Spiritual Presence and Dimensional Space beyond the Cosmos

Abstract

This paper examines connections between concepts of space and extension on the one hand and immaterial spirits on the other, specifically the immanentist concept of spirits as present in rerum natura. Those holding an immanentist concept, such as Thomas Aquinas, typically understood spirits non-dimensionally as present by essence and power; and that concept was historically linked to holenmerism, the doctrine that the spirit is whole in every part. Yet as Aristotelian ideas about extension were challenged and an actual, infinite, dimensional space readmitted, Henry More defended a dimensionalist concept of spirit. Despite More's intentions, his dimensionalist concept opens the door to materialism, for supposing that spirits have parts outside parts implies that those parts could in principle be mapped onto the parts of divisible bodies. The spectre of materialism broadens our interest in More's unconventional ideas, for the question of whether other early modern thinkers, including Isaac Newton, followed More becomes a question of whether they too unwittingly helped usher in materialism. In fact, More's attack upon holenmerism fails, because he illegitimately injects his dimensionalist concept of spirit into the doctrine, failing to recognize it as a consequence of the non-dimensionalist concept of spirit, which in itself secures indivisibility. The interpretive consequence for Newton is that there is no prima facie reason to suppose that the charitable interpretation takes him to deny holenmerism.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper was written during a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Philosophy of Science, whose funding and support I gratefully acknowledge. For their generosity in discussing my ideas when in nebulous form, I thank the members of the Center's reading group. For an illuminating discussion of scholastic ideas about divisibility, I thank Peter Distelzweig, and for comments on an earlier draft, I thank Benny Goldberg, Geoff Gorham, Jim Lennox, Alan Nelson, Nicholas Rescher, and Ed Slowik, shortcomings being my own. I dedicate this paper to the spirit of Elaine Kochiras Tamvakis.

Notes

¹ On the acceptance of finite vacua following the Condemnation of 1277, see Grant, Much Ado About Nothing (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1981), 116.

² Once Patrizi asserts an actual, infinite space, this theological concern begins to lose steam; Newton would counter it with the claim that infinitude is not in and of itself a perfection, for just as there can be infinity of a perfection, such as intellect, so too can there be infinity of imperfection, such as ignorance; see I. Newton, Philosophical Writings, edited by A. Janiak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 25; see also Newton's post-Principia manuscript, Tempus et Locus: ‘No thing is by eternity and infinity made better or of a more perfect nature, but only of longer duration in its own kind’, translated by and discussed in J.E. McGuire, ‘Newton on Place, Time, and God: An Unpublished Source’, British Journal of the History of Science, 11:2 (1978), 114–129 (121). Still, the concern persists in some quarters; in Berkeley's Treatise we read, ‘Or else there is something besides God which is eternal, uncreated, infinite, indivisible, unmutable’, G. Berkeley, ‘A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge’ in The Works of George Berkeley, edited by A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1949, 1I, 94) in J.E. Power, ‘More and Newton on Absolute Space’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 31: 2 (1970), 289-296, (291)).

³ One reason is that the term ‘anti-nullibism’ is a bit cumbersome. Another reason is that More sometimes imports his own assumptions along with his terminology, though I will not always avoid More's terminology on that ground.

⁴ Grant, Much Ado about Nothing, 138, 139. Additional metaphors discussed by Grant include Saint Cyprian's remark that God is ‘one and diffused everywhere’, and Boethius' claim that God is ‘everywhere but in no place’, see Grant, Much Ado about Nothing, 113.

⁵ J. Raphson, ‘De spatio reali’ in A. Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe [‘Closed World’] (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1957), 197–198; and Grant, Much Ado about Nothing, 232.

⁶ More explains the term as follows: ‘By Actual Divisibility I understand Discerpibility, gross tearing or cutting of one part from the other’, Henry More, ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, Book I, chapter II, Axiom IX, in Philosophical Writings of Henry More, edited by F. MacKinnon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925), 63.

⁷ Here I concur with Reid's observation that, according to the view that More eventually embraces, ‘it does indeed appear that the only remaining possibility must be that one part of his soul should be present in his head while a different part is present in his toe’, J. Reid, ‘The Evolution of Henry More's Theory of Divine Absolute Space’ [‘Evolution’], Journal of the History of Philosophy, 45 (2007), 79–102 (100).

⁸ See, for instance, Reid, ‘Evolution’, 100: ‘And the whole holenmerian approach was wrong-headed anyway, he [More] suggested, for it had been constructed specifically in order to avoid the problem of rendering spirits susceptible to division into several parts, which was apparently going to arise if extension in the “parts outside parts” sense was ascribed to them’. See also Slowik, ‘Newton's Neo-Platonic Ontology of Space’, Foundations of Science (forthcoming); in §4.2, he describes holenmerism as ‘a belief common among the Scholastics, that God is whole in every part of space (which thereby guarantees that God is not divisible even if matter and space were divisible)’.

⁹ Plotinus, Enneads IV.2.1, translated by S. MacKenna, in Grant, Much Ado about Nothing, 350, n. 127.

¹⁰ See Grant, Much Ado about Nothing, 350, n. 127.

¹¹ See Grant, Much Ado about Nothing, 342.

¹² ‘The ubi definitivum also came to be characterized by the assumption that a spiritual substance could fill not only the whole of the place that delimited it but the whole of that spiritual substance, for example, an angel or soul, was in every part of its place or ubi definitivum’, Grant, Much Ado about Nothing, 343, note 67. Grant also points out that Peter Lombard seems to have crafted his concepts without attempting to explain the relevant sense of ‘place’, which is to say without either affirming the Aristotelian notion of place as a two-dimensional boundary or containing surface, or repudiating it in favor of the concept of an incorporeal extension that is distinct from any entity that might occupy it; see Grant, Much Ado about Nothing, 242.

