God, space and the Spirit of Nature: Morean trialism revisited

ABSTRACT

In my paper, I dispute Christian Hengstermann’s analysis of More’s philosophical system as a form of panentheistic panpsychism in which matter is alive by virtue of being the last emanation from God. I show that, in his mature period, More explicitly rejected such an emanationist doctrine and attributed the non-mechanical powers of matter to an outside immaterial principle, the Spirit of Nature. Ultimately, this leads to a system in which divine space, the Spirit of Nature and the spirit of God are representations of various aspects of the divine essence, as it is at work in the world. On the other hand, matter is not part of this triadic structure and can only be said to be alive at the cost of a rather counterintuitive redefinition of the notion of “life”.

KEYWORDS:

• Panpsychism
• world soul
• Spirit of Nature
• Henry More
• panentheism
• Kabbalah
• Francis Glisson
• vitalism

1. Introduction

It is well-known that, in the Enchiridion Metaphysicum, Henry More argues for the existence of absolute space, conceived as an omnipresent spiritual substance within which the whole universe is located. The fact that this spiritual substance exhibits a considerable number of properties that are traditionally ascribed to God ultimately leads More to conclude that space is “a certain rough representation of divine essence”.¹ If space is divine and everything that exists is located in it,² then the basic tenet of panentheism (that everything exists within God) directly follows. Upon this basis, Christian Hengstermann describes what he calls “Morean trialism”,³ a panpsychist and panentheist vision of the world consisting of three distinct ontological strata: (i) divine space filled with (ii) material reality endowed “with a spiritual agency of its own by which it may gradually come to participate in his [God’s – JJ] universal self-communication”,⁴ the whole encompassed under a (iii) transcendent divinity that is at the same time the archetypal, perfect mind and ultimate, creative goodness.⁵ According to Hengstermann, this structure allows More to do justice to the claims of both divine transcendence and immanence. The third layer represents God as the transcendent Creator distinct from his creation and able to alter the natural course of events from outside. At the same time, God is extended (again, whatever is, is extended!) and his immaterial and infinite extension is the first ontological layer which, “quite literally, contains in itself all finite extensions upon which God acts”.⁶ The description of the middle layer – spiritually active, living matter – is based primarily on the correspondence with Descartes along with certain passages from More’s critique of Francis Glisson.

In the first part of my paper, I will present a brief overview of More’s philosophical development, pointing out a seemingly radical change of view occurring in the 1650s. A great illustration of this change is More’s critique of the Kabbalah. As I will show, the arguments presented there against the doctrine of emanation⁷ are, in fact, arguments exactly against the sort of vitalistic idealism that More embraced in his correspondence with Descartes and upon which Hengstermann bases his interpretation.

Yet, despite this open rejection of vitalism and pantheism, More’s later writings still contain passages seemingly implying that the whole world is pervaded with divine life. A crucial notion in this regard is the Spirit of Nature, which will be the focus of the second part of this paper. I will argue that, when More ascribes life to matter in his critique of Francis Glisson, he does not revert back to his earlier position. Instead, he considers the principle of life to be the Spirit of Nature. While Hengstermann does also take the Spirit of Nature into account, it seems to me that he fails to do justice to how important a role it plays in More’s system. By analysing several passages from the Enchiridion Metaphysicum, I will therefore try to show what exactly this Spirit of Nature is and how it works. I believe that, through it, More does in fact surreptitiously turn his system into a panpsychist and vitalist one – albeit in a different form both from how Hengstermann conceives it and how we usually think about it today.

Having established that the Spirit of Nature, rather than matter endowed with life, is the more appropriate candidate for the second ontological layer in Hengstermann’s triadic structure, I will finally briefly turn to the problem of the divinity of space. A correct understanding of the relation between God and space is undoubtedly an important part of interpreting More’s metaphysics, yet, at the same time, we have only a few clues to work with. My proposition is that, if we follow More’s own expressions and conceive space as a representation of a certain aspect of the divine essence, it sets the stage for a triadic understanding of More’s ontological system in which space, the Spirit of Nature and the spirit of God are three representations of different aspects of divine presence in the world. This structure is slightly different from the one proposed by Hengstermann and it also entails a different conception of the relation between God and the world or between divine transcendence and immanence.

2. More’s early and late philosophies

Henry More’s thinking can be divided, more or less clearly, into two main periods, with the change occurring somewhere in the early 1650s. More’s early philosophy⁸ presents a system that is fully in line with the Neoplatonic tradition and whose strongest influences are Ficino, Origen and Plotinus.⁹ A strong parallel (if not outright identity) is drawn between the “Platonic triad” of One, Intellect and Soul and the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The Intellect is the world of ever-living Ideas and the Soul/Holy Ghost (identical with the world-soul) forms the material world by imprinting these Ideas into matter (acting by way of a world-spirit called the Mundane Spright). All these and everything else are part of the “Ogdoad”, an eightfold hierarchy in which every ontological layer emanates from the layers above so that, in the end, the whole universe is but an overflow of divine creativity and goodness, with the One as its ultimate source. In an often-quoted passage from his correspondence with Descartes, More thus argues that the seeming transmission of motion by contact is, in fact, just the receiving body’s inner life being stirred into motion:

Instead of receiving motion, a body stirs itself into motion on being alerted by another body. And, as I have said before, motion is to body what thought is to mind, that is to say, neither of them is received from without but both proceed from within the subject in which they are to be found. And in fact, every so-called body is also alive in a mindless and befuddled way, since in my view it is the last and lowest shadow and image of the divine essence which, I hold, is most perfect life.¹⁰

Looking at the works written after 1650, one might get the impression of reading a completely different philosopher. There is no mention of the eightfold ontological hierarchy anywhere, or of a world-soul contemplating the world of ideas and imprinting them into matter. Instead, we get a dualistic definition of matter and soul in terms of the impenetrability, divisibility and passivity of the former, and penetrability, indivisibility and activity of the latter.¹¹ The main emphasis is put on the refutation of materialistic atheism by showing that interactions of inert matter are not sufficient to explain various phenomena encountered in the world. Thus, immaterial entities have to be posited, including individual souls but also God, absolute space and the Spirit of Nature. Though bearing similarities with the earlier notion of the world-soul,¹² the Spirit of Nature is slightly different. More defines it as:

A Substance incorporeal, but without Sense and Animadversion, pervading the whole Matter of the Universe, and exercising a Plastical power therein according to the sundry predispositions and occasions in the parts it works upon, raising such Phænomena in the World, by directing the parts of the Matter and their Motion, as cannot be resolved into mere Mechanical powers.¹³

