Samuel Clarke

British theologian and rationalist philosopher who argued for the a priori knowability of moral obligations from the nature of things and conducted the famous correspondence with Leibniz on space, time, and God.

Moral rationalism: moral obligations are eternally necessary relations between things knowable by reason alone — not derived from God's will (voluntarism) but from the fitness of things. Newtonian theology: absolute space is God's sensorium.