Abstract
Henry More has been one of the hardest philosophers to classify. For want of a better term, he is ranked as leading ‘Cambridge Platonist’, a classification that itself is pretty vague. More, on the one hand, has been seen to have one of the most incisive critics of Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza. He was also one of the sharpest opponents of various kinds of religious enthusiasm and unlike most of his religious contemporaries, found nothing of interest in the mystical writings of Jacob Boehme that were engulfing the English intellectual world of his time. On the other hand, More was one of the leading exponents of Cabbalism, and of research into witchcraft, spirits, ghosts, demons and angels. He developed a spiritualistic metaphysics out of Cabbalistic, Neoplatonic and other ingredients, a metaphysics that may have played an important role in the cosmology of Isaac Newton. More and Newton worked assiduously on trying to interpret the secrets and symbols in the books of Daniel and Revelation. The table of contents of almost any of the many works of More moves from the sublime to the ridiculous. As a result, More has usually been interpreted by taking some strands of his thought as central and dismissing the rest as the result of personal idiosyncracies. His critique of Descartes has received more interest recently, and this has been counterpoised with the apparently contradictory fact that he was the first and most enthusiastic English Cartesian.1
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Notes
Rosalie L. Colie, Light and Enlightenment, esp. chap. 4; Alan Gabbey, “Philosophia cartesia-na triumphata.” For a somewhat different assessment of More’s view of Jacob Boehme, see Sarah Hutton’s article in this volume.
Richard H. Popkin, “The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought.”
On Anne Conway, see Marjorie J. Nicolson (ed.), Conway Letters; and Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 253–268.
For More and Newton, with some account of the debate over More’s possible influence on Newton, see Rupert Hall’s paper in this volume.
On More’s view of Quakerism, see Nicolson, Conway Letters, chap. 7, which includes More’s reaction when Lady Conway became a Quaker.
More, TW (1708). The second title page, p. 385, contains a motto from Sextus Empiricus, chap. 6, “Does Proof Exist?” The original title page of 1664 has a short motto from the same text of Sextus.
For details on this see Popkin, “Third Force,” 24–5.
More, CSPW, “The Preface General,” p. xii.
More, AA, bk. 1, chap. 2, p. 3.
Ibid, chap., ii, pp. 4–8.
This is developed in Books 1 and 12 of AA and IS.
More, CSPW, and Anne Conway, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy.
The letters of More and Conway while More was writing these works show that Lady Conway was raising points that led to revisions by More. She may also have discussed what he was writing before composition as well. See Conway Letters, chap. 2.
More, CSPW, Preface, pp. xviii–xxi.
Ibid., sect, xi, p. xi.
More to Anne Conway, 4 July 1653, in Conway Letters, p. 82.
Ibid, and More, CSPW, Preface, p. xx.
More, AA, Preface and Books 1 and 2.
More, IS, bk. 1, chap. 2, pp. 4–5.
Ibid. 1, chap. 10, sect. 5, p. 68; CSPW, AA, Bk. 1 chap. 4, pp. 14–15; and CSPW, “Preface General”, pp. xiii–xv.
Glanvill, Essays (1676), Essay 6, “Against Modern Sadducism in the Matter of Witches and Apparitions,” esp. sects. 1 and 2.
Most of More’s philosophical works contain long sections about the activities of spirits. In Lux orientalis, More and Glanvill put together most of their data on this subject. See also Glanvill, Saducismus triumphatus.
More, CSPW, AA, bk. 3, chap. 16, p. 17.
On the malign spirits, see More MG, Book 3, esp. chaps. 10–19.
More, ET, 2, “For Enthusiasm is nothing else but the misconceit of being inspired”
Ibid., passim.
More, AA, bk. 3 and Appendix.
On this see Joseph Mede’s letter to William Twisse, 23 March 1634/5, in The Works of the Pious and Profoundly Learned Joseph Mede (London, 1664), 980–81.
More, MG, Bk. 3, chaps. 3, 13 and 14. See Popkin, “The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Indian Theory,” Menasseh ben Israel and his World, forthcoming.