The Spirit of Nature is thus introduced as a supplementary principle meant to fill in whenever mechanical explanations are lacking. As Alan Gabbey put it, it seems to be a “Spirit of causal gaps”.¹⁴ Upon deeper inspection, however, it becomes clear that, in More’s opinion, mechanism has very little explanatory power on its own. What this means is that the “causal gaps” are pretty much everywhere and the Spirit of Nature is much more accurately perceived as an omnipresent metaphysical principle underlying nearly every interaction of matter. As More himself claims, he is “abundantly assured that there is no purely Mechanical Phænomenon in the whole Universe”.¹⁵

While on the face of it, the gap between More’s early and later writings could hardly be wider, a more thorough analysis reveals a surprising amount of underlying continuity. The problem, then, becomes that of giving a balanced account of the similarities and differences.¹⁶ The preface to the Latin edition of More’s Opera Omnia gives us a good idea of how the man himself perceived his philosophical development. There, he asks the reader to correct what is found in his earlier works in light of what is written in the later ones.¹⁷ He then presents two examples of doctrines that he originally held and later rejected, “holenmerism” and “actinism”. “Holenmerism”, which won’t be our concern in the current paper,¹⁸ is More’s neologism for the doctrine that the soul is whole in the whole body and whole in each part of it. “Actinism”, on the other hand, is characterized by More as “dogma de Substantiarum omnium eradiatione” – in other words, emanationism.¹⁹ Although an author’s self-assessment should always be taken with a grain of salt, any interpretation of More’s philosophy should take into account both that he considered these two topics as topics on which his opinion changed and that he considered this change important enough to give it explicit mention. Let us therefore have a closer look now at More’s rejection of actinism and its implications regarding his supposed panentheism.

3. The errors of the Kabbalists

According to More’s notion of ancient wisdom, the one and only true philosophy (a sort of philosophia perennis,²⁰ though More does not use this name) was revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai by God himself. From there, it eventually got transmitted to Pythagoras, whose followers split it into a naturalistic, atomistic part carried on by the Epicureans and a more noble, spiritual part that was transmitted to Plato and his successors. While Descartes was the newest reviver of the Epicurean tradition, More considered himself as the one who once again combines the two separate traditions and thus brings back the true Mosaic philosophy in its original form. At the same time, More felt that, since this philosophy was the one originally revealed to Moses, it also necessarily had to be the “old true Cabbala indeed”, as he claimed in the Preface to his Conjectura Cabbalistica.²¹ Only much later did More actually come into contact with Jewish Kabbalistic texts, when Anne Conway introduced him to Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont and Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, editor of the Kabbalistic anthology Kabbala denudata. Paradoxically, in these texts, More discovered a philosophy much different from the one he imagined. That led him to write a short refutation of the basic tenets of the Kabbalistic philosophy, which he sent to Rosenroth to be added to his book under the name Fundamenta philosophiæ cabbalisticæ.²² The ontology of the Kabbalists that More refutes is a radical idealism where matter is just a crass form of spirit and everything is pervaded by God so that even the basest bits of matter contain some elementary form of life and divinity in them. The parallels with More’s early emanationism are obvious and the short book is as much a criticism of the Kabbalists as it is More coming to terms with his own earlier philosophy.²³

The short text Fundamenta philosophiæ is divided into three parts. The first represents a list of sixteen “fundamental” axioms upon which the Kabbalistic doctrine stands. The second is their refutation, while the last part is a sort of “general scholium”, an addendum clarifying the wider context of More’s critique as well as describing an allegorical dream in which the Kabbalah appeared to More first as an eagle, then as a young boy and finally as a pestering bee (that is why the title characterizes the Kabbalah as aëto-pædo-melissæa). The scholium further explains that More’s critique is based on a distinction between two possible ways of philosophizing. Both proceed by deduction through reason but differ in their starting points. For the first type of philosophy, these are intellectual – innate ideas and logical, ethical and mathematical axioms. In the second case, philosophizing is based on crass, corporeal imagination. The intellect bases its philosophy on such principles as “whatever is, is either finite or infinite” or “the supreme and absolutely perfect being is such that it fully contains within itself all perfections both in form and in effect”. In contrast, imagination leads to a philosophy based on the notions that “all phenomena in the world can be explained by means of mechanism” or that “the cohesion of bodies is due to the union of hooked atoms”.²⁴

If the stated examples didn’t already give it away, More makes his allegiance clear with an ironic quip that there would be many philosophers of this second type “if God or nature accorded brute animals the ability to speak and write”.²⁵ Yet the fault of sense-based philosophy lies rather in its incomplete character than in its being straight up wrong. Besides Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius, whom More explicitly mentions, a prominent contemporary representative of this philosophy would certainly be Descartes. Now, More is indeed convinced that Cartesianism ultimately leads to atheism but its mistake is in fact quite easily remedied. As the pinnacle of mechanical philosophy, Cartesianism gets most of the things concerning interactions of matter right and its only problem is that it puts too much emphasis on mere matter. All we have to do is supplement it with an accurate doctrine of spiritual substances along with a clear proof of their existence and we get a pretty much true picture of the world.²⁶ A much more serious problem, however, comes up if we injudiciously attempt to mix the two ways of philosophizing. That is exactly what the Kabbalists do and the result is an incoherent jumble of absurd conclusions that has no easy remedy and can only be rejected as a whole.²⁷

The first axiom claims that “nothing can be created from nothing” and is thus based on the intuition of the senses, whereas the third says that, “due to its crass nature, [matter cannot] exist of itself”, which is one of the irrefutable principles of intellectual philosophy.²⁸ Yet it is exactly the combination of these two principles that opens the door to all the absurd conclusions of the Kabbalists. If matter can neither exist of itself nor be created from nothing, it follows that it cannot exist at all (axiom 4) and that all that exists is spirit (axiom 5). This spirit must be uncreated, eternal and necessarily existing, it is therefore divine (axioms 6 and 7) and, at the same time, everything that is, must be made from it (axiom 9). This is the train of thought that, according to More, leads the Kabbalists to the conclusion that if creatio ex nihilo is impossible, the world must have been created not only by God but also from God – i.e. God is not only its efficient but also material cause.²⁹ In the end, the whole text of the Fundamenta is mostly a tirade against the absurd consequences of the claim that God is the material cause of the world. This would mean he has to be split into an infinite multitude of particles, be material and subject to generation and corruption. Furthermore, each of these particles (monads) would have to contain all of God’s infinity and perfection, yet be limited to a mere point in space. Finally, since each of these particles would be God, there would in fact be an infinity of gods. The result is thus an absurd cocktail of mechanistic materialism and polytheism that ultimately amounts to atheism because a God conceived in such a way is no God at all.³⁰