¹³ Aquinas held, with Averroes and neo-Platonist predecessors, that the language by which we describe God is equivocal; it cannot have the same meaning as it has when applied to the finite things of God's creation. On this point, see A. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century [‘Theology’] (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 50–54.

¹⁴ Aquinas himself does not put things in those terms, and indeed, the need to do so arises only with the possibility of alternative conceptions of space and extension.

¹⁵ Funkenstein, Theology, 51.

¹⁶ T. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae [‘ST’], translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Bros. 1947), I. Q.8. Art.2; Reply to Obj. 1. See also the rest of article 2, and Q.52. Art.1.

¹⁷ ‘A body is said to be in a place in such a way that it is applied to such place according to the contact of dimensive quantity; but there is no such quantity in the angels, for theirs is a virtual one. Consequently an angel is said to be in a corporeal place by application of the angelic power in any manner whatever to any place’, Aquinas, ST I Q.52. Art.1.

¹⁸ ‘There are not two angels in the same place. The reason of this is because it is impossible for two complete causes to be the causes immediately of one and the same thing. This is evident in every class of causes: for there is one proximate form of one thing, and there is one proximate mover, although there may be several remote movers. Nor can it be objected that several individuals may row a boat, since no one of them is a perfect mover, because no one man's strength is sufficient for moving the boat; while all together are as one mover, in so far as their united strengths all combine in producing the one movement. Hence, since the angel is said to be in one place by the fact that his power touches the place immediately by way of a perfect container, as was said […] there can be but one angel in one place’, Aquinas, ST I.Q.52. Art.3.

¹⁹ Aquinas, ST I Q.8.Art.2: ‘God fills every place; not, indeed, like a body, for a body is said to fill place inasmuch as it excludes the co-presence of another body; whereas by God being in a place, others are not thereby excluded from it; indeed, by the very fact that He gives being to the things that fill every place, He Himself fills every place’.

²⁰ Aquinas, ST I.Q8.Art.2.

²¹ Aquinas, ST I.Q.8.Art.1.

²² Aquinas, ST I.Q.8.Art.1. The claim will be reiterated by Suarez and More, among others.

²³ Thus one sense in which God is in things is as ‘an object of operation is in the operator’. Most especially, God is in the rational beings who know and love him, as the object of their knowledge and love. (See Aquinas, ST, I.Q8 Art.3: ‘God is said to be in a thing in two ways; in one way after the manner of an efficient cause; and thus He is in all things created by Him; in another way he is in things as the object of operation is in the operator; and this is proper to the operations of the soul, according as the thing known is in the one who knows; and the thing desired in the one desiring. In this second way God is especially in the rational creature which knows and loves Him actually or habitually’). God's being in things is consistent with their being also in God, and as Aquinas clarifies elsewhere in the same article, things are, with respect to knowledge and will, ‘more truly in God than God in things’, Aquinas, ST, I.Q8 Art.3, reply to obj. 3.

²⁴ Aquinas, ST, I.Q8 Art.3.

²⁵ Aquinas, ST I.Q.8.Art.4

²⁶ Aquinas, ST I.Q.8.Art.3: ‘A thing is said to be by its presence in other things which are subject to its inspection; as things in a house are said to be present to anyone, who nevertheless may not be in substance in every part of the house’.

²⁷ Aquinas, ST I.Q.8.Art.4.

²⁸ Aquinas, ST, I.Q8 Art.3.

²⁹ Aquinas, ST, I.Q8 Art.3, Reply to Obj. 1: ‘God is said to be in all things […] by His own essence; because His substance is present to all things as the cause of their being’.

³⁰ Aquinas, ST I.Q.8.Art.4.

³¹ ‘Further, others said that, although all things are subject to God's providence, still all things are not immediately created by God; but that He immediately created the first creatures, and these created the others. Against these it is necessary to say that He is in all things by His essence’, Aquinas, ST I .Q8 Art.3.

³² Aquinas, ST Articles 2 and 4 of Question 8, respectively.

³³ Aquinas, ST Q.8.Art.2; Reply to Obj.3.

³⁴ ‘Objection 3: Further, what is wholly in any one place is not in part elsewhere. But if God is in any one place He is all there; for He has no parts. No part of Him then is elsewhere; and therefore God is not everywhere’, Aquinas, ST I Q8.Art.2.

³⁵ ‘What therefore is whole in any place by totality of quantity, cannot be outside of that place, because the quantity of anything placed is commensurate to the quantity of the place; and hence there is no totality of quantity without totality of place’, Aquinas, ST I Q8.Art.2; Reply to Obj.3.

³⁶ Aquinas, ST I Q76.Art.1.

³⁷ Aquinas, ST I Q8.Art.2; Reply to Obj.3.

³⁸ Aquinas, ST I Q8.Art.2; Reply to Obj.3.

³⁹ Aquinas clarifies that that accidental forms – properties such as whiteness – have accidental quantity. If we consider whiteness in terms of its essence, it is whole in every part of a white surface, ‘because according to the perfect idea of its species it is found to exist in every part of the surface’, Aquinas, ST I Q8.Art.2; Reply to Obj.3. But the quantity that it has accidentally, in virtue of the surface being large or small, may also be considered; and in terms of this accidental quantity, it is not whole in every part of the surface. But incorporeal substances do not have quantity in even this accidental way, Aquinas emphasizes. After allowing accidental quantity to accidental forms, he writes, ‘On the other hand, incorporeal substances have no totality either of themselves or accidentally, except in reference to the perfect idea of their essence. Hence, as the soul is whole in every part of the body, so is God whole in all things and in each one’, Aquinas, ST I Q8.Art.2; Reply to Obj.3.

