Moral Good and Evil, Just and Unjust, Honest and Dishonest (if they be not mere names without any signification, or names for nothing else but _Willed_ or _Commanded_, but have a reality in respect of the persons obliged to do and to avoid them), cannot possibly be arbitrary things, made by Will without nature; because it is universally true that Things are what they are not by Will, but by nature.

As it is the nature of a triangle to have three angles equal to two right angles, so it is the nature of 'good things' to have the nature of goodness, and things just the nature of justice; and Omnipotence is no more able to make a thing good without the fixed nature of goodness, than to make a triangular body without the properties of a triangle, or two things like or equal, without the natures of Likeness and Equality.

The Will of God is the supreme _efficient_ cause of all things, but not the _formal_ cause of anything besides itself.

Nor is this to be understood as at all derogating from God's perfection; to make natural justice and right independent of his will is merely to set his Wisdom, which is a rule or measure, above his Will, which is something indeterminate, but essentially regulable and measureable; and if it be the case that above even his wisdom, and determining it in turn, stands his Infinite Goodness, the greatest perfection of his will must lie in its being thus twice determined.
By far the largest part of Cudworth's treatise consists of a general metaphysical argument to establish the independence of the mind's faculty of Knowledge, with reference to Sense and Experience.

In Sense, according to the doctrine of the old 'Atomical philosophy' (of Democritus, Protagoras, &c .-- but he thinks it must be referred back to Moses himself!), he sees nothing but _fancies_ excited in us by local motions in the organs, taken on from 'the motion of particles' that constitute 'the whole world.' All the more, therefore, must there exist a superior power of Intellection and Knowledge of a different nature from sense, a power not terminating in mere seeming and appearance only, but in the reality of things, and reaching to the comprehension of what really and absolutely is; whose objects are the immutable and eternal essences and natures of things, and their unchangeable relations to one another.