 Section 16 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy, Volume 2 by John Tulloch. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 5. Henry Moore, Christian Theosophy and Mysticism, Part 2. Soon after he became fellow of Christ's College, he seems to have acted as tutor to several persons of great quality. His deep thoughtfulness did not take him off from all that due care that was any way requisite for the discharge of so great a trust. His biographer speaks on the authority of personal knowledge and letters which had passed betwixt Moore and some of his pupils, one of whom told him in particular, quote, what excellent lectures he would deliver to them of piety and instruction from the chapter that was read on nights in his chamber, close quote. Others confirmed the same report, and we can easily understand the hearty bonds of sympathy which would unite such a tutor and young men of a refined and thoughtful turn of mind. But amongst all his pupils the most interesting was a young lady of noble family, a heroin pupil, as his biographer says, of an extraordinary nature. This lady appears to have been a sister of Heneage, Lord Finch, afterwards Earl of Nottingham, Chancellor and Lord Keeper, under Charles II, a well-known statesman of great legal ability and eloquence, who, with something of the harshness and subserviency of his age, maintained a high personal character and was animated by genuine and lofty religious aspirations. Footnote. In evidence of this, it is enough to mention that Cudworth's intellectual system was dedicated to Lord Finch, in acknowledgment of his hearty affection for religion and zeal for it. Cudworth also speaks highly of his eloquence, while Peeps says, quote, he was a man of his great eloquence as ever I heard or ever hoped to hear in all my life, close quote. The main evidence of his harshness is a saying attributed to him when Andrew Marvell proposed that the fees incurred by Milton during his brief custody after the restoration should be refunded by Parliament. No said Finch, quote, Milton had been Latin secretary to Cromwell, and instead of paying one hundred fifty pounds, he well deserved hanging. Close quote. End of footnote. Thus distinguished by birth, Moore's favorite pupil married Lord Conway and settled at Ragley in Warwickshire where at intervals he spent a considerable part of his time. He had the highest esteem for her and the feeling was mutual, not withstanding causes of difference which arose betwixt to them. He was wont to say, quote, that he scarce ever met with any person, man or woman, of better natural parts than the Lady Conway. Close quote. And she in her turn had an extraordinary value for his genius. Her husband was scarcely less enthusiastic and is said to have treasured everything of Moore's with as much reverence as if it were Socrates. It is added that, quote, as she always wrote a very clear style, so would she argue sometimes or put to him the deepest and noblest queries imaginable. Close quote. Lady Conway was of delicate constitution and appears to have suffered much, particularly from pains and disorders in her head. Her bodily infirmity, as in many similar cases, had developed her spiritual enthusiasm and she gradually passed from Moore's pupillage into the ranks of the Quakers. This was a great blow in discouragement to him and he entered into many arguments, not only with her but with her Quaker friends. He wrote a letter to Penn concerning baptism and the Lord's Supper and even tried a discussion with their great leader, George Fox. But Fox, either by his rudeness or his ignorance, proved too much for him. He said to someone, quote, that in conversing with him he felt himself, as it were, turned into brass so much did the spirit, crookedness or perverseness of that person move and offend his mind. Close quote. Moore failed to reconvert his pupil but he retained her friendship. He continued to spend much of his time, as before, at Ragley and its woods, and there composed several of his books at Lady Conway's own desire and instigation. When she died she left him a legacy and he, on the other hand, drew an interesting portrait of her in the form of a preface to a volume of remains of her genius, which at one time it was designed to publish. He drew this portrait under another name and with so much address that we are told, quote, the most rigid Quaker would see everything they could wish in it and yet the soberest Christian be entirely satisfied with it. Close quote. Footnote. The preface was written under the name of Van Helmont and is printed at length in Ward's life. End of footnote. Lady Conway was evidently a remarkable person and there is some reason to think that she exercised a greater influence upon more than his biographer is willing to confess. Her mysticism was in close affinity with one side of his religious nature. She had studied in Latin both Plato and Plotinus and searched into and judiciously sifted the abstrusest writers of theosophy. But to her mysticism she plainly united a vigorous and confident will. Moore himself said that she was one that would not give up her judgment entirely unto any. Such a character, enthusiastic yet self-reliant, of subtle spiritual insight chastened by suffering and yet of firm purpose naturally exerted a great attraction for an intelligence like Moore's, free and rational yet mobile and restlessly sympathetic. Her genius and generous force of thought charmed him and probably influenced and stimulated him more than he imagined and the fact that he wrote so many of his books at Ragley may be taken as clear evidence of this. At Ragley was the seat of other influences besides those of a congenial and thoughtful mistress. Spiritualism found a favorite abode in it in the shape not only of religious enthusiasm but of gifts and wonders which seemed to many little else than miraculous. In addition to the best and chiefest of the Quakers its society embraced two of the most extraordinary men of the time, Baron Van Helmont and the no less famous Valentin Great Rakes, with both of whom Moore made special acquaintance in this pleasant retreat. The former is not to be confounded with the well-known chemist of the same name who, following in the footsteps of Paracelsus, did much with all his extravagances to advance the study of natural science in the first half of the seventeenth century. Footnote. Jean-Baptiste Van Helmont was a gentleman of Brabant and Lord of Merode, etc. He was born in Brussels in 1577 and passed most of his time on his Flemish estate engaged in the researches of his laboratory. He died in 1644. End of footnote. The Van Helmont who was Moore's associate and in whose person and name he wrote the Panagyric of Lady Conway, to which we have already adverted, was the son of this distinguished chemist. He inherited something of his father's genius but more of his enthusiasm and extravagance. He seems to have devoted himself solely to those occult medical studies which were a secondary passion with his parent and to have lived for some time in Lady Conway's family as physician. He was greatly attached, along with his friend and patroness, to the Quakers and attended their meetings frequently. From all we learn of him it is difficult to get a real view of his character. Moore's