." However, Locke does not close his sentence without some trepidation for the use of an unequivocal term, obnoxious even under the new monarchy of the revolution. "To avoid ambiguity I crave leave to use the word commonwealth in that sense in which I find it used by King James the First, and I take it to be its genuine signification which if anybody dislike, I consent with him to change it for a better !" An ample apology! but one which hardly suits the dignity of a philosophical writer. VOL. II.-35 4.10 THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF It is only in the silence of seclusion that we should open the awful tomb of "The True Intellectual System of the Universe" of Ralph Cudworth. The history and the fate of this extraordinary result of human knowledge and of sublime metaphysics, are not the least remarkable in the philosophy of bibliography. The first intention of the author of this elaborate and singular work, was a simple inquisition into the nature of that metaphysical necessity or destiny which has been introduced into the systems of both philosophy and religion, wherein man is left an irresponsible agent in his actions, and is nothing more than the blind instrument of inevitable events over which he holds no control. This system of "necessity" or fate our inquirer traced to three different systems, maintained on distinct principles. The ancient democratic or atomical physiology endows inert matter with a motive power. It views a creation, and a continued creation, without a creator. The disciple of this system is as one who cannot read, who would only perceive lines and scratches in the fairest volume, while the more learned comprehend its large and legible characters; in the mighty volume of nature, the mind discovers what the sense may not, and reads "those sensible delineations by its own inward activity," which wisdom and power have with their divinity written on every page. The absurd system of the atomist or the mere materialist Cudworth names the atheistic. * My copy is the folio volume of the first edition, 1678; but they have recently reprinted Cudworth at Oxford in four volumes. THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE. 411 The second system of "necessity" is that of the theist, who conceive that the will of the Deity, producing in us good or evil, is determined by no immutability of goodness and justice, but an arbitrary will omnipotent; and therefore all qualities, good and evil, are merely so by our own conventional notions, having no reality in nature. And this Cudworth calls the divine fate, or immoral theism, being a religion divesting the Creator of the intellectual and moral government of the universe; all just and unjust, according to this hypothesis, being mere factitious things. This "necessity" seems the predestination of Calvinism, with the immorality of antinomianism. The third sort of fatalists do not deny the moral attributes of the Deity, in his nature essentially benevolent and just; therefore there is an immutability in natural justice and morality, distinct from any law or arbitrary custom; but as these theists are necessarians, the human being is incapacitated to receive praise or blame, rewards or punishments, or to become the object of retributive justice; whence they deduce their axiom that nothing could possibly have been otherwise than it is. To confute these three fatalisms, or false hypotheses of the system of the universe, Cudworth designed to dedicate three great works; one against atheism, another against immoral theism, and the third against the theism whose doctrine was the inevitable " necessity" which determined all actions and events, and deprived man of his free agency. These licentious systems were alike destructive of social virtues; and our ethical metaphysician sought to trace the Deity as an omnipotent understanding Being, a supreme intelligence, presiding over all, in his own nature unchangeable and eternal, but granting to his creatures their choice of good and evil by an immu |