Group of 17th-century British philosophic and religious thinkers.
Led by Benjamin Whichcote (16091683), it included Ralph Cudworth and Henry More (16141687) at Cambridge and Joseph Glanvill (16361680) at Oxford. Educated as Puritans, they reacted against the Calvinist emphasis on the arbitrariness of divine sovereignty. In their eyes, Thomas Hobbes and the Calvinists erred in making the voluntarist assumption (see voluntarism ) that morality consists in obeying the will of a sovereign. Morality, they asserted, is essentially rational, and the good person's virtue is grounded in an understanding of the eternal and immutable nature of goodness, which not even God can alter through sovereign power.