Living Matter

Abstract

A return to the nature of bodies, now examining another issue that has also been missed in the secondary literature: namely, More’s early contention that all bodies were actually alive, at least in some minimal sense, and consequently were not purely corporeal after all. One key reason why this point has been overlooked, just like his early views on the mode of a spirit’s presence in the spatial world, must surely be that he himself opposed it with great vigour in his later writings. I examine that opposition, and discuss how More shifted from a gradual monism to a strict dualism (albeit a dualism that was still substantially unlike that of Descartes). And I discuss More’s evolving position in relation to the theories of Anne Conway, F.M. van Helmont, and Leibniz.