remark might lead us to infer that he was either a pure, unconscious enthusiast or a well-intentioned, self-denying philanthropist. He knew as little of himself truly and really, Moore says, as one that had never seen him in his life. Great Rakes is a comparatively well-known person, his name being one of the most celebrated in that strange history of occult marvels which is so far from having run its course that our age, with all its enlightenment, is likely to add to it one of its most startling and memorable chapters. His wonderful cures made even more noise in the seventeenth century than any similar phenomena have yet done in the nineteenth. They were the subject of formal investigation by the Royal Society and quite carried away men like Moore and Glanville, both of whom have specially adverted to them. Footnote The former in the notes to his Latin version of Enthusiasmus Triumphatus and the latter in his well-known publication on Witchcraft. End of Footnote Great Rakes was a native of Ireland, a gentleman of liberal birth and fortune, well-educated and apparently possessed both of public and private virtues. There is no reason to doubt his honesty. At first it is said that he was far from eager to exert the strange powers with which he felt himself endowed. But at length the impulse became too powerful for him, and having tried his skill on some persons in the neighbourhood of his residence, the effect was so marked that sick people flocked to him from all quarters. He cured them in the most extraordinary manner merely by laying his hands upon them and stroking them. Lady Conway's sufferings led her to invite him to England where his success was no less astonishing save in her own case. His performances became the talk of town and country, and his reputation was keenly canvassed. At the coffee-houses and everywhere writes a person of great veracity and a philosopher to Glanville, quote, the great discourse now is about Mr. G., the famous Irish stroker. He undergoes curious censures here, some take him to be a conjurer and some an impostor, but others again adore him as an apostle. I confess I think the man is free from all design of a very agreeable conversation, not addicted to any vice nor to any sect or party, but is, I believe, a sincere protestant. I was three weeks together with him at my Lord Conway's and saw him, I think, lay his hands upon a thousand persons, and really there is something in it more than ordinary, but I am convinced it is not miraculous. I have seen pains strangely fly before his hand till he hath chased them out of the body, dimness cleared and deafness cured by his touch. Twenty persons at several times, in fits of the falling sickness, were in two or three minutes brought to themselves so as to tell where their pain was. And then he hath pursued it till he hath driven it out at some extreme part, running sores of the king's evil dried up and kernels brought to a curation by his hand, close, quote. Yet adds Glanville, agreeing in this respect with his friend more, quote, I have many reasons to persuade me that nothing of all this is miraculous. He pretends not to give testimony to any doctrine. The manner of his operation speaks it to be natural. The cure seldom succeeds without reiterated touches. His patience often relapses. He fails frequently. He can do nothing where there is any decay in nature and many distempers are not at all obedient to his touch. So that I confess I refer all his virtue to his particular temper and complexion, and I take his spirits to be a kind of elixir and universal ferment, and that he cures, as Dr. M. expresses it, by a sanative contagion, close, quote. More had a strong faith, as many men of genius have had, in what may be called the sanatory virtue of rare personal gifts, whether of mind or of body. With the most unaffected candor, a candor so perfectly simple as to be to our modern tastes ludicrous, he expresses his belief that he was himself endowed in a remarkable degree with such gifts. Like Socrates he had his monetary counsellings and warnings, impulses borne in upon his spirit in an irresistible and more than ordinary manner. Frequently in his writings such impulses would come to him and lead him in a different line of thought from that which he had intended when he saw afterwards that the way he was going would have led him into what he calls an angiportis or position of difficulty. He was in a very great rapture when he was thus affected. It is added by his biographer that he was not a little shy in speaking of matters of this nature, that it was only occasionally to his most intimate friends that he would do so, and that there was good reason to believe that he was more frequently moved in such a manner than he hath anyhow particularly related. His vivid realization of the spiritual world and the presence of higher powers everywhere encircling human life made it natural and easy for him to believe such things. His belief in what he declared to be the strange properties of his body is of a more remarkable kind. He has himself placed on deliberate record, in speaking of great rakes' singular endowments, that certain products of his own person, quote, had naturally the flavor of violets, that his breast and body, especially when very young, would of themselves in like manner send forth flowery and aromatic odors from them, and such as he daily almost was sensible of when he came to put off his clothes and go to bed. And even afterwards, when he was older, about the end of winter or beginning of the spring, he did frequently perceive certain sweet and herbaceous smells about him, when yet there were no such external objects nearer from whence they could proceed. Close quote. Whatever explanation may be given of this curious story, more himself supposed the results to arise from the peculiar virtue of his temperament and constitution. Animasika animapura, animasika sapientissima, he was want to say, repeating an ancient aphorism and explaining that a dry constitution, such as he had, was naturally the seat of the purest and wisest mind. Undoubtedly he had a singularly healthy and elastic bodily frame, fitted as a well-strung instrument to his soul. It seemed built for a hundred years, and as he further says of himself, quote, there were not many that could have borne that high warmth and activity of thoughtfulness and intense writing. After all his study and depth of thought in the daytime, when he came to sleep, he had a strange sort of narcotic power, as his word was, that drew him to it, and he was no sooner in a manner laid in his bed, but the falling of a house would scarce wake him. When yet early in the morning he was want to awake usually into an immediate unexpressible life and vigor, with all his thoughts and notions reying about him, as beams surrounding the center from whence they all proceed. Close quote. He had so tempered and attuned his body that it readily obeyed all the movements of his mind, and he was able to have his thoughts often times as clear as he could almost desire, and to take them off or fix them upon a subject in a manner as he pleased. It was pleasant, he said, to go quick in thought from notion to notion without any images of words in the mind. As we have glided into these personal details it may be