The Spirit of Nature

Abstract

If there are spiritual forces at work in the natural world, whether to stand in for mechanical explanations where the latter fall short, or to supplement them even where they are forthcoming, then what might the bearers of these powers be like? We already saw a partial answer to this question in Chap. 7, with More’s notion of how bodies might possess a stupefied form of life of their own, and thereby qualify as being in some sense ‘corporeo-spiritual’ rather than purely corporeal. But, as we also saw in that chapter, More did subsequently move away from that early opinion; and, as we will see in the present chapter, it was not quite the end of the story even while he was still embracing it.