⁴⁰ Aquinas, ST I Q8.Art.2; Reply to Obj. 2. I have closely paraphrased certain parts of Aquinas' reply (as translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province), which reads as follows: ‘Reply to Objection 2: The indivisible is twofold. One is the term of the continuous; as a point in permanent things, and as a moment in succession; and this kind of the indivisible in permanent things, forasmuch as it has a determinate site, cannot be in many parts of place, or in many places; likewise the indivisible of action or movement, forasmuch as it has a determinate order in movement or action, cannot be in many parts of time. Another kind of the indivisible is outside of the whole genus of the continuous; and in this way incorporeal substances, like God, angel and soul, are called indivisible. Such a kind of indivisible does not belong to the continuous, as a part of it, but as touching it by its power; hence, according as its power can extend itself to one or to many, to a small thing, or to a great one, in this way it is in one or in many places, and in a small or large place’.

⁴¹ In Article 4, Aquinas argues that it is proper to God to be everywhere absolutely, which is to say, on any conditions that might be supposed. He contrasts this to the case on which a thing, say a millet seed, could be everywhere only given a particular supposition – that no other body existed, and in so doing evinces the Aristotelian notion that there is no place beyond existent bodies.

⁴⁶ Aquinas, ST I Q76.Art.8.

⁴² Aquinas, ST I Q76.Art. 3.

⁴³ ‘One cannot sense without a body: therefore the body must be some part of man. It follows therefore that the intellect by which Socrates understands is a part of Socrates, so that in some way it is united to the body of Socrates’, Aquinas, ST I Q76.Art.1.

⁴⁴ ‘The intellect which is the principle of intellectual operation is the form of the human body. For that whereby primarily anything acts is a form of the thing to which the act is to be attributed’, Aquinas, ST I Q76.Art.1.

⁴⁵ ‘In each body the whole soul is in the whole body, and in each part is entire’, Augustine of Hippo, De Trin. vi, 6, quoted by Aquinas at ST I Q76.Art.8.

⁴⁷ Aquinas, ST I Q76.Art.8.

⁴⁸ Aquinas, ST I Q76.Art.8.

⁴⁹ Aquinas, ST I Q76.Art.8

⁵⁰ ‘The first kind of totality does not apply to forms, except perhaps accidentally; and then only to those forms, which have an indifferent relationship to a quantitative whole and its parts; as whiteness, as far as its essence is concerned, is equally disposed to be in the whole surface and in each part of the surface; and, therefore, the surface being divided, the whiteness is accidentally divided. But a form which requires variety in the parts, such as a soul, and specially the soul of perfect animals, is not equally related to the whole and the parts: hence it is not divided accidentally when the whole is divided. So therefore quantitative totality cannot be attributed to the soul, either essentially or accidentally’, Aquinas, ST I Q76.Art.8.

⁵¹ ‘The whole soul is in each part of the body, by totality of perfection and of essence, but not by totality of power. For it is not in each part of the body, with regard to each of its powers; but with regard to sight, it is in the eye; and with regard to hearing, it is in the ear; and so forth’, Aquinas, ST I Q76.Art.8.

⁵² See Rozemond, who cites Aquinas' Questiones de anima X ad 8: ‘Aquinas notes that since the intellect is not located in the body at all, the intellectual soul is in this sense not even whole in the whole body’, M. Rozemond, ‘Descartes, Mind-Body Union, and Holenmerism’, Philosophical Topics, 31:1&2 (2003), 343–367 (347). I also thank Peter Distelzweig for discussion and clarification of this point.

⁵³ See D. Des Chene, Life's Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 172–173 for a discussion of the contrary positions that: all souls are divisible (asserted, for instance, by Pompanazzi): and no souls are divisible (held by Marsilio Ficino). This latter view implies, Des Chene notes, that a new soul is produced when the cutting of a plant survives and grows.

⁵⁴ See Suarez, De anima 1.XIV.9–10, discussed in Rozemond, ‘Descartes, Mind-Body, and Holenmerism’, 347.

⁵⁵ Compare with Aristotle, De anima I 5 411b19-31. At I 5 411b26, Aristotle writes, ‘It is found that plants, and among animals certain insects or annelida, live when divided, which implies that the soul in their segments is specifically, though not numerically, the same’, Aristotle, De anima, translated by R.D. Hicks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 47. I thank Jim Lennox for the references.

⁵⁶ Suárez, Disputationes metaphysicae, XXX.VII.3, Opera omnia, vols. 25–26, translated and discussed by Rozemond in ‘Descartes, Mind-Body, and Holenmerism’, 344–345.

⁵⁷ Suárez, Disputationes metaphysicae, translated and discussed by Rozemond in ‘Descartes, Mind-Body, and Holenmerism’, 344–345.

⁵⁸ Rozemond, ‘Descartes, Mind-Body, and Holenmerism’, 346: ‘One argument Suárez cites relies on the principle that every agent must be joined to the patient on which the agent acts. The question is, Suárez writes, whether this principle really applies to God or only to finite agents. He concludes the principle applies to the “ratio agendi” as such, and is not dependent on issues of finitude, Suárez, Disputationes metaphysicae, XXX.VII.12’.

⁵⁹ See Rozemond, ‘Descartes, Mind-Body, and Holenmerism’, 345–346: ‘The presence of the divine substance in creatures Suarez labels “whole in the whole and whole in the singular parts – tota in toto et tota in singulis partibus”. This type of presence characterizes God but also angels and the rational soul (Disputationes metaphysicae, XXX.VII.44). Indeed, Suárez argues that it pertains to God on the ground that it pertains to the rational soul, and, being a more perfect mode of presence, must also belong to God’.