as well so far to complete them. Moore lived very much alone in the paradise which he had made for himself in Christ's college, safe when the mistress of Ragley tempted him to join her society. Many happy days he said he had spent in his chamber, and so sweet and pleasing was the fruit of his solitary labors and musings that they often appeared to him in looking back upon them as an aromatic field. His father, who had, we have seen, at one time cherished other and ambitious hopes regarding him, quote, coming into his room and seeing him there with his books about him and full well knowing the tendencies of his studies was most highly affected with it and in a rapture said, what indeed was the truth, that he thought he spent his time in an angelical way, close quote. He had no doubt of the propriety of the mode of life he had chosen for himself. He knew his own powers and appreciated what he could do as well as what was agreeable to him. There were some of the spiritualists, he said, who would have had him to go upon a stall and from thence preach to the people. But I have measured myself, he added, from the height to the depth and to know what I can do and what I ought to do, and I do it. If he was to live his whole life over again he would do just for the main as he had done. Living in college he frequented for the most part, quote, the public hall except on Fridays which being a fish-day and that a sort of food which did not then so well agree with him, he chose rather to dine upon something else in his chamber. He kept more than once the time of Lent abstaining from flesh. But he found, he said, that it quite altered the tone of his body and so afterwards forbore the observing of it. His drink was, for the most part, the college small beer, which in his pleasant way of speaking he would say sometimes was seraphical and the best liquor in the world, and he hath several times observed, according to the generous heat that was in him, how mightily he should find himself refreshed by it. But he was not at times without his farther refreshments of a better sort, and every one, adds his biographer with more sense than many who have ventured to touch such details, must here follow his own constitution and best experience in these matters. Such a life as Moore's necessarily presents few points of contact with the great events of his time. He was so busy in his chamber with his pen and lines as not to mind much the bustles and affairs of the world without. He did not occupy any party position, even in that indefinite sense in which Wichcote and Cudworth may be said to have done. He had no relations with the statesmen of the Civil War and the Commonwealth and never made, like his friends, any prominent public appearance. Educated in a Calvinistic, although not a Puritan home, he turned aside very early from all that could have connected him with the religious parties dominant in his youth. Decided Calvinist as his father was, he does not seem to have been a Puritan. Moore himself at least says, quote, his nearest relations were deep sufferers for the king, close quote, and a footnote. His ideal was the Church of England as it existed before the times of disturbance, the Church of the Reformation and of Hooker. To Popery in every form he was as violently opposed as it was in his nature to be, and one of his chief works is mainly devoted to an exposure of its anti-Christian features, the points in which it seems to him to favor idolatry, to bind burdens upon the conscience, and to deaden and resist instead of quickening and educating the divine life. Footnote A modest enquiry into the mystery of iniquity, first part containing a careful and partial delineation of the true idea of anti-Christianism, 1564. End of footnote All his rational impulses rose against such a system. But both his reason and his love of quietness and order were opposed to what he considered the excesses of Puritanism, the dismal spectacle of an infinity of sects and schisms. We have already seen his relations with the Quakers. Not all his affectionate respect for Lady Conway could make him regard them with any leniency or favor, and he is here and there through his writings hardly fair to them as when he describes them as the offspring of the Familists. Divine Dialogues page 459-567 These so-called Familists were the special bugbear of reasonable religious people amidst the swarming sects of the century. Moore describes them and their principles at length in his grand mystery of godliness and connects them directly with H. Nicholas, a fanatic of Amsterdam. They seem to have resembled the modern communities of love. End of footnote He probably disliked the many forms of obtrusive fanaticism which prevailed in England in the 17th century, all the more because there was a side of his nature on which he felt he had some affinity with them. In all that he says of the Quakers and throughout his interesting treatise on enthusiasm it is not difficult to trace the operation of this feeling. But his intense hatred of disorder was sufficient to keep in check all his own natural tendencies towards enthusiasm. Ardent as his religious feelings were, he cherished a strong dislike to that individualism and assertion of special divine prerogative which more or less lie at the basis of all fanaticism. Your enormous contumacity and schismaticalness, he said to the secretaries, is hugely for the interest of Antichrist and as manifestly against the interests of the kingdom of Christ. Footnote Apology, Chapter 10, 1664. In this same apology he presses the secretaries with the following rather happy expostulation. Quote, Ye that fancy yourselves the only zealots for truth and holiness, the only sound and incontaminate part of our nation, but the national church, sick and crazy, if it were so indeed, where is your charity, and how little your discretion to run out of the house now your mother lies thus on her sick bed? Is it to call the physician? No. I demand then why do you run out of the house? Oh, my mother is sick and I am in good health. Will not anyone reply, more unmanorly and unnatural, son you, to leave your mother when you ought most to assist and administer help unto her, and thus to strut out of doors merely to ostentate your own health, as if your glory was the greater that your mother is sick while you fancy yourself so well? Close quote. End of footnote. Both in his poems and elsewhere he invades against the empty opinionativeness so rampant and the source of so many evils. Disopinion that makes the riven heavens with tempest's ring and thundering engine murderous balls out sling, and send men's groaning ghosts to lower shade of hard hell, this the wide world doth bring to devastation makes mankind to fade such direful things doth false religion persuade. But true religion sprung from God above is like her fountain full of charity embracing all things with a tender love, full of goodwill and meek expectancy, full of true justice and sure verity, in heart and voice free, large, even infinite, not wedged in straight particularity, but grasping all in her vast active sprite, bright lamp of God that men would joy in thy pure light. Close quote. For himself he loved nothing more and desired nothing better than the Church of England with its decent grandeur