Cudworthian Consciousness

Abstract Ralph Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) is credited with introducing the English word ‘consciousness’ into the philosophical lexicon. This chapter argues, however, that Cudworth distinguishes two kinds of consciousness in his (largely published) freewill manuscripts, which I term ‘bare consciousness’ and ‘reflective consciousness’. The difference is that, while each involves the soul’s reflection upon itself, Cudworth thinks that bare consciousness is always directed toward individual cogitations; reflective consciousness, by contrast, is the kind of consciousness that the soul achieves through reflection upon itself as a whole. Cudworth thus takes reflective consciousness to introduce a unity into our experience that is not present at the level of bare consciousness.