 The philosophy constitutive of Cudworth’s intellectual system combines atomist natural philosophy with Platonic metaphysics. Cudworth conceives this as having originated with Moses from whom it was transmitted via Pythagoras to Greek and other philosophers, including Descartes whom Cudworth regarded as a reviver of Mosaic atomism. For Cudworth, as for Plato, soul is ontologically prior to the physical world. Since motion, life, thought and action cannot be explained in terms of material particles, haphazardly jolted together, there must be some guiding originator, namely soul or spirit. In order to account for movement, life and orderliness in the operations of nature, Cudworth proposed his hypothesis of ‘the Plastick Life of Nature’. Similar in conception to More’s Spirit of Nature, Cudworth’s Plastic Nature is a formative principle which acts as an intermediary between the divine and the natural world, as the means whereby God imprints His presence on his creation and makes His wisdom and goodness manifest (and therefore intelligible) throughout created nature.