⁶⁰ Suárez, Disputationes Metaphysicae, vol. 2, 100, col. 1, par. 16, in Grant, Much Ado About Nothing, 155 (original Latin n. 33, 355–356), his translation.

⁶¹ The passage continues as follows: ‘And when we separate real bodies either from the thing itself, or in the mind, we necessarily perceive a certain space capable of being filled by certain bodies, [a space] in which the whole divine substance is present – the whole [divine substance] in the whole [space] and the whole [divine substance] in each of the particular parts of it [i.e., of the space]. And by this presence, we signify nothing other than the aforesaid disposition of the divine substance’, Suárez, Disputationes Metaphysicae, vol. 2, 100, col. 1, par. 16, in Grant, Much Ado About Nothing,155 (original Latin n. 33, 355–356), his translation.

⁶² J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by P.H. Nidditch (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1975), II.13.21.

⁶³ As John Henry notes, Aristotle does seem to allow in his Categories (6,5a, 5–14) that space and body are both dimensional, and yet are distinct, regions of the former occupied by the latter: ‘Space is a continuous quantity: for the parts of a solid occupy a certain space, and these have a common boundary; it follows that the parts of space also, which are occupied by the parts of the solid, have the same common boundary as the parts of the solid’, J. Henry, ‘Francesco Patrizi da Cherso's Concept of Space and its Later Influence’, Annals of Science, 36 (1979), 549–575 [517].

⁶⁴ On this point, see Grant, Much Ado about Nothing, 131 and 140–141.

⁶⁵ See Grant, Much Ado about Nothing, 117–121; in the seventeenth century, Otto von Guericke catalogued the meanings of the term ‘imaginary space’, and found them to include: a mental fiction; a possible but not actual space; something actual, namely, the immensity of God. This third meaning at least is rather elusive, due to many theologians' metaphorical use of spatial language in connection with God.

⁶⁶ J. Henry, ‘Francesco Patrizi da Cherso's Concept of Space and its Later Influence’ [‘Patrizi’], Annals of Science, 36 (1979), 549–575 (556). According to Philoponous, space is ‘pure dimensionality void of all corporeality’; J. Philoponus, In Aristotelis physicorum libros quattttor priores commentaria, in Henry, ‘Patrizi’, 567.

⁶⁷ Grant, Much Ado about Nothing, 116.

⁶⁸ There is not full consensus about the claim that Aquinas denied a true void. Grant, for one, claims that he denied it (Grant, Much Ado About Nothing, 118, 145–146). Yet Funkenstein understands Aquinas as speculating about the possibility of an actual, extra-cosmic void (Funkenstein, Theology, 61), and Centore suggests that Aquinas may have gone beyond speculation (see especially 355–358). We can at least agree that Aquinas does not abandon the Aristotelian conception, which is evident in passages such as the following: ‘But a thing is everywhere absolutely when it does not belong to it to be everywhere accidentally, that is, merely on some supposition; as a grain of millet would be everywhere, supposing that no other body existed’, Aquinas, ST I.Q.8.Art.4. Here Aquinas holds, with Aristotle, that the limit of the body is the limit of place; if no body other than the millet seed existed, the seed would be everywhere, since there is no place apart from existent bodies.

⁶⁹ John Buridan, in Grant, Much Ado about Nothing, 123.

⁷⁰ A detailed and insightful analysis of Patrizi's ideas and influence may be found in Henry, ‘Materialism’; see also chapter 8 in Grant, Much Ado about Nothing. I have drawn upon both in my discussion here.

⁷² Patrizi, ‘On Physical Space’, 225.

⁷¹ F. Patrizi, ‘On Physical Space’ (De Spacio Physico), translated and commentary by B. Brickman, Journal of the History of Ideas, 4:2 (1943), 224–245 (225).

⁷³ ‘It always remains fixed per se and in itself, nor is it every or anywhere moved, nor does it change its essence or locus in any of its parts or in its entirety. Whatever is moved, is moved through this Space, but this Space does not move upon itself […] For it would be moving through a part of itself, and the two parts of Space would be one within and on the other, and the locus of the part that moved would remain empty of Space, and thus Space would be empty of itself. It therefore does not move either as a whole or in its parts. It is therefore entirely unmoved and immovable’, Patrizi, ‘On Physical Space’, 242.

⁷⁴ See Patrizi, ‘On Physical Space’, 241.

⁷⁵ Patrizi defends an actually infinite space via the following argument (one that does not seem to target the medieval concept of non-dimensional space): ‘If it were said to be potential, it would necessarily follow that it is now finite, and that later it would become infinite, but still only potentially infinite. But if that is an absurdity, we conclude that it is actually infinite. But is it infinite with respect to lines, surfaces, or even depths? With respect to all of them, of course’, Patrizi, ‘On Physical Space’, 237.

⁷⁶ ‘What then is it [space], a body or an incorporeal substance? Neither, but a mean between the two. It is not a body, because it displays no resistance, nor is it ever an object of, or subject to, vision, touch, or any other sense. On the other hand, it is not incorporeal, being three-dimensional. It has length, breadth, and depth – not just one, two, or several of these dimensions, but all of them. Therefore it is an incorporeal body and a corporeal non-body’, Patrizi, ‘On Physical Space’, 241.

⁷⁷ ‘Space is not bounded by a body or by Space’, Patrizi, ‘On Physical Space’, 237.

⁷⁸ Patrizi, ‘On Physical Space’, 238. The idea of an infinite space having a center is not so odd if the center is understood as the locus of creation, from which space then extends, a point I thank Jim Lennox for mentioning. (The question of where God was before the creation might, however, plague those who take God to be immanent rather than transcendent.)

⁷⁹ See Patrizi, ‘On Physical Space’, 242.

