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Henry More on Material and Spiritual Extension

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Jasper Reid
Jasper Reid
Affiliation:
King's College, London
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Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , Summer 2003 , pp. 531 - 558
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Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2003

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References

Notes

1 More, Henry, Divine Dialogues, 2nd ed. (London: Joseph Downing, 1713), p. 49 (Dial. 1, §25)Google Scholar. We will be following the spelling and punctuation of this 2nd edition and of the 4th edition of A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (London: Downing, 1712)Google Scholar, both of which were swelled by translations of the important scholia and notes that More added in his Latin Opera—except that in just a couple of instances, where minor textual mistakes have crept in, we will be silently reverting to the original 1668 and 1662 texts, respectively.

2 Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul, p. 8 (Bk. 1, chap. 3, §1), in his A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings. The Oxford English Dictionary prefers to spell the term as “discerptibility,” and it lists “discerpibility” as an obsolete form; but, since the word itself seems pretty obsolete anyway, I prefer to follow the spelling which More himself—together with all other seventeenth-century writers who used the term at all—invariably employed.

3 More, Divine Dialogues, pp. 61, 64 (Dial. 1, §§29–30).

4 More, Henry, An Answer to a Letter of a Learned Psychopyrist, in Glanvill, Joseph, Saducismus Triumphatus, 3rd ed. (London: S. Lownds, 1689), p. 196 (§1).Google Scholar

5 More, The Immortality of the Soul, p. 9 (Bk. 1, chap. 3, §3).

6 In a note to the passage where he had originally rejected impenetrable-indiscerpible entities, More observed that the figured atoms of the Epicureans might have qualified: but More himself did not believe in such things (The Immortality of the Soul, p. 12 [Bk. 1, chap. 3, §3, n.]). But even in this later passage, More still did not concede that his own atoms (which were not figured) were impenetrable and indiscerpible, despite the fact that his other discussions clearly indicate that they were.

7 Baxter, Richard, Of the Nature of Spirits; especially Mans Soul. In a placid Collation with the Learned Dr. Henry More, in his Of the Immortality of Mans Soul (London: B. Simons, 1682), p. 16Google Scholar. It was in response to Baxter's prodding that More provided his most thorough discussions of the issues which currently concern us, and we will return to the Baxter-More debate several times.

8 Baxter, Of the Nature of Spirits, pp. 16–77.

9 Henry More, Annotations upon the Discourse of Truth. Into which is inserted by way of Digression, A brief return to Mr. Baxter's Reply, p. 211, in Glanvill, Joseph and Rust, George, Two Choice and Useful Treatises (London: James Collins and Sam. Lowndes, 1682), p. 211Google Scholar. (A separate title page gives 1683 for the date of More's annotations on Rust's Discourse of Truth.)

10 More, Divine Dialogues, p. 65 (Dial. 1, §30). See also More's, HenryManual of Metaphysics, edited by Jacob, Alexander (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1995), Vol. 1, p. 124Google Scholar (Enchiridion Metaphysicum, chap. 28, §10).

11 More, Divine Dialogues, p. 65 (Dial. 1, § 30).

12 Henry More, An Antidote against Atheism, Appendix, p. 224 (chap. 13, §8), in A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings.

13 More, The Immortality of the Soul, p. 20 (Bk. 1, chap. 6, §5).

14 Ibid., p. iii (Preface, §3).

15 Ibid. See also pp. 19–20, 59 (Bk. 1, chap. 6, §5; Bk. 2, chap. 1, §8)

16 More, The Immortality of the Soul, p. 5 (Bk. 1, chap. 2, §9, Axiom 9).

17 More, Divine Dialogues, p. 64 (Dial. 1, §30). See also Manual of Metaphysics, Vol. 1, p. 126 (chap. 28, §13).

18 More, Manual of Metaphysics, Vol. 1, p. 124 (chap. 28, §10).

19 Grant, Edward, Much Ado about Nothing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 235CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also pp. 186–88, 193, 217–18, 231, 378 n.42, 380 n.62, 396 n.218, 403 n.286, and 403 n.287 on the issue of the penetrability (or impenetrability) of space in the works of Bruno, Telesio, Guericke, Raphson, and Keill.

20 Bayle, Pierre, Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, translated by Popkin, Richard H. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991), pp. 281–82 (“Simonides,” note F)Google Scholar. Although Bayle did not mention More by name in this passage, the larger context makes it seem plausible that he might have had one eye on More's works. As we will shortly see, Richard Baxter also presented the same objection to More directly.

21 More, Annotations upon the Discourse of Truth, p. 204 (More's brackets). The page references are to the edition cited in n. 7 above.

