More Henry (1614–87), English philosopher, theologian, and poet, the most prolific of the Cambridge Platonists. In 1631 he entered Christ’s College, where he spent the rest of his life after becoming Fellow in 1641. He was primarily an apologist of anti-Calvinist, latitudinarian stamp whose inalienable philosophico- theological purpose was to demonstrate the existence and immortality of the soul and to cure ‘two enormous distempers of the mind,’ atheism and ‘enthusiasm.’ He described himself as ‘a Fisher for Philosophers, desirous to draw them to or retain them in the Christian Faith.’ His eclectic method deployed Neoplatonism (notably Plotinus and Ficino), mystical theologies, cabalistic doctrines (as More misconceived them), empirical findings (including reports of witchcraft and ghosts), the new science, and the new philosophy, notably the philosophy of Descartes. Yet he rejected Descartes’s beast-machine doctrine, his version of dualism, and the pretensions of Cartesian mechanical philosophy to explain all physical phenomena. Animals have souls; the universe is alive with souls. Body and spirit are spatially extended, the former being essentially impenetrable, inert, and discerpible (divisible into parts), the latter essentially penetrable, indiscerpible, active, and capable of a spiritual density, which More called essential spissitude, ‘the redoubling or contracting of substance into less space than it does sometimes occupy.’ Physical processes are activated and ordered by the spirit of nature, a hylarchic principle and ‘the vicarious power of God upon this great automaton, the world.’ More’s writings on natural philosophy, especially his doctrine of infinite space, are thought to have influenced Newton. More attacked Hobbes’s materialism and, in the 1660s and 1670s, the impieties of Dutch Cartesianism, including the perceived atheism of Spinoza and his circle. He regretted the ‘enthusiasm’ for and conversion to Quakerism of Anne Conway, his ‘extramural’ tutee and assiduous correspondent.
More had a partiality for coinages and linguistic exotica. We owe to him ‘Cartesianism’ (1662), coined a few years before the first appearance of the French equivalent, and the substantive ‘materialist’ (1668).
See also BOYLE, CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS , DESCARTES , NEOPLATONIS. A.G. Sir Thomas (1477 or 1478–1535), English humanist, statesman, martyr, and saint. A lawyer by profession, he entered royal service in 1517 and became lord chancellor in 1529. After refusing to swear to the Act of Supremacy, which named Henry VIII the head of the English church, More was beheaded as a traitor.
Although his writings include biography, poetry, letters, and anti-heretical tracts, his only philosophical work, Utopia (published in Latin, 1516), is his masterpiece. Covering a wide variety of subjects including government, education, punishment, religion, family life, and euthanasia, Utopia contrasts European social institutions with their counterparts on the imaginary island of Utopia. Inspired in part by Plato’s Republic, the Utopian communal system is designed to teach virtue and reward it with happiness. The absence of money, private property, and most social distinctions allows Utopians the leisure to develop the faculties in which happiness consists. Because of More’s love of irony, Utopia has been subject to quite different interpretations. J.W.A.