⁸⁰ ‘When it is filled with a body, it is locus; without a body it is a vacuum. And on this account, this vacuum, like locus, must have the three common dimensions – length, width, and depth. And the vacuum itself is nothing else than three-dimensional Space’, Patrizi, ‘On Physical Space’, 231.

⁸¹ Patrizi, ‘On Physical Space’, 240.

⁸² ‘For the property of a natural body, in so far as it is a natural body, is that antitypia mentioned above, and what is called anterisis. This is resistance (resistentia et renitentia)’, Patrizi, ‘On Physical Space’, 231.

⁸³ Patrizi, ‘On Physical Space’, 239.

⁸⁴ ‘Space, ever the same, ever fixed, must have length, width, and depth so as to release all bodies that leave it, and receive all bodies that enter it. Otherwise, we are faced with the interpenetration of bodies, which is impossible’, Patrizi, ‘On Physical Space’, 230–231. A later passage contains a similar argument: ‘When water contracts, it must fill up the empty spaces interspersed within it, else you are faced with the interpenetration of bodies […] The air, likewise, yields to my body when I change my position in it. As it gives way it is either destroyed or else withdrawn into its other neighboring particles, and thus, either one part penetrate the other, or else it withdraws into the empty spaces interspersed within it. But we must not say that it was destroyed, without any previous transformation. Nor is the interpenetration of one part of the air with another admissible. Therefore, we must admit that it betook itself into the empty spaces of the nearby air’, Patrizi, ‘On Physical Space’, 232–233.

⁸⁵ Although I have set out three main possibilities, other ideas about extension are of course possible. See, for instance, Funkenstein's discussion of Ockham's idea of extension: ‘Extension is, for Ockham, a connotative, relative notion by which a thing is recognized to have “parts outside parts” or parts separate from, yet together with, each other. Therefore a body can be thought of without this relation, so to say contracted to a point that is not “somewhere,” and still be a body – such as the body of Christ’, Funkenstein, Theology, 60.

⁸⁶ See H. Stein, ‘Newton's Metaphysics’, edited by I. Bernard Cohen and G.E. Smith, in Cambridge Companion to Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 256?307 (275). Slowik refers to it as the ‘determined quantities of extension’ hypothesis, or ‘DQE’ hypothesis; see §3.1 of ‘Newton's Neo-Platonic Ontology of Space’.

⁸⁷ In ‘By y^e Divine Arm: Substance and Method in De gravitatione’ (manuscript, n.d.,), I develop the suggestion sketched here.

⁸⁸ Newton, Philosophical Writings, 27.

⁸⁹ Newton, Philosophical Writings, 28.

⁹⁰ The point is evident in Newton's explanation of the conditions obtaining for those things that we classify as bodies: ‘therefore I did not say that they are the numerical parts of space which are absolutely immobile, but only definite quantities which may be transferred from space to space’. See Newton, Philosophical Writings, 28. The original text reads as follows: ‘Quod si forent corpora, tum corpora definire possemus esse Extensionis quantitates determinatas quas Deus ubique praesens conditionibus quibusdam afficit: quales sunt (1) ut sint mobiles, et ideo non dixi esse spatij partes numericas quae sunt prorsus immobiles, sed tantum definitas quantitates quae de spatio in spatium transferri queant’, Newton, ‘De gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum’, in Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, edited by A.R. Hall and M.B. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 106.

⁹¹ The phrase is from More, 190 (ed. MacKinnon): ‘Wherefore when as the Nullibists come so near to the truth, it seems impossible they should, so all of a sudden, start from it, unless they were blinded with a superstitious admiration of Des Cartes, his Metaphysicks, and were deluded, effascinated and befooled with his jocular Subtilty and prestigious Abstractions there: For who in his right wits can acknowledge that a Spirit by its Essence may be present to Matter, and yet be no where, unless the Matter were nowhere also?’.

⁹⁴ More to Descartes (December 11, 1648), More, Epistolae, 62; in Reid, ‘Evolution’, 93, his translation.

⁹² Indeed, as John Henry has pointed out, More's immaterial Spirit of Nature, which he took to actuate matter and thereby cause such phenomena as magnetism, cohesion, and the production of colors, which the mechanical philosophy could not explain, had to be extended in space. For More conceived of the Spirit of Nature in neo-Platonic terms, something that emanated outward, like an orb of light from a source. See J. Henry, ‘Henry More’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2007/entries/henry-more, §3.

⁹³ More, ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum' in Philosophical Writings of Henry More, 184. Despite such disagreements, More had admired Descartes and had disseminated his ideas in England; see Henry, ‘Materialism’, 175, including n.10.

⁹⁵ On this point see Des Chene: ‘To an Aristotelian versed in the machinery of distinctions devised by Ockham and Scotus it will naturally occur to wonder how the soul is distinguished from its powers (§7). One answer, favored by Nominalists, is that the soul's powers, so-called, are only the soul itself, whose action is conditioned by the objects and organs through which it operates. The Jesuit authors, on the other hand, follow Thomas Aquinas in holding that between the soul and its powers there is a distinction, real in the sense that it does not depend on our conception’, Des Chene, Life's Form, 7.

⁹⁶ See More, ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum’ in Philosophical Writings of Henry More, 188. Interestingly, Descartes' position in the Principles of Philosophy commits him to that position, because in Book I §62, he asserts that there is only a conceptual distinction, not a real one, between a substance and its attributes, which implies that God is only conceptually distinct from his omnipotence, and so must be located in rerum natura if his power is. R. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes [‘CSM’], translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 214. Jasper Reid notes that when More presses Descartes on the issue during their correspondence, Descartes raises that very point, yet does so immediately after having claimed both: that God is omnipresent in virtue of his power; and that God's essence has no relation to place. In other words, having reaffirmed the claim that God's substance or essence is transcendent, Descartes allows that his power is spatially located, and then, as if it supported that position, he invokes a claim from his Principles that in fact undermines it, implying instead that God is immanent if his power is; J. Reid, ‘The Spatial Presence of Spirits among the Cartesians’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 46:1 (2008), 91–117 (102).

