Plastic Principle

The Plastic Principle is an idea introduced into Western thought by the English philosopher Ralph Cudworth (1617–1689) to explain the function of nature and life in the face of both the mechanism and materialism of the Enlightenment. It is a dynamic functional power that contains all of natural law, and is both sustentative and generative, organizing matter according to Platonic Ideas, that is, archetypes that lie beyond the physical realm coming from the Mind of God or Deity, the ground of Being.

The role of nature was one faced by philosophers in the Age of Reason or Enlightenment. The prevailing view was either that of the Church of a personal deity intervening in his creation, producing miracles, or an ancient pantheism (atheism relative to theism) – deity pervading all things and existing in all things. However, the "ideas of an all-embracing providential care of the world and of one universal vital force capable of organizing the world from within." presented difficulties for philosophers of a spiritual as well as materialistic bent.

The Cartesian idea of nature as mechanical, and Hobbes' materialistic views were countered by the English philosopher, Ralph Cudworth (1617–1689), who, in his True intellectual system of the universe (1678), addressing the tension between theism and atheism, took both the Stoic idea of Divine Reason poured into the world, and the Platonic idea of the world soul (anima mundi) to posit a power that was polaric – "either as a ruling but separate mind or as an informing vital principle – either nous hypercosmios or nous enkosmios.

Cudworth was a member of the Cambridge Platonists, a group of English seventeenth-century thinkers associated with the University of Cambridge who were stimulated by Plato's teachings but also were aware or and influenced by Descartes, Hobbes, Bacon, Boyle and Spinoza. The other important philosopher of this group was Henry More (1614–1687). More held that spiritual substance or mind controlled inert matter. Out of his correspondence with Descartes, he developed the idea that everything, whether material or non, had extension, an example of the latter being space, which is infinite (Newton) and which then is correlative to the idea of God (set out in his Enchiridion metaphysicum 1667). In developing this idea, More also introduced a causal agent between God and substance, or Nature in his Hylarchic Principle, derived from Plato's anima mundi or world soul, and the Stoic's pneuma, which encapsulates the laws of nature, both for inert and vital nature, and involves a sympathetic resonance between soul (psyche) and soma.

Like More, Cudworth put forward the idea of 'the Plastick Life of Nature', a formative principle that contains both substance and the laws of motion, as well as a nisus or direction that accounts for design and goal in the natural world. He was stimulated by the Cartesian idea of the mind as self-consciousness to see God as consciousness. He first analysed four forms of atheism from ancient times to present, and showed that all misunderstood the principle of life and knowledge, which involved unsentient activity and self-consciousness.

...
Wikipedia