and splendor. He cannot but think that it would be a sorry exchange to accept of presbytery instead which would prove but a democratical papacy. Yet he elsewhere admits that episcopacy may be prized unduly and that the popular element may not be without its value and advantage. His main concern is that neither one order of Church government nor another usurp the place which only religion itself should hold. He is for the naked truth of Christianity and nothing more, willing even to be called a Puritan if this be to be a Puritan. I am, he concludes, quote, above all sects whatsoever as sects, for I am a true and free Christian, and what I write and speak is for the interest of Christ and in behalf of the life of the Lamb. Close quote. If Moore's life as a student kept him retired from the world, it greatly stimulated his productivity as an author. Probably also it contributed in some degree to the endless prolixity and repetitions of his writings. We feel especially with him, as more or less with all the Cambridge school, except which coat, that we are conversing with a mind too little braced by active discipline and the prompt, systematic, compact habits which come from large intercourse with men and the affairs which stir men to powerful movement or great ambitions. The air of a school which was, after all, confined to a narrow if influential sphere is more pervading in his writings than in any of the others. Christ College, with its books, is never far out of sight, and all the sweetness and seclusion of Ragley, the solemnness of the place, its shady walks and hills and woods, where he lost sight of the world and the world of him, did not help to let the light of day or the breath of the common air into his choice theories, however they may have assisted him in finding them out and elaborating them. In this respect we have been reminded more than once of an analogy betwixt him and the leaders of the modern High Church school in its original development. Oxford and Hursley Parsonage may not in aptly be compared to Cambridge and Ragley, and the innervating force of a willful seclusion from the world is certainly not less conspicuous in Kiebel and Newman, although in a different direction than in our author. It may be pleasant to keep away from the bustles and affairs of the world without, as it is pleasant to contemplate the peculiar beauty and serenity of character which ripen amid such retirements. But after all, no man can escape from his fellow men and the rough facts of ordinary human life without spiritual and intellectual injury. The product may be finer that is grown in solitude, but it will neither be so useful nor in many respects so true and good. And so Moore's writings, largely as they bulk in his life and deeply interesting as some of them are to the religious and philosophical student, have long ceased to exert any influence. They never became literature. None of them have even attained the sort of dignified prominence accorded to Cudworth's intellectual system which is eminently one of those books which people agree and highly respecting without thinking of reading. As to their reception in his own age, there are two accounts not very easy to reconcile. On the one hand it is stated that an eminent London bookseller declared that for twenty years after the return of Charles II the mystery of godliness and Dr. Moore's other works ruled all the booksellers in London. On the other hand, his biographer says virtually on his own authority, quote, that though he had not wanted particular and extraordinary respects from many persons, yet the world in general had either been in part averse to his writings or not known well what to make of some things in them. It is very certain, he adds, that his writings are not generally, I will not say, read, but so much as known, and many scholars themselves are in a great measure strangers to them. The truth seems to be that some of his writings at least were very well received, and judging from the number of additions which they reached may be said to have been popular, but that he himself was disappointed with the welcome accorded to his favourite notions or theories as he called them. These children of his brain were naturally much prized by him and he wondered, as so many theorists have done before and since, that others did not value them as much as himself. To his own mind they appeared, quote, so very clear as well as glorious that he almost fancied he should have carried all before him, but a little experience served to cure him of this vanity and he quickly perceived that he was not like to be overpopular, close, quote. The period of his activity as an author stretched from the first publication of his poems in 1642 to within ten years of the close of his life in 1687, or a period of thirty-five years. During all this time he continued to write sometimes what we would now call pamphlets rather than books, but also many elaborate and formal treatises. He has himself left us a list of his publications in their chronological order and we give a summary of it below which may interest the reader. Extended Footnote The following is a summary of Moore's statement of the order in which he composed his works. We have abbreviated, or thrown out, the personal details which he intersperses with his statement save insofar as they give some real explanation of the character of the works or the circumstances of their origin. We have also added such explanations of our own as may give the reader some idea of writings which he has not himself characterised. 1642 to 47 Philosophical Poems II. 1650 to 51 Letter and reply to Eugenius Philolethes under the pseudonym of Elezonomastics. We have not seen this letter nor reply except as quoted by Ward in his life. He himself describes them as follows. Opuscula san e ludicrosseria et que nun quamscripsisem nisi neinis nugisque e orem temporem entusiasticis dicam an fantasticis e o provocatus. Roscoe. III. 1652 Antidote Against Atheism New Edition 1655 Also in Collection of Philosophical Writings 1662. IV. 1653 Conjectura cabalistica or attempt to interpret the three first chapters of Genesis in a three-fold manner, literal, philosophical, and mystical, or divinely moral. Also in Collection, etc., 1662. V. 1656 Enthusiasmus triumphatus, or a brief discourse of the nature, causes, kinds, and cure of enthusiasm. Also in Collection, etc., 1662. VI. 1659 Immortality of the Soul with a valuable preface on the general subject of his philosophy. Also 1662. VII. 1660 An explanation of the grand mystery of godliness, written after an illness in which he had vowed, if spared, to write a book demonstrative of the truth of the Christian religion, so far as concerns the person and offices of Christ, to the confusion of fanatics and infidels alike. VIII. 1662 Collection of Philosophical Writings embracing Numbers 3, 4, 5, and 6, with an appendix to Number 3, Latin Correspondence with Descartes, and Letter to V.C. IX. 1664 Enquiry into the Mystery of Iniquity, first part chiefly directed against Popery, second part treating of the prophecies of Scripture regarding the reign of Antichrist. X. 1666 Encuridium ethicum, or manual of ethics, the occasion of writing which is explained in our notice of Cudworth, New Edition 1669. XI. 1668 Divine