Henry More

← Encyclopedia

Henry More (1614–1687) was an English philosopher and theologian, a fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, for almost his entire adult life, and the most prolific of the group later called the Cambridge Platonists. He spent that life on a single problem: how to keep a world of mind, spirit, and divine purpose intact at the moment the new science was redescribing nature as matter in motion. His answer was neither to reject the new physics nor to surrender to it, but to argue that matter by itself could explain nothing — that behind every ordinary event stood an immaterial principle holding the whole together.

More was raised a Calvinist and came to detest the doctrine of predestination; the warmth of his mature theology, with its insistence on a loving and intelligible God, is in part a reaction against it. At Cambridge he read Plato, Plotinus, and the later Neoplatonists, and like them held that the soul is naturally divine and that knowledge of God is the soul’s proper homecoming. He took the Hermetic and Kabbalistic writings seriously as ancient testimony to the same truths, though he grew more cautious about them over time. He was among the first English readers of Descartes, corresponded with him admiringly, and then turned against him: a universe of pure mechanism, More concluded, left no room for spirit and so opened the door to atheism.

His characteristic move was to give spirit a place in the physical world. More argued that spirits are genuinely extended — that they occupy space as bodies do, only without being impenetrable — and he posited a “Spirit of Nature,” an unconscious immaterial agent through which God works the regularities the mechanists mistook for self-sufficient law. He defended, in An Antidote against Atheism and The Immortality of the Soul, the reality of apparitions, witchcraft, and the soul’s survival of death, treating reports of the supernatural as evidence in an argument against a godless cosmos. To later readers this looks credulous; in its own moment it was a considered strategy — if spirits act in the world, materialism is false.

More’s influence ran through his circle and beyond it. He was the teacher and lifelong correspondent of Anne Conway, whose posthumous Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy — the work the library holds — carried his concerns into a vitalist metaphysics of her own, one that may in turn have touched Leibniz. His doctrine of extended, omnipresent spirit and absolute space shaped the theological background against which Newton thought. The resemblances between his project and later spiritualist and occult attempts to find empirical footing for the immaterial are real, and worth noting; they are also separated by two centuries and a wholly different intellectual world. What More wanted was narrower and stranger than either label suggests: a single account in which the geometry of the new science and the old conviction of a soul-filled universe were the same account. He kept arguing for it until the end.

→ In the library: Conway — The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (1692)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Plato · The One · Spiritualism