Furthermore, axioms 13 and 14 describe the notion that the divine atoms (monads) find themselves at various levels of sleep and wakefulness, covering the whole range from vegetative through sensitive and rational life up to angelic spirits. These axioms – reminiscent of the emanationism, described by Hengstermann, in which God endows all of creation with some elementary life – are then rejected on the basis that they turn even stones and lime into God.³¹

As we see, the Fundamenta clearly show what, specifically, is More’s gripe with actinism. If all substances eradiate from God, then they are not only made by God but in a sense also out of God, in which case we lose all means of drawing a sufficiently clear distinction between God and this brute material world. If we think through all the consequences, the chain of logical implications is implacable: emanation entails pantheism (by making God the material cause of the world), and pantheism entails atheism (by identifying God with the multitude of material atoms). Yet this position is exactly what we find in the letter to Descartes upon which Hengstermann bases his vitalistic panpsychist reading of More. For what else is the notion that matter is “the last and lowest shadow and image of the divine essence”³² if not actinism? Not only that, the incriminated passage also hints at the problematic consequences of such a view when it uses the turn of phrase “so-called body”. If body is ultimately an emanation of a spiritual, divine principle, then it is body in name only, while, in fact, it is a form of spirit, albeit a very dense and crass one. Thus, emanationism leads to the denial of the reality of matter and ultimately to a vitalistic idealism in which everything that exists is a form of divine spirit. It is undeniably true that these were More’s opinions when he wrote to Descartes in 1649, but using these as a framework for interpreting More’s later philosophy blatantly disregards the fact that, as witnessed by the Fundamenta, More’s thoughts on these matters evolved.³³

4. Immaterial principles and living matter

Interestingly, though, even in More’s later writings, we find passages that seem to support a vitalistic panpsychist reading. Most notably, Hengstermann turns his attention to More’s critique of Francis Glisson. In his Treatise on the Energetic Nature of Substance, Glisson, a British vitalist, lists a number of motions found in matter and argues that their cause cannot be mechanical. He considers this as evidence of the fact that, besides mere mechanical interactions, there is some inherent life in matter that acts as the cause of these motions. In a Scholium to a letter in which he discusses Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus, More presented a critique of Glisson’s vitalism. In a nutshell, his argument is that, although the motions in question are indeed not mechanical, they are caused by an immaterial principle, the Spirit of Nature, whereas matter in itself is as inert and lifeless as the mechanists claim. Despite this clearly anti-vitalist context, though, More at one point quite unexpectedly claims that

a life modifiable by an immaterial principle in various ways is the one and only life that I am prepared to admit as being deeply rooted in matter. In fact, I am all the more willing to concede that, lest the ultimate emanation from the first source of life seem entirely devoid of life.³⁴

This statement looks very similar to the passage from the correspondence with Descartes, seemingly implying the same sort of vitalist emanationism. Later on, More again says that the various motions that Glisson argues with really do “provide evidence that there is some general life shining forth from worldly matter”. But the text goes on, “in no way  …  are they proof that this life emanates from matter itself or that it has not been communicated to it by an immaterial principle”. Thus, the general life shining forth from matter is not an inherent property of it – as Glisson claims – but rather the consequence of some other, immaterial principle. Yet this does not stop Hengstermann from fully accepting the seeming actinism of the first passage and claiming that the immaterial principle is God, “the first source of life”, of which matter is “the ultimate emanation”. But, if everywhere else in the text the immaterial principle responsible for the seemingly vital motions noted by Glisson is the Spirit of Nature, why should it be any different here?³⁵

The problem presented by the first quoted passage remains, though. In it, life is supposedly “deeply rooted in matter”, which is described as the “ultimate emanation from the first source of life”. Still, this represents only an isolated passage standing in opposition to the rest of the letter, where More (just as in his other writings) consistently argues that the source of life must be a spiritual principle extrinsic to matter, the Spirit of Nature. Hence, in all likelihood, we shouldn’t accept this seeming return to actinism at face value. And indeed, a look at the paragraph in which the sentence occurs shows that what More ascribes to matter is life only in a very unusual sense of the word. The discussion doesn’t concern such things as the beauty of a snowflake or the intricate design of the eye but rather a lead bullet being fired from a gun. What is under consideration is thus not matter’s ability to give form to beautiful objects and living bodies but rather its capacity to stay in motion after receiving an initial impulse. First off, More rejects that this motion be attributed to any form of appetite or perception in the bullet, since that would (quite literally) mean that the motion of a bullet depends on its whims and fancies and might stop whenever its appetite for it disappears. In contrast to this, More emphasizes that the bullet moves “in a determinate fashion”, i.e. according to certain laws. And, while he admits that this motion is vital in nature, it only leads him to the conclusion that “there may be a life without perception or appetite and without any original autokinesia”.³⁶ Similarly, in the preceding paragraph, More says that Glisson’s examples fail to prove “any life in matter other than one that is merely passive and incapable of perception, being, as it were, a shadow and imitation of the true principle of life, which is certainly immaterial and which precedes every single motion”.³⁷ Although the language has, once again, a vaguely emanationist tone, the meaning is quite different. The emphasis is not on the connection through which even matter has to participate in the life of the divine, but, rather, on the disconnect, on the fact that matter is only a shadow of the first principle and, therefore, that its life can only be passive.