Dialogues, containing Disquisitions concerning the Attributes and Providence of God. XII. 1669 Expositio profetica septem epistolarum ad septem Ecclesias asiaticus una cum antidoto adversis idolatrium, prophetical explanation of the Seven Epistles to the Seven Churches of Asia, along with antidote against idolatry, especially directed against certain doctrines of the Council of Trent. XIII. 1670 Philosophiae to Tonisei censura Criticism of the Philosophy of Jacob Bohm XIV. 1671 Encuridium metafisicum, partly translated apparently by himself along with a letter, answered to a learned psychopyrus, on the Nature of Spirit in Glanville's Seducimus triumphantus. XIV. 1672-78 Moore employed himself in issuing complete editions of his works in Latin. First, his opera Theologica in 1675, and subsequently in 1678, his opera Philosophica. The opera Theologica contains Numbers 7, 9, 12, along with some smaller pieces and hymns in Latin. The latter form two volumes folio. Volume 1 contains Numbers 10, 14, 11, along with various minor philosophical writings, the productions of his later years, partly essays on what may be called natural philosophy, for example the gravity and weight of fluid bodies in connection with the experiments of Torricelli, and partly a series of cabalistical writings, such as a mystical explanation of the vision of Ezekiel, a cabalistic catechism, etc. Also a further letter to V.C. and a refutation of Spinoza. Duarum precipuarum at the ismi Spinoziani columnarum subversio. Volume 2 contains the collection of the philosophical writings published in English in 1662. This Latin republication of his writings was aided by a legacy from an admiring disciple, John Cokschwit of the Inner Temple, who left 300 pounds for the purpose. End of footnote. Some of the most characteristic of his works seem to have been the most popular, and amongst these may be mentioned the antidote against atheism, his first prose publication in 1652, and the essay on the immortality of the soul, along with his two extended treatises, The Grand Mystery of Godliness and The Mystery of Iniquity, the former of which was published in the year of the Restoration and the latter four years later. But of all his writings, the only one which can be said to have retained any literary popularity, or to be commendable to the modern reader, is his divine dialogues, from which we have already given an extract of some length, illustrative of his mental and spiritual growth. It is of this volume that Dr. Blair speaks in his lectures on rhetoric as one of the most remarkable in the English language. Though the style, he adds, quote, be now in some measure obsolete, and the speakers be marked with the academic stiffness of those times, yet the dialogue is animated by a variety of character and a sprightliness of conversation beyond what are commonly met with in writings of this kind. Close quote. The divine dialogues are certainly, upon the whole, the most interesting and readable of all Moore's works. The current of thought runs along smoothly, with less tendency than in any of his other writings to digressive absurdity and weary some subdivisions. The style is here and there fresh and powerful, and there is not only some liveliness of movement in the success of conversations, but an attempt is made, as Blair implies, to impart a definite portraiture to the several speakers and to preserve throughout their individuality and consistency. This attempt is not very successful, but it is one in which scarcely any modern writer of dialogues has succeeded, and Moore may in this respect compare happily even with Barkley in an age of far more literary brilliancy. Footnote. Except perhaps Mr. Savage Landor in some of his imaginary conversations. End of footnote. The divine dialogues, moreover, possess for the common reader the advantage of condensing his general views in philosophy and religion. In fact, most of his characteristic principles may be gathered from them. The year 1668, in which he composed the dialogues, may be said to mark the apex of Moore's intellectual activity. It is true that after this he composed his manual of metaphysics and attacked both Jacob Bohm and Spinoza in elaborate treatises. But the elasticity and temper of his philosophical genius are less buoyant in these efforts. His metaphysics, elaborate though they be, are in the main only a systematic and somewhat desultory expansion of views regarding the nature and proof of incorporeal substances, which he had already more than once expressed. While his cabalistical and prophetical studies have acquired a stronger hold of his mind. Within the next ten years there are no fewer than five publications taken up with mystical subjects. Some of them are the most curious technical character, including a cabalistic catechism. Two of these writings are addressed to a friend, Noor, a leading German orientalist, whose speculations at this time considerably influenced him. Noor had traveled a great deal and zealously devoted himself in his peregrinations to chemistry and the cabalistic art. He was a friend of Van Helmont, with whom he conducted a correspondence which appears to have engaged the attention of our author. He was evidently a man of remarkable, if somewhat useless, erudition from the interest which he excited in Lightfoot and others. Footnote. His reputation was chiefly founded on a work entitled Cabala di Nudata, Seo d'Octrina Hebreorum Transcendalis, et Metafisica, Atcoe Theologica, etc., Three Volumes Quarto, a farago, it is said, of wild reveries and mystical absurdities, with occasionally some learned notices of the philosophy of the Hebrews, Chalmers Biographical Dictionary. End of Footnote. He had read and admired Moor's works, and his admiration seems to have exercised an injurious influence on a mind only too much inclined naturally to transcendental vagaries and mystical dreams. Footnote. See his series of cabalistic writings, Opera Omnia, Book 1, 423-528, especially his cabalistic catechism and Fundament of Philosophia, Sive Cabale eto Paedo Melisae, in which he discusses an extraordinary dream which he had of an eagle, a boy, and a bee which appeared to him in their transformations to represent a form of Jewish cabala. End of Footnote. The theosophic elements already so apparent in his philosophical poems were for some time held in check by his higher life of reason and healthy appreciation of natural and moral facts. But gradually they acquired a more marked ascendancy as his mental habits became fixed and the elasticity of natural feeling and thought began to decay. The balance which had been long trembling began at length to decline on the unhealthy side. Prophetical studies, which have been the bane of so many minds of his stamp, became more and more attractive to him. Ezekiel's dream and the synchronous method of the apocalyptic visions received elaborate transcendental explanation. He was himself conscious apparently of an undue confidence in this sort of study, yet he was unable to resist its fascinations. Footnote. In allusion it is supposed to himself he makes one of the speakers in his fifth dialogue say, quote, the greatest fanaticism I know in him is this, that he professeth he understands clearly the truth of several prophecies of the mainest concernment