⁹⁷ More, ‘Complete Poems’, 62 (Psychathanasia, bk. 2, cant. 2, st. 33), in Reid, ‘Evolution’, 91. I have emphasized the word ‘not’; the other italics are original in More.

⁹⁸ More to Descartes (December 11, 1648), Epistolae, 62; in Reid, ‘Evolution’, 93, his translation.

⁹⁹ More to Descartes (March 5, 1649), Epistolae, 76; in Reid, ‘Evolution’, 93, his translation.

¹⁰⁰ In an impressive article deciphering the vagaries and obscurities of More's language, Jasper Reid has shown that the term ‘self-reduplication’ refers to something quite different in More's mature writings than it did in his early works. In early writings, such as the poems of 1647, he uses it to affirm the holenmerian doctrine that a spirit exists, in its entirety, at different places, but in his later works uses it in connection with the claim that spirits are extended in the sense of having ‘parts outside parts’, albeit notional ones. See Reid, ‘Evolution’, 91.

¹⁰¹ More to Descartes (March 5, 1649), Epistolae, 76–77, in Reid, ‘Evolution’, 93, his translation.

¹⁰² H. More, ‘Psychathanasia’, Book II, Canto II, Stanza 33, in The Complete Poems of Dr. Henry More (1614–1687) [‘Poems’], collected and edited by A. Grosart (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1878), 62. Much later, when More repudiates holenmerism, he will cite this as the second of two reasons that the ‘holenmerians’ accept the doctrine: ‘The other Reason is, That from hence it might be easily understood, how the Soul being in the whole Body, C, D, E, whatever happens to it in C, or B, it presently perceives it in A’, More, ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum’ in Philosophical Writings of Henry More, 198. The first reason he attributes to those accepting the doctrine – but which does not describe the Scholastics, as noted elsewhere, and so may only describe More's earlier self – is that he takes it to ground the indivisibility of spirits.

¹⁰³ The sources of the phrases are: Divine Dialogues (1668), in which one character takes space to be ‘so imaginary that it cannot be disimagined by human understanding’, More 1668, 54, in Henry, ‘Henry More’, §6; and; Enchiridion Metaphysicum' in Philosophical Writings of Henry More, 215: ‘There is an Idea of infinite Extension drawn or taken in from no external Sense, but is natural and essential to the very Faculty of perceiving; which the Mind can by no means pluck out of her self, nor cast it away from her.’

¹⁰⁶ Henry More, ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum’ in Philosophical Writings of Henry More, 215. Earlier, in Divine Dialogues, More had one of his characters acknowledge that space beyond the cosmos was difficult to ‘dis-imagine’; see Henry's discussion, ‘Patrizi’, 572; also 570, n.144.

¹⁰⁴ From a 1651 letter from More to Anne Conway, in Reid, ‘Evolution’, 83, who references Alan Gabbey, ‘Anne Conway et Henry More: Lettres sur Descartes (1650–1651)’, Archives de Philosophie, 40 (1977), 379–404 (388).

¹⁰⁵ More, An Antidote Against Atheism, 200 (Appendix, ch. 7, §3), in Reid, ‘Evolution’, 83.

¹⁰⁷ ‘If the universal deity is indivisible, as it is, it will be in indivisible space’; Patrizi, ‘Nova philosophiae’, 61b-c, in Henry, ‘Patrizi’, 570, his translation.

¹⁰⁸ In §4–6 of the 1655 Appendix to An Antidote against Atheism, More writes, ‘If after the removal of corporeal Matter out of the world, there will be still Space and distance, in which this very matter, while it was there, was also conceived to lye, and this distant Space cannot but be something, and yet not corporeal, because neither impenetrable nor tangible, it must of necessity be a substance Incorporeal, necessarily and eternally existent of it self: which the clearer Idea of a Being absolutely perfect will more fully and punctually inform us to be the Self-subsisting God’, quoted in Koyré, Closed World, 137. There is some disagreement about whether this identification of space with the ‘self-subsisting God’ was a one-off occurrence. According to Reid, it was: ‘After that isolated remark in the Appendix to An Antidote Against Atheism, More subsequently shied somewhat away from declaring space to be the very substance of God, but he was at least willing to identify it with one of His attributes’, Reid, ‘Evolution’, 101. Henry, by contrast, holds that More implicitly made the identification elsewhere too: ‘This identification is implicit in the Divine dialogues (1668, London), vol. 1, 106, where space is considered to be “a more general and confused apprehension of the divine amplitude,” and it is a space in which all things are “necessarily apprehended to live and move and have their being” (p. 107)’, Henry, ‘Patrizi’, 571.

¹⁰⁹ ‘Enchiridium metaphysicum’, cap. viii, 8, 69 sq.; in Koyre, Closed World, 148.

¹¹⁰ H. More, Divine Dialogues, Containing Disquisitions Concerning the Attributes and Providence of God (Glasgow: Printed by Robert Foulis, 1743), 448–449. Cuphophron responds that the point is obscure, but doubtless belongs to high metaphysics.

¹¹¹ See Reid, ‘Evolution’, 98–99.

¹¹² Ted McGuire tells me that Hobbes quips, ‘Methinks spirits are only found in bottles’.

¹¹⁷ Hobbes, Leviathan, 500. Continuing his gibe, Hobbes asks how incorporeal spirits manage to ‘walk by night in […] Church-yards’, and wonders whether they will be said to ‘walke definitivè, not circumscriptivè, or spiritually, not temporally’. Hobbes is, as More remarks, ‘very copious in [his] jearing’, More, Philosophical Writings of Henry More, 94.

