The paper presents the notion of “Spirit of Nature” in Henry More and describes its position within More’s philosophical system. Through a thorough analysis, it tries to show in what respects it can be considered a scientific object and in what respects it cannot. In the second part of this paper, More’s “Spirit of Nature” is compared to Newton’s various attempts at presenting a metaphysical cause of the force of gravity, using the similarities between the two to see this notorious (...) problem of Newton scholarship in a new light. One thus sees that if Newton drew from Stoic and Neo-Platonic theories of aether or soul of the world, we need to fully acknowledge the fact that these substances were traditionally of a non-dualistic, half-corporeal, half-spiritual nature. Both More’s “Spirit of Nature” and Newton’s aether can thus be understood as different attempts at incorporating such a pneumatic theory into the framework of modern physics, as it was then being formed. (shrink)

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”. (shrink)

For Henry More, witchcraft served as an empirical confirmation of the existence of immaterial substances. Yet while he takes great care to make his reports as trustworthy as possible and argues against the claim that the effects of witchcraft are only the illusions of people suffering from melancholy, he almost completely ignores the possibility that such effects may be caused by natural magic. In More’s natural philosophical writings, discussions of magic are very much downplayed, as well. This may seem surprising, (...) as a crucial component of More’s metaphysical system is his doctrine of the Spirit of Nature, a sort of world-soul whose action is nonmechanical, vital, and magical. The essay argues that this deeply ambivalent approach to natural magic is due to the fact that More uses traditional magical notions to supplement the shortcomings of mechanicism and at the same time tries to divorce these notions from the potentially problematic background from which they originated. In the end, the essay suggests, More’s ambivalence toward magic is only one manifestation of a much deeper problem wherein he adopts an immanentist position while trying to avoid its more problematic, potentially pantheistic, consequences. (shrink)

This paper presents a comparison of the philosophical systems of Francesco Patrizi and Henry More. The point, however, is not to demonstrate Patrizi’s influence on More but rather to see how, with respect to some particular subjects, they both tried to offer a modern interpretation of Neoplatonism. The main axis of the analysis follows the topics of space, light, and soul. While to More, light is of merely marginal interest, it is demonstrated that space and soul are of crucial importance (...) and play a similar role in both authors’ systems. They function as intermediary entities that link the higher and the lower reality and form a sort of canvas upon which the material world unfolds. Yet, in comparison with Patrizi, More’s system is both constrained by a much stricter, dualistic classification and at the same time veers dangerously close to immanentism and pantheism (which More tries to avoid). (shrink)