 The Platonist principle that mind precedes the world lies at the foundation of Cudworth’s epistemology which is discussed in A Treatise of Eternal and Immutable Morality. This is the most fully developed theory of knowledge by any of the Cambridge Platonists, and the most extensive treatment of innatism by any seventeenth-century philosopher. For Cudworth, as for Plato, ideas and moral principles ‘are eternal and self-subsistent things’. The external world is, intrinsically, intelligible, since it bears the imprint of its creator in the order and relationship of its component parts, as archetype to ectype. Cognition depends on the same principles, for just as the created world is a copy of the divine archetype, so also human minds contain the imprint of Divine wisdom and knowledge. Since the human mind mirrors the mind of God, it is ready furnished with ideas and the ability to reason. Cognition therefore entails recollection and the ideas of things with which the mind thinks are therefore ‘anticipations’– for which Cudworth adopts the Stoic term prolepsis. Cognition is not a passive process, but involves the active participation of the mind. Although innate knowledge is the only true knowledge, Cudworth does not reject sense knowledge because sensory input is essential for knowledge of the body and the external world. However, raw sense data is not, by itself, knowledge since it requires mental processing in order to become knowledge. As Cudworth puts it, we cannot understand the book of nature unless we know how to read.