¹¹³ T. Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by A.R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904 [1651]), 497.

¹¹⁴ Hobbes, Leviathan, 497–498.

¹¹⁵ Hobbes, Leviathan, 294–295: ‘To men that understand the signification of these words, Substance, and Incorporeall; as Incorporeall is not taken for subtile body, but for not Body, they imply a contradiction: insomuch as to say, an Angel, or Spirit (is in that sense) an Incorporeall Substance, is to say in effect, there is no Angel nor Spirit at all’.

¹¹⁶ Hobbes, Leviathan, 497–498.

¹¹⁸ T. Hobbes, De Corpore, edited by Sir W. Molesworth (London: John Bohn, Henrietta St., Covent Garden, 1839 [1656]), 97.

¹¹⁹ In ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, 1659 (bk. 1, ch. 10, §8; discussed by J. Reid, ‘Evolution’, 98), More terms the doctrine that the spirit is whole in every part ‘the Scholastick Riddle’. The other phrase appears in ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum’: The phrase is from More, ‘it is apparent the three Objections which we brought in the beginning do again recur here, and utterly overwhelm the first Reason of the Holenmerians: So that the Remedy is far more intolerable than the Disease’, More, Philosophical Writings, 202.

¹²⁰ More, ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum’ in Philosophical Writings, 206–207.

¹²¹ More ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum’ in Philosophical Writings, 207. Later in the same section, he explains that a spirit is one, true, and good.

¹²² While it is clear in ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum’ that More takes spirits to be indiscerpible and penetrable, he indicated earlier, in ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, that the law of opposites is the ground for those characteristics: ‘I will define therefore a Spirit in generall thus, A substance penetrable and indiscerpible. The fitness of which Definition will be the better understood, if we divide Substance in general into these first kindes, viz. Body and Spirit, and then define Body to be A Substance impenetrable and discerpible. Whence the contrary kind to this is fitly defined, A Substance penetrable and indiscerpible’, More, ‘The Immortality of the Soul’ in Philosophical Writings, 65–66.

¹²³ More, ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum’ in Philosophical Writings, 213. See also ‘The Immortality of the Soul’ in Philosophical Writings, 64: ‘Essential Spissitude: For so I will call this Mode or Property of a Substance, that is able to receive one part of it self into another. Which fourth Mode is as easy and familiar to my Understanding, as that of the Three dimensions to my Sense or Phansy. For I mean nothing else by Spissitude, but the redoubling or contracting of Substance into less space then it does sometimes occupy’.

¹²⁴ More, The Immortality of the Soul, edited by A. Jacob (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), 7. The principle appears in an argument meant to show that the material particles comprising compound bodies are extended and yet divisible only intellectually, not actually. I do not find the statement's meaning unambiguous. For one thing, More does not tell us whether he means ‘extension’ as a synonym for ‘parts’, or instead means the phrase as a disjunction, such that the essence of being is either to have quantitative parts outside parts, or to be extended in some other, non-quantitative manner. Additionally, his main point in the passage is that an entity cannot exist if it is nowhere, as is evident from the next sentence, which reads, ‘For, to take away all Extension, is to reduce a thing onely to a Mathematical point, which is nothing else but pure Negation or Non-entity; and there being no medium betwixt Entity and Nonentity, it is plain that if a thing be at all, it must be extended’. Reid, by contrast, interprets the passage as a straightforward claim that extension consists in having parts outside parts: ‘He decided that it was not only necessary to attribute extension in some sense to all substances. He now realized that such an attribution really did have to involve some sort of attribution of parts outside parts to them, albeit inseparable, notional parts in the case of immaterial substances: ‘it being the very essence of whatsoever is, to have Parts or Extension in some measure or other. (More, Immortality, 39 (bk. 1, ch. 10, §8)’, Reid, ‘Evolution’, 98; see also Reid's remarks on 96–97 and 102. Reid does emphasize on 93, in connection with ‘Echiridion Metaphysicum’, that in attributing parts outside parts to spirits, More was not saying that spirits are composed out such parts, but rather that such parts can be distinguished in the spirits.

¹²⁵ In distinguishing ‘immaterial extension’ or ‘metaphysical extension’ from material extension, More charges the nullibists with assuming that extension implies two qualities associated with matter, divisibility and impenetrability: ‘they presently imagine that it [extension] has partes extra partes, and is not Ens unum per se & non per aliud, a Being one by it self, and not by vertue of another, but so framed from the juxtaposition of parts’. Yet considered just in itself, More continues, extension ‘includes no such thing’, More, ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum’ in Philosophical Writings, 216. Does he mean to deny that immaterial extension involves partes extra partes? This passage really does not answer the question, for when More tells us that extension ‘includes no such thing’, it is difficult to tell whether he means to oppose only the claim that extension implies being composed from a juxtaposition of parts (a claim that would in turn imply actual divisibility), or whether he also means to oppose the claim that every extended thing has parts outside parts. It is similarly difficult to extract a decisive answer from Section XXV. In that section, More aims to show ‘That every thing that is extended has not Parts Physically discerpible, though Logically or Intellectually divisible’, (More, ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum’ in Philosophical Writings, 217). The nullibists are mistaken when they say ‘that all Extension inferreth Parts and all Parts Division’. Does More mean to deny both conjuncts, or only one? If he means to deny the first as well as the second, then it would seem that he wants to say that immaterial extension does not involve the having of parts. And in fact his next remarks seem to assert just that: ‘The first is false, forasmuch as Ens unum per se, a Being, one of it self, or of its own immediate Nature, although extended, yet includes no Parts in its Idea, but is conceived according to its proper Essence, as a thing as simple as may be, and therefore compounded of no Parts’, More, ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum’ in Philosophical Writings, 217. As noted next, however, More's subsequent remarks, as well as the setion's heading, indicate that he does not deny that spirits have parts, but only that they have discerpible parts.

