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More, Henry (b. 1614, Grantham, Lincolnshire—d. Sept. 1, 1687, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire), poet and philosopher ofreligion whose affinity for the metaphysics of Plato places him among the group of thinkers known as the Cambridge Platonists,
Reared a Calvinist, More became an Anglican as a youth. At Christ’s College, Cambridge, he encountered such Platonists as Edward Fowler and John Worthington and came under the influence of Joseph Mead (or Mede), the mystic who wrote Clavis Apocalyptica (1627; “The Key to the Apocalypse”). In 1639 he was elected to a fellowship at Cambridge. Among his pupils was Lady Anne Conway, whose religious enthusiasm influenced More and at whose request he later wrote Conjectura Cabbalistica (1653).
In close touch with the leading philosophers and scientists of his time, More gradually abandoned his admiration for the thought of the French Rationalist René Descartes, which separated mind and matter, and came to see mechanical naturalism and atheism as the inevitable result of Cartesian philosophy. In their correspondence of 1648-49, published as The Immortality of the Soule (1659), and in his major metaphysical work, Enchiridion Metaphysicum (1671), More argued against Descartes’ skepticism and maintained his own spiritualist views.
In a similar fashion, he sought to refute the claim of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes that theism is impossible because the human mind cannot know an immaterial substance.
More’s early poetry, written in a style akin to that of the English lyricist Edmund Spenser, treated metaphysical subjects and included satirical sketches of the Puritan religion, against which he had rebelled. His religious views, most fully expressed in An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (1660) and Divine Dialogues (1668), centred on his idea that “there is no real clashing at all betwixt any genuine point of Christianity and what true Philosophy and Right Reason does determine or allow.” His ethical writings include Enchiridion Ethicum (1667); his work An Antidote against Atheism (1652) is curiously devoted, in large part, to witch and ghost stories. His poetry is published in Alexander Balloeh Grosart’s Complete Poems of Henry More (1878). Excerpts from his philosophical writings appear in Flora Isabel MacKinnon’s Philosophical Writings of Henry More (1925).
