Henry More

Henry More FRS (/mɔːr/; 12 October 1614 – 1 September 1687) was an English philosopher, theologian, and poet, associated with the Cambridge Platonists. He sought to reconcile Platonism with Christian theology and responded critically to Cartesian philosophy. His metaphysical writings addressed the nature of spirit, matter, divine providence, and the soul, and he was a prominent voice in seventeenth-century religious and philosophical debates.

More rejected Cartesian dualism, arguing that spirit, like matter, must be extended in space. He coined the term fourth dimension and introduced the concept of essential spissitude to describe the spatial extension of immaterial substance. He also proposed the existence of a Spirit of Nature—an unconscious, incorporeal agent through which God sustained the order of the physical world. His metaphysics grounded his opposition to materialist atheism and emphasised the necessity of immaterial principles in explaining life and motion.

He opposed the Cartesian view that animals were mere machines, asserting instead that they possess immaterial but mortal souls. More regarded animals as part of divine providence and cited their usefulness to humans as evidence of design, while acknowledging the theological difficulty posed by predation and suffering.

His writings, in both Latin and English, spanned metaphysics, ethics, natural philosophy, and theology, and included poetry and prose. He influenced figures such as Lady Anne Conway, Joseph Glanvill, and John Norris, and was later cited by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Helena Blavatsky.