which yet many others pretend to be very obscure. Close quote. End of footnote. Such confidence it may be safely said is never found united with a sober and healthy rational discernment. A mind addicted to prophetical interpretation is almost always a mind either weak in itself or becoming weakened in the intoxication of its own delusions. Of the last ten years of Moore's life we have no record. His health does not seem to have been good for we find him writing in the end of 1680, quote, I have not been in bodily health this is the best day I have had a great while. Close quote. Yet he does not appear even then to have laid aside his pen. On the contrary says his biographer, quote, he wrote to the very last and had then under his hands Madeleine Mundi or a practical treatise which he called in that title the cure of the world. Close quote. There is no further trace of this treatise but it was probably the same which he mentions in one of his letters under the name of the safe guide. It is pleasant to reflect that his active mind remained full of thoughts for others to the last and that those great questions in which he said he had spent all his time, what is good and what is true, were apparently as fresh and important with him at the end as at the beginning. He died on the morning of the 1st of September 1687 and was interred in the chapel of his college where his friend Cudworth was to be laid beside him within less than a year. Section 17 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy Volume 2 by John Tulloch. This Librebox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 5 Henry Moore, Christian Theosophy and Mysticism Part 3. Moore was in person tall and thin but of a serene and vivacious countenance, rather pale than florid in his later years yet was it clear and spirituous, and his eye hazel and vivid as an eagle. There is indeed, as all who have seen his portrait by Logan will admit, a singularly vivid elevation in his countenance, with some lines strongly drawn round the mouth, but with ineffable sweetness, light, and dignity in the general expression. As he is the most poetic and transcendental, so he is upon the whole the most spiritual looking of all the Cambridge Divines. His character has been already so far sketched, but it is in some respects so marked and interesting a type of the devout mystic, a character which, as the world grows older, seems to become rarer, at least in any healthy form, that we may be excused for adding a few further touches. He was from youth to age evidently gifted with the most happy and buoyant religious temper. He was profoundly pious, and yet without all sourness, superstition, or melancholy. His habitual cast of mind was a serene thoughtfulness, while his outward conversation with his friends was, for the most part, free and facetious. Religion was in practice with him clearly what he conceived it to be in theory, the consecration and perfection of the natural life, the brightest and best form which it could reach under the inspiration and guidance of the Divine Spirit. Although he chose for himself a secluded life, and so far suffered in consequence from a lack of that comprehensive experience which is more than all other education to the wise and open mind, he was not yet actuated in doing so by any indifference to the lighter and more active interests of humanity. There was such a life and spirit in him as loved the exercises of reason, wit, and divine speculation at once. And his biographer has heard him say that he could not get melancholy enough, by which he was supposed to mean, dive deep enough into divine sense and meditation. His spiritual happiness seems at times to have overpowered him and given him cause for self-reflection. He professed to a friend that he was sometimes almost mad with pleasure, and he experienced this ecstatic feeling in the simplest circumstances. Walking abroad after his studies, his sallies towards nature would be often inexpressibly ravishing beyond what he could convey to others. Many passages in his writings, and particularly in his dialogues, show how great was his love of and delight in nature. He was wont to say that he wished that he could be quote, always sub-deo. He could study abroad with less weariness by far to himself than with indoors, close quote. His freedom and buoyancy of mind and rapturous delight in his own thoughts would sometimes carry him away. It stimulated unduly his rapidity as a writer and left him without the cool judgment that rigorously revises, condenses, and brings into form the heated thoughts which the brain casts from it in moments of spiritual and intellectual excitement. He said that he felt sometimes in writing as if his mind went faster than he almost desired and that all the while he seemed as it were to be in the air. This mystical glow and elevation were the chief features of his mind and character, a certain transport and radiancy of thought which carried him beyond the common life without raising him to any false or artificial height. It was remarked that his very air had in it something angelical. He seemed to be full of introversions of light, joy, benignity, and devotion at once as if his face had been overcast with a golden shower of love and purity. Strangers even noticed this marvelous luster and a radiation in his eyes and countenance. A divine gale, as he himself said, breathed throughout all his life as well as his works, but however far it lifted him it never inflated him. A highly learned and pious man said that he looked upon Dr. Moore as the holiest person upon the face of the earth, but his charity and humility were not less conspicuous than his piety. His very chamber door was a hospital to the needy. When the winds were ruffling about him he made it his utmost endeavor to keep low and humble that he might not be driven from that anchor. While Moore, in short, was no hero, either in thought or indeed, his speculations were too transcendental and his life too retired for this. He yet comes before us as a singularly beautiful, benign, and noble character, one of those higher spirits who help us to feel the divine presence on earth and to believe in its reality. In now turning to estimate Moore as a Christian thinker, we must first of all consider him in relation to the school of which he is a prominent representative, and the forms of contemporary thought which influenced him, and then endeavor to sum up and explain some of the more distinctive principles of his peculiar philosophy. In other words, we shall look first at his general method and position, and secondly at his special ideas and theories so far as they retain interest or significance. In doing this we shall refer to his writings indiscriminately as may suit our purpose. Moore, still more than Cudworth, repeats himself, adding prefaces and appendices to what he has already written, and returning again and again upon the same track of thought. The germ, in fact, of most of his speculations may be traced in his early philosophical poems. His genius, in one sense, was singularly fecund. Work after work sprang with easy luxuriance from his pen. But his writings do not exhibit any clear growth or system of ideas unfolding themselves gradually and maturing to a more comprehensive rationality. This