Both in common sense and throughout most of the European philosophical tradition, life has very often been linked to (variously understood) self-motion.³⁸ To many of More’s opponents, then, speaking of a life without autokinesia would almost be a contradictio in adiecto. For what sort of motion is left if we take away perception, appetite and even autokinesia? Pretty much just the bullet’s ability to stay in motion upon being set into motion by something else – in other words, inertia. And this is the context in which More says, as quoted above, that “a life modifiable by an immaterial principle in various ways is the one and only life that I am prepared to admit as being deeply rooted in matter”. In a way, he is twisting the vitalists’ argument on its head. What most vitalists claim when they say that all matter is alive is exactly that there is some inherent activity in it. More goes in the opposite direction, saying that, if vitalists want to ascribe life to matter, they have to be prepared to redefine life so as to include even mere inertia. This can be seen as a reductio ad absurdum of the vitalist position but, on the other hand, it also stands as a testimony to the metaphysical insufficiency of matter in More’s philosophy. Matter in itself would not even be inert and able to receive motion. Even this ability (pace materialism) has to be provided by some vital force in matter. But if we want to look for the thing that sets it into motion, the source of autokinesia (and therefore something much closer to the ordinary conception of life), this vital force in matter is not enough. For any motion or activity to take place, the inner life of matter has to be “modified” by an outside source, an “immaterial principle”. All individual souls are such principles of life, but the one responsible for the motions of seemingly inanimate objects is the Spirit of Nature, to which we now turn our attention.

5. The Spirit of Nature as a principle of life

As I mentioned above, More is convinced of the utter explanatory insufficiency of mechanism. In the Enchiridion Metaphysicum, an extensive summary of his late metaphysics and natural philosophy, he goes through a great variety of natural phenomena, showing how they cannot be explained by mere interactions of matter. In each case, the conclusion is that we have to posit some immaterial substance, viz. the Spirit of Nature. This Spirit thus becomes responsible not only for gravitation but also for the outcome of various hydrostatic experiments like the formation of a vacuum in a vacuum pump,³⁹ as well as for specific gravity, the tides and a great range of meteorological phenomena. Throughout the book, More’s arguments are usually twofold, directed on the one hand against mechanistic materialism and on the other against the sort of vitalistic panpsychism we already encountered in Glisson. In the first part of the argument, More shows that the phenomenon under consideration cannot be explained by mechanical interactions of dead matter, and then he just briefly adds that the situation is not helped in any way by supposing these atoms to be endowed with life, perception or even reason.

As an example, we can consider More’s discussion of the cohesion of material objects. Since atoms are the most minute, indivisible parts of matter, they necessarily lack any shape that would allow them to hold together. The only alternative mechanical explanation is Descartes’s claim that cohesion is nothing but the mutual rest of parts. But since Descartes defines motion as the separation of parts, rest is necessarily implied to be the union of parts. Explaining cohesion (i.e. union) as rest is therefore circular.⁴⁰ More then goes on to say that conscious atoms would not fare any better. The consciousness of an atom would necessarily be limited only to that atom, yet cohesion is a relation that has to encompass all the cohering atoms at once. Since consciousness cannot extend beyond the atom it belongs to, it cannot explain cohesion.⁴¹

This is then the general structure of More’s twofold rejection of mechanism and vitalism in the Enchiridion. Going through the individual arguments one by one would be unnecessarily tedious, but there are some general points relevant for our discussion that I’d like to point out about them. First, his refutations of panpsychism often have a structure somewhat similar to the combination problem, i.e. the question of how a multitude of particles with some elementary form of consciousness can combine to form an integrated whole that perceives itself as a unity.⁴² Similarly for More, granting consciousness to atoms does not help in explaining their mutual coordination as they create complex and working wholes. Either the atoms would have to have some way of communicating when organizing themselves into organic bodies, or each of them would already have to contain the blueprint for the whole body in order to know how it is supposed to contribute. The former is impossible on account of the atoms’ simplicity, while the latter would lead to the absurd conclusion that, at the moment of creation, before anything existed, all the atoms already had the forms of all living bodies and other structures they would create imprinted in them.⁴³

The second general point to note about More’s arguments against panpsychism is that, even when operating under the assumption that atoms are conscious, he sticks to a strictly mechanistic conception of matter. In its most extreme form, this comes up at the beginning of chapter 25. In this chapter, More first shows that material particles cannot think or perceive and then proceeds to argue that, even if they did, they could not produce complex living structures in the way in which they do. The combination problem we just mentioned represents the latter part of this argument. The former, on the other hand, consists in a strange twist in which More argues that, since atoms are material particles (and therefore only capable of mechanical interactions), ascribing consciousness to them means reducing it exactly to these mechanical interactions. In other words, any form of Glissonian vitalism is ultimately bound to end up as Hobbesian materialism, wherein consciousness and perception are nothing more than “the reaction of one part of matter against another, or at least the due continuation of this reaction”.⁴⁴ The next several paragraphs are then devoted to the refutation of Hobbes’s materialistic theory of how consciousness arises.⁴⁵

While such a conflation of vitalism and pure materialism is a form of vicious circle that would hardly convince any vitalist, a more cogent form of this argument appears in the context of specific gravity. In the second half of the 17th century, questions of gravitation and of specific gravity still weren’t always clearly differentiated. More thus asks us to imagine a bucket full of water with a wooden plank submerged in it that rises to the surface when we let go of it.⁴⁶ If we put our hand under the bucket, we feel the full weight of the water in it. The same amount of weight (minus the weight of the bucket itself) should be exerted on the submerged plank as well, yet it still rises to the surface. For More, this is something that cannot be explained mechanically and, again, granting atoms consciousness doesn’t help at all. Even if they were conscious, the particles of water are limited in their action by the principles of mechanism – namely, they can only act where they are located. In other words, if the particles of water exert their weight under the bucket, they necessarily have to exert the same weight in every single point of space between their location and the bottom of the bucket. Even for conscious atoms, there is thus no way to exert their weight under the bottom of the bucket without also exerting it on the plank submerged in the water – which they obviously do not, since otherwise the plank would not rise to the surface. The solution therefore is not to claim consciousness for atoms but rather to posit a single spiritual substance extended throughout all space. If it is this substance (the Spirit of Nature) that, in fact, exerts the weight on behalf of the water, its omnipresence means that it can easily exert weight under the bucket while “bypassing” the plank, just as it can grant cohesion by spreading its influence over a multitude of atoms at the same time.