¹²⁶ More, ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum’ in Philosophical Writings, 217. The preceding section similarly suggested that there is ‘another Extension, namely, an Immaterial one’, which is penetrable and yet cannot be torn into parts by anything, which is to say that no thing, whether material or immaterial, can ‘disjoin any thing of its Essence any where’, More, ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum’ in Philosophical Writings, 216–217. Why exactly is it impossible to separate any of its essence? While here More says only that such a spirit is ‘One of its own Nature, and held together into one by virtue of some other, either Quality or Substance’ (More, ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum’ in Philosophical Writings, 217), the course of his reasoning suggests that from the failure of extension to imply divisibility conceptually, we get the possibility of an extended being that is not actually discerpible, and from our other reasons to believe in spirits, we can take that possibility to be realized, as the spirits we have conceived on other grounds.

¹²⁷ An interesting counterpoint to More's suggestion that immaterial spirits may be more or less dense is the concept of indeterminate dimension, developed in connection with body. On that concept in the thinking of Aegidius and of Averroes, see E. Sylla, ‘Godfrey of Fontaine on Motion’ in Alfonso Maierù and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (ed), Studi sul XIV secolo in memoria di Anneliese Maier, (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1981), 110–115. On related issues, see A. Maier, ‘Das Problem der quantitas materiae’ in Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14. Jahrhundert (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1966.)

¹²⁸ More, ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum’ in Philosophical Writings, 213.

¹²⁹ More, ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum’ in Philosophical Writings, 199–200.

¹³⁰ See Grant, Much Ado about Nothing, 253. McGuire and Slowik also consider More's arguments compelling: ‘Probably in the wake of Hobbes's attack on the absurdity of holenmerism […] More came to see that the presence of incorporeal substances in space needed to be defended by better and more positive arguments […] He faces this task squarely in his Divine Dialogues (1668). The claim that the soul, for example, can be at once wholly in the human toe and wholly in the head, means that if it is wholly “in the Toe, there is nothing left to be in the head” (1743, 72). From this follows the absurd consequence that God's amplitude is reduced to a minute point, resulting in the instantiation of Divine omnipresence in multiple totalities. This, of course, contravenes the essential unity that incorporeal substances must possess’, McGuire and Slowik, ‘Newton's Ontology of Omnipresence and Infinite Space’, Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy (forthcoming), section 2.

¹³¹ Aquinas, ST, Q8.Art.2, reply to obj.3.

¹³⁴ More, ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum’ in Philosophical Writings, 198.

¹³² More, ‘Enchiridion Metaphysicum’ in Philosophical Writings, 198.

¹³³ More, Psychathanasia, Book II, Canto II, Stanza 33, in Poems, 62.

¹³⁵ In another section, he weakens his charge, writing that the doctrine of holenmerism is either ‘superfluous or ineffectual’. Since the doctrine as conceived by most of its proponents was not needed to block divisibility, to describe it as ineffectual would be misleading. More is closer to the mark, then, with the possibility that holenmerism is superfluous, yet that too is misleading, since the doctrine does express an important aspect of the spiritual presence implied by a certain concept of spirit.

¹³⁶ The proper target for More is the non-dimensionalist concept of spirit, and for Hobbes it is the notion of immaterial spirit generally. Geoff Gorham raises the question of whether one might defend More (and perhaps Hobbes too) by pointing out that Aquinas' notion of spiritual extension depends upon an ontology that More rejects, one in which substantial forms and essences qualify as a kind of parts. My point here may be seen as a response to that question. Instead of attacking the ontology directly, More (like Hobbes) attacks holenmerism directly, but misconstrues that doctrine because he fails to see that it is simply a consequence of the ontology. The better strategy, then, would be to attack the ontology directly.

¹³⁷ John Henry observes that despite his intentions to the contrary, More's concept of spirits opens the door to materialism; although he ‘was always concerned to avoid the attribution of activity to matter and the attribution of materiality to spirit […] we can see More being ineluctably drawn towards a materialist concept of spirit. The rot sets in as a result of More's Neoplatonist conviction that real existence is nonsensical except for extended entities’, Henry, ‘Materialism’, 176; see also 173–174, where Henry references D.P. Walker's observation that More tended to identify the soul with the subtle but material ‘animal spirits’.

¹³⁸ Ed Slowik notes that opponents of holenmerism might claim the following advantage: ‘A spatial view of the mind more closely follows what we know today about mental functions. My language abilities are on the left side above the ear, and motor skills in the back, etc.; hence a part-like or extended conception of the mind/soul might actually be a successful prediction made by the anti-holenmerists’, Slowik, personal correspondence, July 3, 2011. Yet it is not incidental that such contemporary theorists avoid the identification implied by the locution ‘mind/soul’, having eliminated immaterial spirits from their ontologies; and the immaterial soul is what an anti-holenmerist such as More is very determined to preserve.

¹³⁹ Newton, ‘De gravitatione’ in Philosophical Writings, 26.

¹⁴⁰ An opposing view is taken by McGuire and Slowik ‘Newton's Ontology of Omnipresence and Infinite Space’, and by Slowik, ‘Newton's Neo-Platonic Ontology of Space’, §4.2.

¹⁴¹ I elaborate upon the ideas sketched here in ‘Newton and the Doctrine of Holenmerism’ (manuscript, n.d.). A less tractable difficulty is that of maintaining a distinction between the view that spirits are transcendent, their powers alone reaching into the world, and the view that spirits are immanent and constituted by powers existing in the world.