Hylozoism is the philosophical doctrine according to which all matter is alive or animated, either in itself or as participating in the action of a superior principle, usually the world-soul (anima mundi). The theory holds that matter is unified with life or spiritual activity. The word is a 17th-century term formed from the Greek words ὕλη (hyle: "wood, matter") and μορφή (morphē: "form"), which was coined by the English Platonist philosopher Ralph Cudworth in 1678. Renaissance period and early modernity During the Renaissance period in Western Europe, humanist scholars and philosophers such as Bernardino Telesio, Paracelsus, Cardanus, and Giordano Bruno revived the doctrine of hylozoism. The latter, for example, held a form of Christian pantheism wherein God is conceived as the source, cause, medium, and end of all things, and therefore all things are participatory in the ongoing Godhead. Bruno's ideas were so radical that he was excommunicated by the Catholic Church with the accusation of heresy, as well as from a few Protestant denominations, and he was eventually burned at the stake for various other beliefs that were regarded as heretical. Telesio, on the other hand, began from an Aristotelian basis and, through radical empiricism, came to believe that a living force was what informed all matter. Instead of the intellectual universals of Aristotle, he believed that life generated form. In the Kingdom of England, some of the Cambridge Platonists approached hylozoism as well. Both Henry More and Ralph Cudworth (the Younger, 1617–1688), through their reconciliation of Platonic idealism with Christian doctrines of deific generation, came to see the divine lifeforce as the informing principle in the world. Thus, like Bruno, but not nearly to the extreme, they saw God's generative impulse as giving life to all things that exist. Accordingly, Cudworth, the most systematic metaphysician of the Cambridge Platonist tradition, fought hylozoism. His work is primarily a critique of what he took to be the two principal forms of atheism—materialism and hylozoism. Cudworth singled out Hobbes not only as a defender of the hylozoic atheism "which attributes life to matter", but also as one going beyond it and defending "hylopathian atheism, which attributes all to matter." Cudworth attempted to show that Hobbes had revived the doctrines of Protagoras and was therefore subject to the criticisms which Plato had deployed against Protagoras in the Theaetetus. On the side of hylozoism, Strato of Lampsacus was the official target. However, Cudworth's