In the Scholia to the passage in question, More even gives us a detailed description of how exactly the Spirit of Nature is supposed to work. The passage deserves to be quoted in extenso:

I say, therefore, that this Spirit of Nature has these peculiarities in it: First, that, although it is one, it permeates all the parts and particles of the matter in the bucket. Next, it not only permeates but vitally activates them. Third, that this Spirit puts forth this vital energeian [sic] from a certain omniform essential life in itself in the parts or particles of matter, according to given circumstances in various ways. Fourth, that this omniform life which contains the laws of moving the matter of the world is within individual points as it were – if one may say so – of this Spirit of Nature. Fifth, finally, since this Spirit is a certain essential or substantial life containing the laws of the motions of the matter of the world, and sympatheia and synenergeia agree with a spirit as such, and finally the said Spirit of Nature is created by the most wise God, from these things it is clear that all its operations, motions, sympathies and synergies are so constituted as, according to certain general rules of the universe, God himself has foreseen that they will be.⁴⁷

Other passages only confirm the vitalist tone of this description, e.g. a little later, More describes the Spirit of Nature as “full of a certain plastic life ordinative of material particles” and later again concludes that “the Spirit of Nature, I say, and the watery particles, as if one living, not mechanical, entity, act on the bottom of the bucket”.⁴⁸ Despite More’s use of tanquam in the last quotation, all these passages strike one as really quite vitalist. The Spirit of Nature “vitally activates” the particles of matter by taking an essential life already present in itself and bringing it forth into them. While the origin of this life lies clearly within the Spirit of Nature, at points the distinction almost seems to blur and even the particles can be considered alive, endowed with omniform life by the Spirit of Nature, the two forming one living whole.

It thus seems that, although More rejected “hylozoism”, the doctrine that all matter inherently contains some elementary life, he in fact only replaced it by a different form of vitalism. This vitalism remains deeply connected to a dualistic conception of body and soul, thus differentiating it from the monism usually associated with today’s panpsychist theories.⁴⁹ At the same time, this conception follows quite naturally from the rest of More’s philosophical system, since the best analogy for the “vital” connection between the Spirit of Nature and the matter of the world seems to be that of soul and body in a living creature. Whereas in a Cartesian-type dualism, soul–body interaction is notoriously problematic, for More, the situation is completely different. Psychophysical interaction does not represent an insurmountable problem but rather the starting presupposition of his brand of dualism. Here we don’t have extended and thinking things opposing one another, substances defined by completely unrelated characteristics and ultimately so different that it is difficult to imagine how they might interact at all. Instead, one of the three distinguishing characteristics of bodies and souls is specifically the fact that the former are passive while the latter active.⁵⁰ From the get-go, then, body is conceived as passive, needing some form of outside action to set it into motion, and soul as active, i.e. specifically designed to incite bodies into motion.⁵¹ With a metaphysics built on such presuppositions, it is no wonder that matter is denied any inherent activity (it is by definition passive!) and that all motion has to originate in some immaterial substance. In the end, this is the reason for there being no “purely mechanical Phænomenon in the whole universe”: the basic model of activity, the basic explanatory schema with which to make sense of the world is not the mechanical interaction of particles but the vital action of soul upon body. It would thus be absurd to conceive the relation of the Spirit of Nature to the matter of the world in any other way.

6. Henry More’s trialism

To conclude my paper, I would like to present an overall picture of More’s metaphysical system and show the specific implications of his type of panpsychism and panentheism. As I already mentioned, Christian Hengstermann argues for a triadic structure of More’s universe. In it, divine space forms the basic ontological layer to be filled with matter that, being also an emanation of the divine, is inherently alive. The third layer of the system is then the transcendent God of whom we may gain some insight via the “boniform” faculty of the soul. Although, at one point, Hengstermann says that this ubiquitous life-giving agency is identified with the Spirit of Nature, his analysis of More’s reaction to Glisson concludes that, “returning to his original position outlined in his early correspondence with Descartes, More, in response to Spinoza’s and Glisson’s ‘hylozoism,’ subscribes to a panpsychist ontology himself”.⁵² In a sense, most of my paper was focused on problematizing this point, according to which, in More’s later system, living matter represents an emanation of the divine life-giving agency. Instead, the enlivening, panpsychistic principle of More’s late philosophy is and remains the Spirit of Nature. Now I would like to show how this criticism fits into the general structure of Morean metaphysics. My sketch will, coincidentally, also be an answer to two problems that Hengstermann mentions, viz. what is the exact relation between space and the Spirit of Nature and whether space should be simply identified with God or only conceived as a mode of his omnipresence.

It is true that More can be quite elusive concerning the exact relation between space and God. At least in one passage, however, he seems to present a carefully thought-out and worded formulation, and that is at the end of the famous chapter 8 of the Enchiridion. There, he presents the three main conclusions following from his previous analysis of the existence (and immaterial and divine character) of space. These are (i) “That all spirit is extended”; (ii) “That which can be extended cannot, however, be discerped into parts” and (iii)

That this immense internal place, or space really distinct from matter which we conceive in our mind, is a certain rude hypographe (as we have elsewhere too foreshadowed) and confused and general representation of the divine essence or essential presence, insofar as it is separated from life and operations.⁵³

There is a lot to untangle here. First, space clearly is not God but only a representation of him, or, rather, of his essence (or essential presence). Obviously, this representation is only confused and general but, much more importantly, it is also “separated from life and operations”. In other words, space is a representation of divine presence, if we dissociate it from divine life and operations. This also seems to be the only possible solution to the paradox that space, in fact, does not fulfil More’s criteria for immaterial substances. Besides being penetrable and indivisible, spiritual substances are also supposed to be active. Even if we disregard my claim about activity being the main of these three criteria, it is still the case that More insists on these three characteristics being inseparable.⁵⁴ Yet space can hardly be said to be active in any way. More’s primary example of a spiritual substance could thus very easily turn into a counterargument against his dualism – that is, if we considered space to be a substance in itself. If, however, instead of being a substance, it is only a representation of an aspect of God, it seems only logical that it should be passive, insofar as the divine substance is conceived in separation from its life and operations.

The Spirit of Nature finds itself in a similar position. Although, unlike space, it is active, it still seems to be deficient in some interesting regards. First of all, it is devoid of free will and perception. But, more importantly, although I have been speaking of the universe as the body of the world-soul/Spirit of Nature, such a formulation is not, strictly speaking, accurate. For More, what unites a soul with its body is a “vital congruity”, a form of magical sympathy that, on the side of the soul, takes the form of a pleasure that tempts the plastic (i.e. vegetative) part of the soul to act specifically on this body. In the case of the body, on the other hand, it is nothing but such a modification of the body that has this effect on the soul.⁵⁵ Preparing this mutual arrangement that allows the soul to connect to a body is exactly the work of the Spirit of Nature, who is metaphorically described as “the common Proxenet or Contractor of all natural Matches and Marriages betwixt Forms and Matter”.⁵⁶ Yet, if the Spirit of Nature is tasked with creating all vital congruities, how can it be in any form of vital congruity itself? If, on the other hand, the Spirit of Nature is not in vital congruity with any matter, it means that, strictly speaking, it does not have a body – which stands in stark contrast with More’s emphasis on the fact that souls must always be embodied!⁵⁷ I believe all these difficulties to be of a similar sort as the fact that space, though a spiritual substance, is passive. In any way, at least, they seem to be resolvable in the same manner. None of these problems are relevant, if the Spirit of Nature is not a fully-fledged spiritual substance of its own but rather a “confused and general representation of the divine essence or essential presence”, only this time considered not separated from but in its life and operations, as they pertain to the matter of the world.