lack of method is more or less characteristic of the school, but the multifarious character of Moore's writings renders it more conspicuous in him than in the others. Not only so, in his later productions there is rather a decay than an increase and enrichment of the rational element. To enter into any exposition of his cabalistical studies, of his discovery of Cartesianism in the first chapters of Genesis, and his favorite notion of all true philosophy descending from Moses through Pythagoras and Plato, and still more to touch his prophetical reveries, the divine science which he finds in the dream of Ezekiel or the visions of the Apocalypse, would be labor thrown away, unless to illustrate the weakness of human genius, or the singular absurdities which beset the progress of knowledge even in its most favorable stages. The supposition that all higher wisdom and speculation were derived originally from Moses and the Hebrew scriptures, and that it was confirmatory both of the truth of scripture and the results of philosophy to make out this traditionary connection was widely prevalent in the 17th century. It was warmly supported and elaborately argued by some of its most acute and learned intellects. Footnote. Gale's once famous book, The Court of the Gentiles, was written in support of this theory, 1669 to 1677, and was widely popular both in England and on the continent. End of footnote. Both Cudworth and Moore profoundly believed in this connection. Footnote. The supposed traditionary connection was chiefly based on a passage in Strabo to which reference has been already made to the effect that a certain Sidonian or Phoenician of the name of Moscus, who lived before the Trojan War, was the reputed father of the atomic philosophy. This Moscus or for so he is elsewhere called in various passages, was believed to be no other than the celebrated Moses of the Jews with whose successors, the Jewish philosophers, priests and prophets, Pythagoras conversed at Sidon, such as Cudworth's conjecture, and Seldon and others, no less distinguished in learning, seemed to have joined in it. Moore puts the connection more distinctly and curiously as follows. Quote. The Cartesian philosophy being in a manner the same with that of Democritus, and that of Democritus the same with the physiological part of Pythagoras' philosophy, and Pythagoras' philosophy the same with the Sidonian, as also the Sidonian with the Mosaic, it will necessarily follow that the Mosaic philosophy in the physiological part thereof is the same with the Cartesian. Close quote. Culverwell, it will be seen distinctly repudiates the supposed indebtedness of the Greeks to the Hebrews. In this respect, as in some others showing his superiority to his age and school. End of footnote. But this was only one of many instances of their lack of critical and historical judgment. Historical criticism, in the modern sense, was not even then dreamed of, and it is needless to consider forgotten delusions which have perished rather with the common growth of reason than by the force of any special genius or discovery. One. In his general method and the avowed basis of his thought, Moore occupies the common ground of the Cambridge School. He was a vigorous advocate of the rights of reason and believed it to be one of his chief missions to show how the Christian and philosophic genius should mix together. The Christian religion, rightly understood, appeared to him to be the deepest and choicest piece of philosophy that is. It was the main, if not the only, scope of his long and anxious studies to demonstrate the rationality of the Christian religion throughout. For to heap up a deal of reading and notions and experiments without some such noble and important design had but been to make his mind or memory a shop of small wares. He adopted therefore, without hesitation, the generous resolution of Marcus Cicero. He was proud to adorn himself as a writer with the sacerdotal breastplate of the logion or rationale. Every priest, he adds, quoting Filo, quote, should endeavor according to his opportunity and capacity to be as much as he can a rational man or philosopher, close quote. Again, quote, to take away reason under what fanatic pretence so ever is to disrobe the priest and to spoil him of his breastplate and, which is worst of all, to rob Christianity of that special prerogative it has above all other religions in the world. Namely, that it dares appeal unto reason, which as many as understand the true interest of our religion will not fail to stick closely to, the contrary betraying it to the unjust suspicion of falsehood and equalizing it to every vain imposture. For take away reason and all religions are alike true as the light being removed all things are of one color. Close quote. Moore's doctrine of reason is eminently Alexandrine. He quotes Filo and Clemens and Plotinus alike in support of his general position that the image of God is the royal and divine Logos, but the image of this image is the human intellect, or as he elsewhere explains more fully, quote, for my own part reason seems to me to be so far from being any contemptible principle in man that it must be acknowledged in some sort to be in God himself. For what is the divine wisdom but that steady comprehension of the ideas of all things with their mutual respects one to another, congruities and incongruities, dependencies and independences, which respects do necessarily arise from the natures of the ideas themselves, both which the divine intellect looks through at once discerning thus the order and coherence of all things. And what is this but Ratio Stabilis, a kind of steady and immovable reason discovering the connection of all things at once, but that in us is Ratio Mobiles or reason in evolution, we being able to apprehend things only in a successive manner one after another. But so many as we can comprehend at a time while we plainly perceive and carefully view their ideas we know how well they fit or how much they disagree one with another and so prove or disprove one thing by another, which is really a participation of that divine reason in God and is a true and faithful principle in man when it is perfected and polished by the Holy Spirit, but before very earthly and obscure, especially in spiritual things. But now seeing the logos or steady comprehensive wisdom of God in which all ideas and their respects are contained is but universal stable reason, how can there be any pretense of being so highly inspired as to be blown above reason itself unless men will fancy themselves wiser than God or their understandings above the natures and reasons of things themselves. To exclude the use of reason in the search of divine truth was therefore according to Moore simply to destroy the light by which divine truth can alone be recognized. It was to act as he himself says, like a company of men who, traveling by night with links, torches, and lanterns, put out their borrowed light from misconceit of it in comparison with the sweet and cheerful splendor of the day, and choose rather to foot it in the dark and tumble into the next ditch than to go happily forward with such light as they had. But while Moore is thus strenuous in his advocacy of reason as the only guide of the philosophical theologian and the