A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings of Dr. Henry More

...and to effectively stop all such rumors in the future, even among the weakest and most skeptical of those who doubt him. I could have added even more from his first volume of letters: namely, that he not only believed in the existence of God, but also in His specific Providence, which he felt and acknowledged in the special inspiration and success he experienced in his philosophical studies. I am not surprised by this, as he began so piously in his youth. His first writing was on that excellent theme, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom Proverbs 9:10. I was informed of this by letters from Mr. Clerselier in Paris when he sent me a list original: "Catalogue" of the writings Descartes original: "Cartesius" left behind. This news pleased me greatly, as it was the very same text upon which I first gave a sermon original: "common-placed" in our college chapel.

But what delights original: "enravishes" me the most is that, although we both started from the same starting point original: "Lifts" and took different paths, we eventually meet at the same goal. One of us traveled the lower road of Democritism original: "Democritisme"; the philosophy of Democritus, which focuses on physical matter and atoms—amidst the thick dust of atoms and flying particles of matter—while the other followed the high and airy hills of Platonism in the thin and subtle region of immateriality. Yet we meet at last (certainly not without the hand of Providence) at the same goal: the entrance of the Holy Bible. We dedicate our joined labors to the use and glory of the Christian Church. We lay at its feet what we believe to be the truest and most acceptable philosophical interpretation of the first three chapters of Genesis ever offered to the world since the loss of the ancient Jewish Kabbalah original: "Judaical Cabbala"; refers to an ancient mystical or secret oral tradition. This is not just a rhetorical flourish on my part, but a frank acknowledgment—or rather, a serious boast—by Descartes himself. In a letter to a certain friend, he confessed that he found his own philosophy to be surprisingly consistent with the text of Moses, more so than any other interpretation. I have fully demonstrated this in the defense of my Philosophic Kabbalah, doing so even more thoroughly than Descartes could have, unless he had happened upon the same key that I used.

12. Regarding my work The Immortality of the Soul, I will address only two points of dissatisfaction. Although these seem like major issues to some, they never seemed so to me. The first is that I have allowed for a kind of extension The property of taking up space in the nature of a spirit. The second is that I have not allowed for perception in the Spirit of Nature More’s term for a non-conscious plastic power that governs the physical world. Regarding the first point, I can rightly defend myself by saying that necessity knows no law. If they consider the clear evidence of these two conclusions—first, that there is an immaterial substance fundamentally and specifically distinct from the body; and second, that nothing real exists that is not in some sense extended—they will find it impossible not to conclude, as I have, that a spirit is also extended in some way. Therefore, it is a poorly constructed complaint to criticize the conclusion without examining the strength of the premises. I appeal to any impartial original: "indifferent" reader to judge whether I have not mathematically demonstrated the truth of the first point in both my Antidote and my Treatise of the Soul’s Immortality.

I shall now, for the reader's fuller satisfaction, demonstrate the second point more precisely: namely, that neither the soul nor anything else can be wholly in original: "Totum in"; part of the Scholastic phrase "totum in toto, et totum in qualibet parte," meaning "the whole is in the whole, and the whole is in every part"