MORE, Henry, an eminent English philosopher and divine, was born at Grantham in Lincolnshire on the 12th October 1614. His father, Alexander More, a gentleman of property in that county, was a staunch Puritan, and educated his family in the strictest principles of Calvinism. At the age of fourteen, Henry was sent to Eton, with many affectionate charges to stand fast to the principles of his hereditary creed. Young More, however, who had always been of a retiring and thoughtful disposition, had already secret misgivings as to the soundness of the predestinarian doctrine; and now that he no longer breathed the Calvinistic atmosphere at home, he gave freer scope to his speculative tendencies. While the Eton boys bounded after the ball, Henry More "with his head on one side, and kicking now and then the stones with his feet," was dimly working his way to the bold conclusion that the doctrine of predestination was inconsistent with the justice and goodness of God. He was, moreover, prepared to maintain this position at all hazards; and with characteristic ardour and genuine speculative courage, he stoutly disputed the question with his elder brother, who, in company with his uncle, shortly afterwards visited him at Eton. This uncle of his, who was a blunt, matter-of-fact sort of man, and who believed more in the rod than in the reason, threatened the young heretic that if he did not give over these immature philosophizings, he would subject him to a wholesome course of corporal punishment. Henry of course did not give over his speculations, but continued to vex his young brain with quite insoluble problems. He seems, however, even in those boyish years, to have been remarkable for sincerity and humble purity of heart. At the advice of his uncle—
who seems to have monopolized the direction of his education—he was, after a three years' residence at Eton, removed to Christ Church, Cambridge, in 1631, just a year before John Milton left it. Here the young philosopher displayed an extraordinary thirst for knowledge, and read eagerly the works of Aristotle, Cardan, Julius Scaliger, and other thinkers of that class. But such writers could not satisfy his longings for higher light. They made him more sceptical than when he began; and renouncing the guidance of the logicians for ever, he directed his attention to the Platonic writers and mystic divines, and discovered the long-looked for treasure in the dreamy pages of Marsilius Ficinus, Plotinus, and Trismegistus. "That golden little book," ascribed to John Tauler, the Theologia Germanica, "pierced and affected" him more than all the rest. The simple knowledge of phenomena no longer had any charm for him; he sought for the proper food of the soul among those archetypal ideas which were believed to lie behind all sensible objects. He learned to think away all objects of sense, and strove with his "illuminated" teachers to live alone with God in a supersensible world. The earthly body, however, clogged the upward progress of the spirit; and what he gained in fancied illumination he lost in bodily strength. After a few years practice of this course, the poor youth found himself reduced to a very skeleton, and from his strange talk about "particular experiences," his friends began to charge him with enthusiasm. Some idea may be formed of his state of mind during this period from his philosophical poem called Psychozoia, or the Life of the Soul, published in 1640. He took the degree of Master of Arts in 1639; and on being chosen a fellow of his college, he became tutor to several persons of distinction, and among others to the brother of Lady Conway. At the request of this lady, who was a noted disciple of William Penn, More wrote, among other treatises, the Conjectura Cabalistica, and the Philosophia Teutonica Censura; and if he did not succeed in converting her from Quakerism, he at least secured her friendship, and at her death a legacy of £400, which the benevolent mystic devoted to purposes of private charity. If ever man strove to be true to the light that was in him, it was Henry More. He repeatedly declined the most flattering offers of church preferment, choosing rather to linger about the quiet halls of Christ Church, and muse as he listed, than enjoy the honours of a bishopric at £1,500 a year. The rectory of Ingoldsby, which had been purchased for him by his father, he resigned in 1642, and afterwards presented it to his college. He even declined the mastership of his own college in 1654, when the celebrated Cudworth was appointed; and if he accepted a prebend in the church of Gloucester in 1675, it was only to make it over to his friend Dr Fowler. Not that he lightly regarded the wants of his country. He is said to have wept over its miseries. But he believed himself to be more in his proper sphere using his pen in studious retirement, than mangling with the busy turmoil of the world. He was no doubt a little of the "intellectual epicure," as Norris of Bemerton called him; but yet his pen was constantly occupied in behalf of what he judged the cause of religion and virtue. He engaged in a correspondence with Descartes during 1648-9; and three of More's letters, with the replies of the French philosopher, are still to be read at the end of most editions of Descartes' works. More had a great esteem for Descartes, and judging from those letters, the admiration must have been mutual. Not that the English Platonist began with Cartesianism and ended with mysticism, as Cousin in his hasty generalization (Cours de l'Histoire de la Philosophie, Leçon 12me) seems to convey. On the contrary, while More always admired the Cartesian philosophy as "a fine, neat, subtle thing," he constantly maintained that "for the true ornament of the mind, it bears no greater proportion to that principle I told you of