22 Ibid., pp. 211–12

23 And, ultimately, it is not so clear that it can. More felt that a spirit could not act except where it was present (see, for instance, Manual of Metaphysics, Vol. 1, p. 101 [chap. 27, §5]), so it is hard to see how the spirit could get a grip on a body, or any part of a body, while it remained outside the boundaries of the spirit, in order then to drag it inside.

24 Exactly the same point holds when B is a finite spirit, and a body A is moved into its dimensions through the agency of another finite spirit C. Limiting our attention solely to A and B, we will surely wish to say that there has been a case of penetration with respect to that pair, and yet neither of them can be assigned any causal responsibility for it.

25 More, The Immortality of the Soul, p. 27 (Bk. 1, chap. 7, §5).

26 More was always keen to stress the possibility of vacua, but he denied their actual existence in nature. A couple of notable consequences of this denial were, first, that atoms could not have any figure: if they were, for instance, round, then there would have to be triangular vacua between them (The Immortality of the Soul, pp. 20–21 [Bk. 1, chap. 6, §7]). More concluded that an atom was “neither gibbose nor plain, neither a Globe nor a Cube, but equally all of them” (ibid., p. xiv [Preface, §3, n.]). This was a deeply peculiar conclusion, to say the least, but it was one with which More himself seemed to be quite content. Second, it followed that all matter was of equal density: “let Matter be of what consistency it will, as thin and pure as the flame of a candle, there is not less of corporeal Substance therein than there is in the same dimensions of Silver, Lead, or Gold” (ibid., p. 167 [Bk. 3, chap. 2, §8]). More explained gravitation wholly in terms of the efficacy of the Spirit of Nature, rather than making it any sort of intrinsic property of the bodies themselves, so it was easy for him to effect a divorce between (what we would call) mass and weight, and to allow the same mass to be present in bodies of vastly different weights.

27 More, Manual of Metaphysics, Vol. 1, p. 133 (chap. 28, §7, scholium).

28 But see below for an alternative interpretation of the notion of essential spissitude.

29 More, The Immortality of the Soul, p. 6 (Bk. 1, chap. 2, §11).

30 More, An Answer to a Letter of a Learned Psychopyrist, p. 209 (§9). Compare his letter to Descartes, May 5, 1649, in Oeuvres de Descartes, edited by Adam, Charles and Tannery, Paul (Paris: J. Vrin, 1996), Vol. 5, p. 304.Google Scholar

31 More, An Antidote against Atheism, Appendix, p. 189 (chap. 3, §8).

32 Ibid., p. 228 (chap. 3, §8, scholium).

33 More, The Immortality of the Soul, p. 6 (Bk. 1, chap. 2, §11).

34 More, Manual of Metaphysics, Vol. 1, pp. 122, 133 (chap. 28, §7, and the scholium thereto); More to Norris, January 19, 1684/85, in Norris, John, The Theory and Regulation of Love (Oxford: Theatre for Hen. Clements, 1688), p. 152.Google Scholar

35 Alexandre Koyré describes More's essential spissitude as “a kind of spiritual density, fourth mode, or fourth dimension of spiritual substance,” but he does not elaborate on the tension—if it can be called that—between these different ways of conceiving essential spissitude, by analogy with density or with dimension (From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957], p. 129).Google Scholar

36 See Henry, John, “A Cambridge Platonist's Materialism: Henry More and the Concept of Soul,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 49 (1986): 172–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Lichtenstein, Aharon, Henry More: The Rational Theology of a Cambridge Platonist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 169CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hutton, Sarah, “Anne Conway Critique d'Henry More,” Archives de Philosophie, 58 (1995): 371–84, especially p. 381.Google Scholar

37 Among recent commentators, we find ourselves probably closest to John Henry, who makes some similar points as the present article in his “A Cambridge Platonist's Materialism.” However, Henry seems content merely to show that concepts borrowed from the material realm crept into More's notion of spirit. He does not take much notice of the ways in which More sought to defend himself against such a charge—his claims that, for instance, spiritual hylopathia was actually quite unlike corporeal impenetrability, or that the indiscerpibility of an atom was unlike that of a spirit. Still less does Henry subject such claims to any rigorous examination, and consider how well (or how poorly) they measure up.

38 Or, originally, a “thicket” (Latham, R. E., Revised Medieval Latin Word-List [London: Oxford University Press, 1983], p. 448).Google Scholar

39 Oresme, Nicole, Le Livre du del et du monde, edited by Menut, Albert D. and Denomy, Alexander J. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), p. 46Google Scholar. See passim in pp. 46–49 (Bk. 1, chap. 1, fols. 4a–4c).

40 Though it is interesting in this regard to observe a remark which Oresme made elsewhere: “Now this space of which we are talking is infinite and indivisible, and is the immensity of God and God Himself” (ibid., p. 177 [Bk. 1, chap. 24, fol. 38d]).

