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A Cambridge Platonist's Materialism: Henry More and the Concept of Soul

ATHEISM WAS greatly on the increase in the seventeenth century or so many devout contemporaries believed.1 This supposed challenge to attempts to establish the principles of the true faith stimulated that proliferation of exegetical studies which is now regarded as a characteristic of post-Reformation scholarship. However, it was immediately recognized that no amount ofhermeneutics would persuade the out-and-out atheist. So an alternative strategy was developed in order to prove the existence of God, the immortality of the soul and other principles of faith on 'natural' grounds. Perhaps the most familiar form of this natural theology can be seen in the attempts to prove the existence of God by vast and detailed elaborations of the cosmological argument or the argument from design.2 But there was also a major philosophical effort to prove the immortality of the soul and the reality of life after death on purely rational or commonsense grounds, in order to persuade or remind the atheist who was regarded as thoroughly antisocial that he must face a future reckoning for his present misdeeds. One of the most important philosophical theologians engaged in this effort was the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More (1614-87). In the early part of his career (from 1642 to 1659), More published a series of philosophical works intended to combat atheism on a number of different fronts. It is easy to see, however, that the nature of the human soul engaged most of his attention; from The Platonicall Song of the Soul of 1642 to The Immortality