[viz., the divine sense], than the dry bones of a snake made up elegantly into a hat-band is to the royal clothing of Solomon." More pursues a still more passionate and unjust strain of invective against Cartesianism in his Enchiridion Metaphysicum, published in 1671. In this work we obtain a more profound and methodical view of More's metaphysical system—if system it can be called—than in any of his other writings. Metaphysics, according to him, is the science of incorporeal existence, and admits naturally of a two-fold division. The one demonstrates the existence of other substances than bodies; the other determines the essence and principal attributes of those substances. His proof of the existence of immaterial things is threefold: first, space, which contains all matter, cannot be itself material; secondly, matter is contingent, for it is possible to think it away, while space is necessary, no such abstraction being possible for it; thirdly, the general series of natural phenomena come and go, begin and end, ceaselessly change, in a word, are contingent; but this supposes some necessary existence beyond the sphere of the sensible world, from the bosom of which the contingent emerges. In attempting to demonstrate the latter position, More ranges over all the sciences with the ease of a master, displaying a knowledge at once extensive and profound. As a speculator, More was perhaps more of the eclectic than the mystic, but his thoughts always gravitated towards mysticism, and found their last expression there. After his own doctrines, More preferred Descartes to all others; just as Hobbes is said to have preferred More's system to every one but his own. Indeed, the extravagant admiration which More always showed for his own conceits and fancies, no matter how groundless, stood in marked contrast with his acknowledged learning, charity, and humility. His allusions to himself and his own productions in the prefatio generalissima to the Latin edition of his works, and elsewhere, betray more than a mere amiable egotism,—they savour much more of personal vanity. More, however, while sometimes extravagant, seldom falls into the rude fervour or weak sentimentalism of the ordinary mystics, and has always the good sense and proper feeling to avoid the gross profanity which often characterized the English mystics of that age. He even wrote an express treatise in 1656, entitled Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, in which he traces the nature, causes, and cure of enthusiasm, and concludes by ascribing this abnormal state of mind mainly to bodily causes. If he was sometimes credulous, he was very generally shrewd and sagacious; and with all his defects, he unquestionably occupies a high place among that bright though small constellation of thinkers known as the English Platonists of the seventeenth century. Some of his books seem to have met with an extensive sale. The Mystery of Godliness was said by a London bookseller to have "ruled all the booksellers" for twenty years. Yet the appreciation which they met with did not quite satisfy their author, and he seems to have occasionally appealed to that "perspicua et pacifica posteritas"—that wise and peaceful posterity—which is to remodel the temple of fame. The young could not understand him, and the old thought him mad. Yet his merits were duly appreciated by such men as Cudworth and Norris. Three hundred pounds were left by an admirer to have some of More's pieces translated into Latin; a circumstance which induced the author to publish the whole of his works in Latin in three folio vols. in 1679. After completing this task, he does not seem to have written any work of importance. His last work was the Medela Mundi, or Cure of the World, which he did not survive to finish. His health had never been robust, and in 1686 he was seized with a fever, from the effects of which he never recovered. He died on the 1st September 1687, in the seventy-third year of his age. Besides the complete Latin edition of More's works already referred to, the greater number of his productions
appeared in English, under the title of A Collection of several Philosophical Writings, folio, London, 2d ed., 1662, and 4th ed., 1712. The Life of the Learned and Pious Dr Henry More, 8vo, London, 1710, was written by the Rev. Richard Ward, an enthusiastic and not very discriminating partisan of More's system. (See also the Biographia Britannica, the Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques, and Hours with the Mystics, by R. A. Vaughan, 2 vols. London, 1856. A detailed list of Dr More's works will be found in Watt's Bibliotheca Britannica.)