John Hales (1584-1656); Edmund Calamy (1600-1666); the Cambridge Platonist, Benjamin Whichcote (1609-1685); Richard Baxter (1615-1691); the puritan John Owen (1616-1683); the philosophical Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688); Archbishop Leighton (1611-1684) - each of these holds an eminent position in the records of pulpit eloquence, but all were outshone by the gorgeous oratory and art of Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), who is the most illustrious writer of sermons whom the British race has produced.
In God, who is pure form without matter, the archetypes of material things exist as eternal immaterial forms. In this way Gilbert was at once Aristotelian and Platonist.
The real root of the difficulty to Platonist as to Gnostic was his sharp antithesis of form as good and matter as evil.
It seems possible that he had listened to the lectures of Nausiphanes,a Democritean philosopher, and Pamphilus the Platonist, but he was probably, like his father, merely an ordinary teacher.
The position of Epicureanism as a recognized school in the and century is best seen in the fact that it was one of the four schools (the others were the Stoic, Platonist, and Peripatetic) which were placed on a footing of equal endowment when Marcus Aurelius founded chairs of philosophy at Athens.