41 See the editors' “Selected List of Technical Neologisms” appended to Le Livre du del et du monde, pp. 763 and 772. Some examples of usage of the French term (including Oresme's own) are listed in Godefroy, Frédéric, Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1881–1902Google Scholar), tome 7.2, p. 572. But the term does not exist at all in most other French dictionaries.

42 Oresme's English translator renders his French “spissitude” as “thickness,” and this is indeed an apt choice, for our term “thickness” does actually demonstrate precisely the same ambiguity as “spissitude.” On the one hand, the thickness of a body is its extension in the third dimension: the more pages a book contains, the thicker it is. On the other hand, the thickness of a body—especially a quantity of fluid matter—is its viscosity: the more that soup resists one's efforts to stir it, the thicker it is.

43 On a terminological point, at least as far as More's own writings are concerned, the term “viscosity” is probably preferable to the ambiguous term “density,” which nowadays tends to connote mass per unit volume at least as much as it connotes the degree of resistance that tends to result from this. As we have already observed (see n. 26 above), More believed that the quantity of matter in a body (as we would say, its mass) was solely a function of its volume, and yet he believed that this same mass could have very different consistencies, ranging from the fluidity of a candle flame to the solidity of silver or gold. As far as More was concerned, the consistency of a portion of matter depended on the force with which the Spirit of Nature held its atoms together, and not on its mass per unit volume which (disregarding any pores within it) was a constant. When we say that “spissitude” can be understood as a sort of density, then, we mean consistency rather than mass per unit volume.

44 More, The Immortality of the Soul, p. 139 (Bk. 2, chap. 16, §§3–4). This was pointed out by Henry, “A Cambridge Platonist's Materialism,” p. 177.

45 More, Henry, The Complete Poems of Dr. Henry More, edited by Grosart, Alexander B. (New York: AMS Press, 1967), p. 92Google Scholar (Democritus Platonissans, stanza 13). See also the explication of “body” at p. 160 (“The Interpretation Generall”).

46 See Staudenbaur, C. A., “Platonism, Theosophy and Immaterialism: Recent Views of the Cambridge Platonism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 35 (1974): 157–69, especially pp. 166–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Coudert, Allison, “A Cambridge Platonist's Kabbalist Nightmare,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (1975): 633–52, especially pp. 648–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 Cf. More, The Immortality of the Soul, pp. 169, 180 (Bk. 3, chap. 3, §2; chap. 5, §2).

48 Smoke—a suspension of solid particles in air—provides a more illustrative analogy here than either air or ether. Although the contractibility of a portion of matter did, for More, depend solely on the gaps between its particles, so that perfectly homogenous matter of any kind at all would not be compressible, its fluidity/hardness additionally depended on the force with which the Spirit of Nature bound those particles together. Air and ether could still remain extremely fluid—though not compressible—even when their atoms were packed tightly together. For terrestrial matter, by contrast, when the gaps between the individual particles were closed up, their aggregate would not only cease to be compressible, but would additionally become solid and hard.

49 More, Annotations upon the Discourse of Truth, pp. 217–18. Note More's remark about how “spiritual subtilty” is given “in measure” to created spirits.

50 Amos Funkenstein observes that More was forced to deny that God has any essential spissitude, but he also suggests in a footnote, “Perhaps it would be more precise to say: God's Spissitude is immense” (Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 79, n. 15Google Scholar). He does not, however, elaborate on this idea.

51 More, The Immortality of the Soul, p. 26 (Bk. 1, chap. 7, §2).

52 Gabbey, Alan, “Anne Conway et Henry More: Lettres sur Descartes (1650–1651),” Archives de Philosophie, 40 (1977): 379–404, esp. p. 389.Google Scholar

53 Baxter, Of the Nature of Spirits, p. 78.

54 More, Annotations upon the Discourse of Truth, p. 215. More proceeded to explain that (in contrast to the divine case) “there is no Repugnancie at all, but the Spirit of Nature might be contracted to the like Essential Spissitude that some particular Spirits are; but there is no reason to conceit that it ever was or ever will be so contracted, while the World stands” (p. 216).

55 More, The Immortality of the Soul, p. 17 (Bk. 1, chap. 6, §1).

56 See More, The Complete Poems, p. 159 (“The Interpretation Generall”).

57 More, Manual of Metaphysics, Vol. 1, p. 112 (chap. 27, §14).

58 Ibid., pp. 117–18 (chap. 28, §§2–3).

59 More, The Immortality of the Soul, p. 8 (Bk. 1, chap. 3, §2). But also see p. 7 (Bk. 1, chap. 2, §9, note).

60 This article was written during the tenure of a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, and I should like to thank the British Academy for its support. I should also like to thank Sarah Hutton and this journal's anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.