Henry More

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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.

He was born at Grantham in Lincolnshire, went up to Eton in 1628, and entered Christ’s College in the early 1630s, taking his BA in 1636 and a fellowship in 1641; he held that fellowship until his death and declined the college’s Mastership when it fell vacant in 1654, leaving it to his friend Ralph Cudworth. For more than fifty years his world was a single staircase, a single chapel, a single library. He published in a steady stream — Latin verse, English prose, treatise after treatise — and the output is unified by one conviction held under pressure: that the universe is at bottom alive, and that the new geometry of nature, far from disproving this, can be made to display it.

The revolt against predestination

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. The decisive moment came early. A boy schooled in the Reformed conviction that God elects some souls to salvation and consigns the rest to damnation before they are born, he found the teaching unbearable and rejected it — the story, told in his own later recollections, is of a child who could not believe that the good of all goodness would damn his creatures by decree. What he put in its place was a God knowable through reason and reachable through the soul’s own ascent: divine goodness as the first datum of theology rather than divine power. This is the temper the whole Cambridge circle shared. Against the Reformed insistence that the good is good because God wills it, Benjamin Whichcote and his juniors held with Plato that the good is good in itself and is known by the soul’s participation in it — the Candle of the Lord, in the phrase from Proverbs that became the circle’s emblem. More’s anti-Calvinism and his Platonism are one movement: both refuse a God whose will is arbitrary and whose creation is dead.

The Platonic and Hermetic inheritance

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. From the school of Plotinus he took the architecture of descent and return — a reality flowing out of a single source, the One, and capable of being traced back to it by a mind that turns inward and upward. The earliest full statement of his position is in verse: the Philosophical Poems of 1642, a Spenserian philosophical epic of the soul in which Trismegistus stands near the head of the line of ancient sages. More read the Hermetica in Marsilio Ficino’s Latin and took it, along with the Kabbalistic writings, as ancient testimony to the same truths he found in Plato — a strand of the prisca theologia, the conviction that a single primordial wisdom underlies the venerable traditions. He grew more cautious over time. Isaac Casaubon’s philological demonstration of 1614 — the year of More’s own birth — had dated the Greek Hermetic treatises to the early Christian centuries, and More, unlike Cudworth, never tried to overturn that verdict. In The Immortality of the Soul he cites the authority of Trismegistus, or whoever it was that wrote the Poimandres — the hedge itself records the redating. He kept Hermes Trismegistus as a corroborating witness while quietly demoting him from a primary source; the prisca theologia survives in him as a chorus rather than a foundation.

His engagement with the Kabbalah went further and turned sharper. His Conjectura Cabbalistica of 1653, dedicated to Cudworth, offered a threefold — literal, philosophical, and mystical — reading of the opening of Genesis, and argued a Mosaic-Pythagorean genealogy for ancient atomism through the half-legendary figure of Moschus the Phoenician, whom he identified with Moses. Two decades later he contributed Latin apparatus to both volumes of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata (1677–1684), the great Latin compendium of Lurianic and Zoharic material — and recoiled from what he found there. The Lurianic doctrines of tzimtzum, the divine self-contraction, and of Adam Kadmon, the primordial cosmic man, seemed to him to dissolve creation into an emanation of God’s own substance, compromising both creatio ex nihilo and the simplicity of God; he called the system a compromise between materialism and spiritualism that was, by its theistic disguise, worse than either. He opposed the transmigration of souls that the rest of the Ragley circle embraced. The man who had wanted Kabbalah as one more witness to the ancient wisdom ended by treating its most developed form as a danger — a Christian Kabbalah reader who drew back from the abyss it opened.

Descartes: admiration and revolt

He was among the first English readers of René Descartes, one of the earliest to urge that the new philosophy be taught in the universities, and at first an enthusiast. On 11 December 1648 he wrote the first of four Latin letters to Descartes, in the tone of a disciple greeting a master; the exchange ran through 1648 and 1649, until Descartes’s death, and More later published it among his own works. What drew him was Descartes’s promise of a clear and mathematical account of the natural world. What turned him was where the account ended. Cartesian mechanism defined matter as pure extension and the mind as pure thought, two substances with nothing in common; and once nature was nothing but extended stuff shoved about by impact, More saw, there was no work left for spirit to do and no room in the physical world for God to act. A universe of self-sufficient mechanism, he concluded, leads by its own logic to atheism — a mechanical naturalism in which the divine is first made unnecessary and then made unreal. By the Divine Dialogues of 1668 and, more severely, the Enchiridion Metaphysicum of 1671, the disciple had become the prosecutor, charging the superstitious admiration of Descartes with opening the door he had meant the new philosophy to close.