This would at the same time resolve both problems that Christian Hengstermann brought up, namely that of the relation between space and God and of the place of the Spirit of Nature in this scheme. I also believe it provides a better second layer in Hengstermann’s triadic structure instead of the hylozoist notion of living matter which, as I have tried to show, is something More’s mature philosophy rejected. What then of the third level, that of the transcendent deity as it is revealed to us through the boniform faculty of our souls? I think it is relevant that, when he addresses this topic, More mostly uses the term “the spirit of God”, rather than directly “God”. Already in his early philosophical poems and all the way to his late theological writings, the spirit of God is, interestingly enough, presented as an entity analogical to the Spirit of Nature, only working on the elevation of souls towards God instead of acting on lowly matter.⁵⁸ The parallelism is explicitly formulated, e.g. in An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness, where More states:

And further it is evident, that though the Holy Spirit of God and the Spirit of Nature be everywhere present in the World, and lie in the very same points of space; yet their actions, applications and engagings with things are very distinct. For the Spirit of Nature takes hold only of Matter, remanding grosse bodies towards the centre of the Earth, shaping Vegetables into all that various beauty we find in them; but does not act at all on our Souls or Spirits with divine illumination, no more then the Holy Spirit meddles with remanding of Stones downward, or tumbling broken tiles off from an house.⁵⁹

This passage clearly implies that, while the Spirit of Nature busies itself with acting on matter, the spirit of God – similarly omnipresent – focuses on bringing divine illumination to souls. It would be therefore fitting analogically to describe this spirit of God as a confused representation of divine presence, only this time as it acts on human souls. Even the fact that More explicitly mentions omnipresence seems telling. More’s ontology, with its stress on the spatial extension of spirits, has been accused of populating the world with a tangled mess of various spiritual substances all present throughout the world simultaneously.⁶⁰ But the amount of omnipresent spirits is actually quite limited – specifically to God, space, the Spirit of Nature and the spirit of God. If we take the last three to be basically specific forms of divine presence in the world, the picture suddenly becomes much clearer. The only omnipresent entity in which everything, souls and bodies, is located is God and, depending on how we think of him, which aspects we decide to focus on, we can talk either about space, the Spirit of Nature or the spirit of God.

We thus come back to Hengstermann’s schema, though slightly altered. God does pervade the world as an immanent principle of life but he does so through what we perceive as some sort of mediating entities representing various aspects of his presence, one of those being the Spirit of Nature. Yet, one major thing is different. The triadic ontological structure as I conceive it completely omits matter (on the second level, matter endowed with life was replaced by the purely immaterial Spirit of Nature). I believe that, in a sense, this represents the core of both More’s dualism and his rejection of actinism. More’s late philosophy is not, in fact, an emanational monism presented under the guise of a seemingly dualist terminology. More really postulates two distinct substances, one penetrable, indivisible and active, and the other impenetrable, divisible and passive. Even when he expresses himself in almost emanationist terms, the tone has shifted in comparison to his early works. Matter is only the last shadow of God and thus can participate in his life only in the most limited manner possible, a life that is so completely passive that most wouldn’t call it a life at all. This inert matter is then pervaded, acted upon and thus enlivened (in a stronger sense of the word) by the Spirit of Nature, but this fact does not change the metaphysical foundations of the system. Just as in the case of a person, body and soul combining to form one living organism isn’t the same, ontologically speaking, as that person being a single substance, matter inherently endowed with life. The importance of this distinction becomes clear when we combine it with More’s rejection of actinism. While the sequence going from God through the Spirit of Nature to divine space represents a quasi-emanational structure encompassing the whole world, matter is left out of it. Inert matter, the only part of the world that is clearly separated from God, represents the boundary line preventing More’s philosophy from descending into fully-fledged immanentism. Though existing in divine space, matter is not a representation of divine essence in the way that the Spirit of Nature is. Completely inert, it does not partake in divine life in any way, except for its capacity of being set into motion by a spiritual principle. Only if we extend our understanding of life to include this inertia is More willing (as we saw in the critique of Glisson) to pick up the vitalists’ way of speaking.

7. Henry More’s panentheism and panpsychism

I would now like to add a couple of closing remarks concerning More’s panentheism and panpsychism. Is More a panentheist? In reference to his doctrine of divine space, the answer is an obvious “yes”, but I would add that only reluctantly so. He was very vague about the relation between space and God, and the whole triadic structure I described is more of an extrapolation than anything that would be based on actual textual evidence. This fact, however, is all the more reason to consider Hengstermann’s interpretation problematic – even my three-layered schema is already stretching More a bit further than he would have probably liked. In a way, More is stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea. Too much stress on divine transcendence and the world will seem like it can get on just fine without God – that’s the sort of mechanistic materialism that is the ultimate outcome of Cartesianism (as More thought). On the other hand, too much emphasis on God’s immanent presence in the world leads through pantheism and straight into a different sort of atheism in which God is identified with matter and dissipates into a multitude of atoms – a position firmly rejected by More in his refutation of Spinoza and the Kabbalists.

The thing is that, out of the three ontological layers mentioned, the middle one is the trickiest. Both absolute space and the transcendent spirit of God are forms of divine presence in the world that can be more or less easily defended without God merging with the world. Openly affirming that the forces presiding over interactions of matter are in fact manifestations of divine presence is very difficult without tying the material world and God together – be it as body and soul or as the former being an emanation of the latter. Although the Spirit of Nature is identified as “God’s Vicarious Power upon this great Automaton, the World”,⁶¹ it must remain ontologically separate from the God whose power it represents. In other words, although More’s metaphysical system implicitly entails the triadic structure I just described, he never explicitly acknowledges as much.