More, CSPW, “Preface General,” pp. xx–xxvii.
Jan van den Berg, “Menasseh ben Israel, Henry More and Johannes Hoornbeeck” (forthcoming).
The Latin edition of her text appeared in Amsterdam in 1690. It was published in English in Amsterdam in 1690 and reprinted in London in 1692.
More to Robert Boyle, in Boyle, Works, 6: 514.
More’s two essays against Spinoza are printed in Opera, 1: 565–614, 615–635. On More and Spinoza, see Colie, Light, chap. 5.
Conway, Principles (ed. Loptson), chap. 9, p. 221.
Ibid.
Ibid., 222.
Ibid.
Ibid., 225.
Ibid., 225–6.
Ibid., 229.
Ibid., 230.
Conway Letters, p. 351.
More, CSPW, “Preface General,” p. xii.
Ibid., p. xix.
More, MG, Preface, pp. xii–xiii.
More, Parapalipomena Prophetica, 2.
Ibid., 2–3.
More, TW, A Brief Discourse, 765–770; and TW, “Preface to the Reader”, p. iv.
Ibid.
This work exists in a confused manuscript in volumes 12, 13 and 15 of Robert Boyle’s papers at the Royal Society. On this see Popkin, “Could Spinoza have known Bodin’s Colloquium Heptaplomeres?” Philosophia 16 (1986): 307–314.
Bodin’s dialogues circulated in mansucript in the second half of the 17th century. On the disperson of Bodin’s manuscript, see Popkin, “A Note on the Dispersion of Bodin’s Dialogues in England, Holland and Germany,” JHI, 49 (1988): 157–60.
Oldenburg to Boreel, April 1656, 24 January, 1656/7, and early November 1657, in Oldenburg, Correspondence, 1: 89–92, 115–6 and 142–4.
For Boyle’s copy, see n. 52 above.
More, TW, Preface, p.v.
More Brief Discourse, ibid., 768.
Ibid.
Ibid., 768–9.
See n. 6 above.
More,MG, Prefact, pp.xii—xiii.
More,Apocalypsis Apocalypseos, “Preface to the Reader”, pp. v.
Ibid. pp. xii–xvi
Ibid. p. xvi
Ibid. pp. xxiii’xxix
Ibid. “The Epilogue,” 249
Ibid. 251ff
See More’s preface to Paaralipomena prophetica and the preface to Exposition...of the Prophet Daniel
Nicolson, Conway Letters, Chap. 7
On More’s relations with the young Newton, see Richard S. Westfall,Never at Rest. A Biolgraphy of Isaac Newtion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 97 and notes.
More to John Sharp, 16 August 1680,Conway Letters, pp. 478—9
Newtion’s alchemical and theological papers were auctioned off at Sotheby’s in 1936. The bulk of the theological ones was purchased by A. S.Yahuda, who bequeathed his manuscript collections to the National Lobrary of Israel in Jerusalem. The only ppublisherd texts from Yahuda’s collection appear as an appendix in Frank E. Manuel,The Religion of Isaac Newton(Oxford: Clarendon Press,1974), 107–125 and 125–136. Richard S. Westfall, Betty Jo Dobbs and I are heading a roup to edit and publish these texts.
On Newton and Whiston, see Jams E. Force, Willian Whiston, Honest Newtonian (Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy Press, 1985
Manuel, op.cit.n. 72 above, 37#x2019;4; Popkin, “Newton and the Rise of Fundamentalism” in Israel Colloquium on the History and Philosophy of Science (forthcoming)
For Leibniz7#x2019; views on Lady Conway, see Conway letters , 453’7, and Conway, Principles, ed. Loptson, 18’212. See also Stuart Brow’s article in this volume
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Popkin, R.H. (1990). The Spiritualistic Cosmologies of Henry More and Anne Conway. In: Hutton, S. (eds) Henry More (1614–1687) Tercentenary Studies. International Archives of the History of Ideas/Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées, vol 127. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2267-9_6
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