The break was over particulars as much as tendency. More allowed a vacuum where Descartes denied one; he insisted on final causes where Descartes banished them; he kept souls in the animals Descartes had reduced to machines. But the deepest quarrel was over the essence of matter. If extension is what makes a thing material, then either spirit is not extended — and so, More reasoned, is nowhere, and a thing that is nowhere is nothing — or spirit is extended too, and the boundary Descartes drew between the worlds of body and of mind cannot be where he drew it. More took the second road, and it led him to the most distinctive doctrine he held.

Extended spirit and the Spirit of Nature

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. The mark of body, he held, is not extension at all but impenetrability together with divisibility, the capacity to be cut into parts, which he called discerpibility. Spirit is the opposite: extended yet penetrable, able to pass through bodies and through other spirits and through itself, and indiscerpible — incapable of being divided. To these he added self-motion and a strange further property he named spissitude, a kind of fourth dimension or density that a region acquires when spirit is present in it, so that spirit can contract into a point or dilate through a volume without ever breaking. A soul is not a dimensionless point lodged mysteriously in the head, then, but an extended living presence coextensive with its body, and the difference between spirit and matter is a difference within the genus of extended things rather than a chasm between two worlds.

Above the individual soul he posited a Spirit of Nature, which he also called the principium hylarchicum, the hylarchic or matter-ruling principle. This is an unconscious immaterial agent, neither God nor any creature’s mind, through which God works the regularities that the mechanists mistook for self-sufficient law — More’s counterpart to Plato’s world-soul and to the plastic nature that Cudworth set to the same task. In the Enchiridion Metaphysicum he assembled a catalog of physical effects he held inexplicable by matter and motion alone — the fall of heavy bodies, the cohesion that holds matter together, the behavior of fluids in the air-pump experiments of Robert Boyle and the Royal Society — and argued that each betrays the hand of the Spirit of Nature reaching where mechanism cannot. Where a later physics would write a force, More wrote a presence. Gravity, for him, was not a property matter could have on its own but a sign that nature is governed from within by something that is not matter.

Apparitions, witchcraft, and the immortal soul

He defended, in An Antidote against Atheism (1653) and The Immortality of the Soul (1659), 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. The strategy is consistent with everything else he held. If the only substance is matter in motion, then the soul dies with the body and nothing immaterial ever acts in the world; but if even one well-attested apparition is genuine, if a single witch genuinely commerces with spirits, then materialism is simply false as a matter of fact. So More gathered the testimony as a naturalist gathers specimens — depositions, hauntings, the strange cases that crossed the desks of the godly — and weighed them as data in a demonstration. He was the presumed editor of and a contributor to Joseph Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus, the great Restoration compendium of witch-evidence published after Glanvill’s death in 1681, supplying a letter of his own on the subject; the title names the enemy, the Sadducee who denies spirit and resurrection alike. To a later eye this looks credulous. In its own moment it was a considered strategy: in a contest over whether anything immaterial exists, the apparition and the witch are not embarrassments but exhibits. The immortality of the soul was for More not a consolation to be hoped for but a conclusion to be proved, and the proof ran through the same evidence that proved spirit acts in nature at all.

Space as the shadow of God

The doctrine of extended spirit had a vast consequence. If spirit is genuinely extended, then the most extended thing of all — infinite space itself — is not mere emptiness or a property of bodies but something real, immaterial, and necessary, present wherever anything is and indifferent to whether anything is. More came to read absolute infinite space as the expression of God’s omnipresence, almost as an attribute of God: one, immense, immovable, eternal, penetrating all things and penetrated by none, the very names the theologians gave the divine. Space is where God is, which is everywhere; it is, in More’s striking phrase, a kind of dim and shadowy representation of the divine essence. The argument that the geometers’ empty container is in truth the sensorium of an omnipresent God is one of the boldest things in seventeenth-century metaphysics, and it did not stay in the cloister of Christ’s College. It passed, by a route that ran through the Cambridge air More breathed into, to Isaac Newton, whose absolute space — real, infinite, uniform, the standing frame of all motion and the medium of God’s omnipresence — bears the unmistakable stamp of More’s. Newton’s God, who endures forever and is present everywhere and by existing always and everywhere constitutes duration and space, is recognizably the God of the Cambridge Platonist down the corridor. This is not the legend of a Hermetic Newton decoding ancient secrets; it is the sober fact that the metaphysics of absolute space, which Newton made the stage of the Principia, was first worked out as a theology of the omnipresent spirit by the man who taught it.