Turning now to the second question, is More a panpsychist? Again, insofar as the world is pervaded and enlivened by the Spirit of Nature, the answer is definitely “yes”, but it comes with a couple of caveats. First, as I already mentioned, today’s discussions focus mostly on a form of panpsychist monism that would be, in fact, much closer to the views of Glisson and other hylozoists. More, on the other hand, works with a dualistic scheme in which the living organism of the world consists of two ontologically distinct principles, one material and one immaterial. Furthermore, we saw that the Spirit of Nature, due to being one omnipresent substance, dodges certain difficulties not unlike the combination problem of contemporary discussions. Such an emphasis on the importance of the unity of the world-mind has its contemporary parallels, too.⁶²

Last but not least, we should fully appreciate the exact nature of More’s panpsychism. The inherent life of matter consists only in its inertia, and even the Spirit of Nature is little more than a personification of natural laws, an entity devoid of free will and perception, acting blindly and in a determinate manner. Today’s panpsychism usually seeks to explain higher-level consciousness by claiming that particles of matter possess some form of elemental awareness that transcends their mere physical properties. In contrast to that, when More says (or rather implies) that the whole world is ensouled and alive, he only means that objects in it can be set into motion and remain in motion, that they can be electrified, magnetized, that they fall to the ground due to gravity, etc. For More, the life of matter does not exceed what we today consider to be its ordinary physical properties. Yet, it is interesting to note that this fact can (and should) be understood in two complementary ways. On the one hand, at the lowest level of existence, the life of matter really is nothing more than the physical phenomena just mentioned. On the other hand, it also means that even these basic phenomena require the input of some vital force and, as such, are evidence of the ubiquitous presence and activity of a spiritual principle turning the world into one big, living organism.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the research project “Renaissance Platonism. Between Science and Religion” (GA ČR 19-11769S).

Notes on contributors

Jacques Joseph

Jacques Joseph is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy and History of Science at Charles University in Prague. He published a monograph in Czech on Henry More. He specializes in interactions between Renaissance and Early Modern philosophy and science, as well as in modern French epistemology.

Notes

1 More, Enchiridion Metaphysicum, 169 (ch. 8, § 15; quoted from More, Opera Omnia). English translations are taken from A. Jacob’s edition, Henry More’s Manual. For a more detailed analysis of More’s doctrine of divine space and its various sources, see Copenhaver, “Jewish Theologies”; and Grant, Much Ado About Nothing, 221–7.

2 In opposition to Cartesian dualism and at least in part following Francesco Patrizi, More claims that “there is no real Entity but what is in some sense extended” (More, A Collection, xii).

3 Throughout the paper, I will stick to Hengstermann’s preferred term, “trialism”. In adjectival form, however, I will be using “triadic”.

4 Hengstermann, “God or Space”, 186.

5 Hengstermann, “God or Space”, 170.

6 Hengstermann, “God or Space”, 186.

7 Throughout this paper, I will use the terms “emanate”, “emanation” to designate the Neoplatonic doctrine conceiving existence, perfection and life as an overflow descending from the One towards all the lower ontological layers. For more on this, see Wallis, Neoplatonism, 61ff.

8 Whose most complete presentation can be found in More, Platonick Song.

9 See Leech, “Ficinian Influence”; Giglioni, “Plotinus in Verses”; Dockrill, “Patristic Platonism”.

10 More to Descartes, 23 July 1649, quoted in Hengstermann, “God or Space”, 164 (italics mine).

11 See e.g. More, Immortality of the Soul, 21 (bk. I, ch. 3, §§ 1–2; quoted from More, A Collection, where the works are paginated separately).

12 See Joseph, “The Spirit of Nature”.

13 More, Immortality of the Soul, 193 (bk. III, ch. 12, § 1).

14 An expression used in Gabbey, “Limits of Mechanism”, 24.

15 More, Divine Dialogues, viii.

16 See Reid, Metaphysics (for a strict distinction between the two periods); Leech, Hammer of the Cartesians; Fouke, Enthusiastical Concerns (for more balanced views).

17 More, Opera Omnia, viii (Præfatio, § 11); see also More, The Grand Mystery, vi (To the Reader, § 4).

18 See Joseph, “Light as a Metaphor”.

19 Today, the word “actinism” is primarily used to refer to the property of electromagnetic radiation that leads to the production of photochemical effects (see O.E.D. online, “actinism“). As far as I know, More’s use of it in this philosophical context is quite idiosyncratic.

20 For the classic distinction between philosophia perennis and prisca theologia, see Schmitt, “Perennial Philosophy”.

21 More, Conjectura Cabbalistica, 3f. (Preface, §3; quoted from More, A Collection, see above, note 11).

22 For more on this, see Coudert, “Kabbalist Nightmare”; Katz, “More and the Jews”.

23 An indirect justification for such a reading of the Fundamenta is provided by way of the philosophies of Anne Conway and F.M. van Helmont, in Reid, Metaphysics, 267f.

24 More, Fundamenta philosophiæ, 527 (quoted from More, Opera Omnia).

25 More, Fundamenta philosophiæ, 527.

26 That is what More sets out to do in several of his writings, e.g. in the Enchiridion Metaphysicum, see below. The explicit motivation of refuting the materialistic implications of Cartesianism is discussed repeatedly in More’s correspondence, see Jacob, Henry More’s Manual, vol. 1, vf. It needs to be said, however, that what I’m presenting here would be more accurately described as More’s appraisal of later Cartesianism rather than of the philosophy of Descartes himself. For more on the evolution of More’s relationship to Descartes, see Agostini, “Quelques remarques”; Agostini, “More interprète de Descartes”; Leech, Hammer of the Cartesians,

27 I believe the same conclusion would apply to Spinoza’s philosophy. Jasper Reid (Reid, “Critiques of Spinoza”) compares More’s materialistic reading of Spinoza with Malebranche’s critique that understands Spinozean substance as spiritual. His conclusion is that More interpreted substance as matter rather than as spiritual extension (i.e. space) due to his preference for empiricism. Yet, such an argument, based on a misinterpretation of a single passage, runs counter to the numerous places where, just as in the Fundamenta, More clearly states his preference for a philosophy based on reason and “common notions” of the intellect. (For another such example, see More, Immortality of the Soul, 17f.; bk. I, ch. 2, § 4.)

