Note 153 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Apart from the influence of Hobbes, who, like Descartes, shaped his thinking from the starting-point of Galileo, the Cartesian philosophy played in England a great transitional part. At the university of Cambridge it was already naturalized;153 and the influence of Glanvill, who was an active member of the Royal Society, must have carried it further. The remarkable treatise of the anatomist Glisson,154 De natura substantiæ energetica (1672), suggests the influence of either Descartes or Gassendi; and it is remarkable that the clerical moralist Cumberland, writing his Disquisitio de legibus Naturæ (1672) in reply to Hobbes, not only takes up a utilitarian position akin to Hobbes’s own, and expressly avoids any appeal to the theological doctrine of future punishments, but introduces physiology into his ethic to the extent of partially figuring as an ethical materialist.155 In regard to Gassendi’s direct influence it has to be noted that in 1659 there appeared The Vanity of Judiciary Astrology, translated by “A Person of Quality,” from P. Gassendus; and further that, as is remarked by Reid, Locke borrowed more from Gassendi than from any other writer.156