Anne Conway and the circle

More’s influence ran through his circle and beyond it. He was the teacher and lifelong correspondent of Anne Conway, introduced to him around 1650 by her half-brother John Finch, his student at Christ’s; he taught her the new philosophy, translating parts of Descartes for her before she had mastered Latin, visited her at Ragley Hall in Warwickshire across nearly three decades, and made her the closest intellectual companion of his life. Her posthumous Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy — the work the library holds, published in Latin in 1690 and in English in 1692 — carried his concerns into a vitalist metaphysics of her own, one bolder than his: where More kept spirit and body as two extended kinds, Conway collapsed them into degrees of a single living substance, denying that dead matter exists at all, and built from the Kabbala Denudata she read with him a monism that disposed of Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza together. Through the courier and physician Francis Mercury van Helmont, who carried her book to Hanover, it reached Leibniz, who acknowledged that his own views lay close to those of the late Countess. The spirit-filled cosmos More argued for was not his alone; it was the common project of a school, and its boldest version was written by his pupil.

Scholarship and texts

More’s works were among the most reprinted philosophical books of Restoration England, and they are entirely in the public domain. The convenient gathering is A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings of Dr. Henry More (London, 1662), which binds together the Antidote, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, the four letters to Descartes, The Immortality of the Soul, and the Conjectura Cabbalistica; the Antidote against Atheism survives in a full digital text from the original editions, and the editorial work of the Cambridge Platonism Sourcebook makes the Divine Dialogues, the Immortality, and the Descartes correspondence available in both diplomatic and modernized form with apparatus. The Latin Opera Omnia of 1675–1679 collects the philosophical and theological writings, including the Kabbalistic dialogues More contributed to Knorr’s Kabbala Denudata.

The modern recovery of More is recent and substantial. Sarah Hutton’s British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2015) sets him in the wider landscape, and her edition of the Conway Letters with Marjorie Hope Nicolson remains the documentary spine of his biography; Robert Crocker’s Henry More, 1614–1687: A Biography of the Cambridge Platonist (Springer, 2003) is the standard life. The deepest single account of his doctrine of space and its descent to Newton is still Alexandre Koyré’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957), whose chapter on God and space reconstructs the More–Descartes debate and More’s infinitization of the divine. Allison Coudert’s 1975 study “A Cambridge Platonist’s Kabbalist Nightmare” in the Journal of the History of Ideas is the classic treatment of his recoil from Lurianic emanation, extended in her “Henry More, Anne Conway and the Kabbalah: A Cure for the Kabbalist Nightmare?”. The fullest restatement of his mature metaphysics, the Enchiridion Metaphysicum, reached English only in 1995; his 1642 Philosophical Poems and the Antidote are read now as much for their place in the prehistory of Newtonian space as for their natural theology.

The single account

The resemblance between More’s program and the later spiritualist effort to find empirical footing for the immaterial — the apparition entered as evidence, the séance offered as proof of survival — is a thing two centuries and a wholly different world apart, and More would not have recognized himself in it; the near current of his own age, the spirit-filled cosmos of Boehmean theosophy, ran beside him without flowing through him, a different lineage feeding from a different spring. What More held was at once narrower and stranger than any of these later or neighboring movements. He wanted one account in which the geometry of the new science and the old conviction of a soul-filled universe were the same account: extension running without a seam from the densest body up through the extended soul to the infinite extended space that is the standing shadow of God, and spirit reaching down through that same extension to do the work — gravity, cohesion, life, the rising of the soul out of death — that matter by itself could never do. The mechanists had given him a measurable world and called it complete; he gave back the same world, measured to the last degree, and showed that at every point it was full. He kept building that one structure, treatise by treatise, until the year he died in the chapel-shadowed rooms he had never left.

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

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