I am convinced that a comparison of the Refutation of Spinoza with the Fundamenta makes it clear that More’s criticism runs along similar lines in both cases: just like the Kabbalists, Spinoza is guilty of combining two distinct ways of doing philosophy, inconsistently mixing up rational axioms with principles derived from the imagination. That is why he attributes to substance characteristics pertaining to matter as well as those pertaining to soul. Why, then, does More consider substance identical to matter rather than to spirit, if it has properties of both? Pace Reid, I believe the answer to this question doesn’t lie in any abstract epistemological considerations but rather in the simple fact that More is directly commenting on proposition 15 (and its commentary) of Book I of the Ethics, where Spinoza explicitly ascribes matter and bodily extension to God/substance.

28 More, Fundamenta philosophiæ, 523.

29 More, Fundamenta philosophiæ, 526f. More refers to Bacharach’s Emeq haMelekh, whose translation was published in the Kabbala Denudata. For more on this, see Coudert, Impact of the Kabbalah, 80f.; Scholem, Kabbalah, 394f.

30 More, Fundamenta philosophiæ, 523f. More’s critique is part of a wider context of reception of the Kabbalah at the time. Beside Knorr von Rosenroth, other people addressing the subject are Johann Georg Wachter and indirectly also Leibniz. Each of these has a different opinion about whether the Kabbalists reject creatio ex nihilo and what are the consequences of such a claim. See Lærke, “Three Texts”.

31 More, Fundamenta philosophiæ, 525.

32 More to Descartes, 23 July 1649; quoted in Hengstermann, “God or Space”, 164.

33 See Reid, Metaphysics, 10 et passim; Leech, Hammer of the Cartesians, 60ff.

34 More, Epistola altera, Scholia, § 51 (my italics); quoted in Hengstermann, “God or Space”, 182.

35 Hengstermann only mentions the Spirit of Nature later, in connection with More’s version of the combination problem and the formation of living organs and bodies. This is in line with the fact that, earlier in the paper, the chief task of the Spirit of Nature is described as “preparing matter in such fashion that it becomes capable of being informed” by souls (Hengstermann, “God or Space”, 178). While that is definitely true, limiting the Spirit of Nature only to this greatly understates its role in the world.

36 More, Epistola altera, Scholia, § 51.

37 More, Epistola altera, Scholia, § 51.

38 The locus classicus is Plato’s Phaedrus 245c–d. For the understanding of self-motion in the Aristotelian (and related) traditions, see Gill and Lennox, Self-Motion.

39 Whether Boyle’s hydrostatic experiments were experimental proof of the existence of the Spirit of Nature or not was the cause of a famous dispute between the two thinkers. For more on this, see Henry, “More versus Boyle”; Greene, “More and Boyle”; Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan, 207f.

40 More, Enchiridion Metaphysicum, 174 (ch. 9, § 6).

41 More, Enchiridion Metaphysicum, 177 (ch. 9, § 14).

42 See the contributions in Brüntrup and Jaskolla, Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives, 177–302.

43 More, Enchiridion Metaphysicum, 299 (ch. 25, § 8). In the Scholia to this passage, More also points out that, if all the atoms forming my body perfectly understood its structure and workings, it would be difficult to explain why I, a compound of these atoms, don’t have the same understanding.

44 More, Enchiridion Metaphysicum, 296 (ch. 25, § 2). See Hobbes, Leviathan, 9f. (bk. I, ch. 1).

45 Without going into unnecessary detail, More’s main arguments focus on the common sensorium (whether the whole image is contained in any individual material particle or in the whole sensorium; § 5), on memory and imagination (whose matter needs to be at the same time fluid and solid in order to be able both to accept new imprints and keep old ones, § 6) and on free will (which the mechanically determined material particles cannot have, § 7). See More, Enchiridion Metaphysicum, 296–9 (ch. 25, §§ 3–7).

46 See More, Enchiridion Metaphysicum, 211f. (ch. 13, § 4).

47 More, Enchiridion Metaphysicum, 222 (Scholia ad ch. 13, § 4). An interesting thing to note is that the Scholia are a reaction to the German philosopher Johann Christoph Sturm (1635–1703) who, in his Collegium experimentale sive Curiosum (1676), criticized More’s doctrine of the Spirit of Nature as vitalistic.

48 More, Enchiridion Metaphysicum, 223 (italics mine).

49 Joanna Leidenhag makes fundamental monism one of the “core theses” of panpsychism. Leidenhag, “Deploying Panpsychism”, 69f. A similar assumption can be found in Skrbina, “God as World-Mind”, 99. Uwe Meixner claims that dualistic forms of panpsychism are possible but suffer from the same problems as classical dualism (Meixner, “Idealism and Panpsychism”, 388–9). On the other hand, cf. Brüntrup, “Emergent Panpsychism”, 50–2 (who claims that “panpsychism is neither monism nor dualism simpliciter”); and Charles Taliaferro’s argument for a dualism-based panpsychism in Taliaferro, “Dualism and Panpsychism”.

50 The other two distinguishing characteristics are in/divisibility and im/penetrability. For reasons that go beyond the scope of this paper, I believe that, in order to work, both of these pairs in fact presuppose the distinction between activity and passivity, thus making that the main distinction between bodies and souls.

51 The souls’ ability to move bodies is so intimately tied to their essence that More rejects the notion that they are ever fully disembodied. See More, Immortality of the Soul, 6–7 (Preface, § 6), 146f. (bk. III, ch. 1, § 2). In an excellent paper, John Henry elaborates on the peculiar implications of More’s dualism with its ever-embodied and spatially extended souls. See Henry, “A Cambridge Platonist’s Materialism”.

52 Hengstermann, “God or Space”, 166 and 185, respectively.

53 More, Enchiridion Metaphysicum, 169 (ch. 8, §§ 14–15). A similar formulation can also be found in More, Divine Dialogues, 55 (dial. 1, § 27).

54 More, Immortality of the Soul, 22 (bk. I, ch. 3, § 3). For more on this, see Reid, Metaphysics, 190f.

55 More, Immortality of the Soul, 120f. (bk. II, ch. 14, §§ 8–10).

56 More, Immortality of the Soul, 203 (bk. III, ch. 13, § 10).

57 See above, note 51.

58 For more on this topic, see Joseph, “The Spirit of Nature”.

59 More, The Grand Mystery, 458 (bk. IX, ch. 2, § 9).

60 See Henry, “A Cambridge Platonist’s Materialism”, 178f.; Walker, “Medical Spirits”.

61 More, An Antidote Against Atheism, 46 (bk. II, ch. 2, § 13; quoted from More, A Collection, see above, note 11).

62 See e.g. Göcke, “Panpsychism and Panentheism”; Nagasawa and Wager, “Panpsychism and Priority Cosmopsychism”.