only sure foundation of divine truth, he no less strongly advocates the recognition of a higher principle more noble and inward than reason itself and without which reason will falter or at least reach but to mean and frivolous things. To this principle he gives the name of divine sagacity and speaks of it as antecedent or, in his own language, antecedaneous to reason but also and more correctly as, quote, the first rise of successful reason especially in matters of great comprehension and moment. All pretenders to philosophy, he adds, will be ready to magnify reason to the skies, to make it the light of heaven and the very oracle of God. But they do not consider that the oracle of God is not to be heard but in his holy temple, that is to say, in a good and holy man thoroughly sanctified in spirit, soul, and body. For there is a sanctity even of body and complexion which the centrally minded do not so much as dream of. Aaron's retionale, his logion or oracle of reason, did it not include in it the Urim and Thummim, purity and integrity of the will and affections as well as the light of the understanding, was not that breastplate square not only in reference to the firmness of raciocination as Philo intimates but also to denote the evenness and uprightness of his spirit that will take upon him to pronounce great truths? For if this divine sagacity be wanting by reason of the impurity of a man's spirit, he can neither hit upon a right scent of things himself nor easily take it or rightly pursue it when he is put upon it by another. Close quote. Here again our author not only quotes his neoplatonical authorities but makes a great point of having Aristotle on his side in a sentence which he quotes from the Udemian ethics to the effect that the beginning of reason in us is something higher than reason or the divine itself. He appears to mean substantially what is familiar to platonic students and may be said to have become a commonplace with certain theologians that in order to apprehend higher divine truth we must approach it with a right disposition as well as a free and unprejudiced intellect. All such truth from its very nature addresses our reason on its moral as well as its intellectual side. Its reality can only be grasped through some share in us of the divine when it comes and which it represents. To affirm this seems little else than a truism on the supposition that there is spiritual truth at all and that the divine ideal of the Gospels forms its highest expression. Yet beyond question so plain an axiom has been frequently forgotten both in theology and philosophy, and Moore did right to emphasize it as he does. It became the keynote of his whole system of thought. Without the recognition of such a spiritual side in reason he could not make a start at all. It is natural, therefore, to find him returning to the subject in the preface to the Latin edition of his works in which he reviews all that he has done and insisting upon it formally as the explanation of his having put his ethics there in front of all his other philosophical writings. He did this, he says, with the view of marking forever his opinion that the only solid foundation of a true philosophy of human life was moral purity. Such a temper and quality of mind as he has described in his ethics under the name of moral prudence or philosophical temperance. For anyone to attempt the comprehension of divine things without a clear and purified spiritual insight was like a man trying to grasp difficult objects at a distance without a healthy and properly assisted vision. With such a rational basis of thought it may be matter of wonder that Moore developed so largely not only an element of mysticism but a vein of credulity which must be pronounced excessive even for his age. It requires some acquaintance with his writings to estimate the force of this vein and the strange manner in which it is constantly cropping out. He believed not only all the popular stories about witchcraft, but he recounts with an abounding faith the most absurd and frivolous narratives of ghosts and apparitions. Nay, he sets them forth in a systematic manner with perfectly honest aim as attestations and arguments on behalf of the supernatural. The third book of his antidote against atheism is entirely devoted to this subject and is nearly as long as the two preceding books together, the first of which may be said to deal with the a priori and the second with certain a posteriori aspects of the theistic argument. It is scarcely possible, without consecutive perusal of this treatise, to conceive a mind so acute, searching and logical, as is displayed in some parts of the first book, sinking into such puerility and nonsense as abound in the last. The metaphysician, hesitating with critical thoughtfulness over certain forms of the Cartesian demonstration of the existence of deity, passes into a mere retailer of popular gossip which has not even the merit of being interesting. We must bear in mind, however, the strong hold which such stories of the supernatural had upon the mind of the seventeenth century. Glanville, the advocate of a scientific skepticism, ran in this respect a race of blind credulity with his friend. Footnote. Hobbes is one of the few men of the age who professed entirely to disbelieve in ghosts and to look upon them as nothing else but creatures of the fancy. But if the well-known story be true as to his apprehensions when left alone in the dark, his disbelief does not seem to have been of a very practical kind. End of footnote. We may also recall the phenomena of what is called spiritualism in our day before condemning too loudly the absurdities of such men. Some of Moore's and Glanville's stories are, in fact, singularly like those now or lately soliciting scientific investigation. Spirit thumping on the bench must have been very much the same as table-wrapping. Nor does it seem more absurd to conceive spirits employed in the fantastic mischief making attributed to them by our theologians than in making senseless revelations without meaning or utility to any human creature. In the general cast of his theological and ecclesiastical views Moore was equally in accord with his school. His early alienation from Calvinism did not throw him into any opposite extreme of dogma. In his works he seldom alludes to Calvinism or Arminianism and nowhere discusses or shows any interest in their doctrinal differences. His platonic genius and the philosophic atmosphere around him saved him from this. All his theological interests go deeper. They concern not so much differences within the church as the reality of Christian truth itself and the existence of an organic Christian communion or church at all. His contentions were with atheists or corporealists on the one hand and Quakers on the other. Those who, in his view, either cut away the basis of the supernatural altogether or destroyed the idea of a church in the dream of a new or second dispensation. The consciousness of this higher task made him, as well as his friend Cudworth, indifferent to minor distinctions of controversy. Indeed he disliked such distinctions cordially and frequently reprobates them under the name of opinions which, according to him, were merely the goodly inventions of nice theologers destined to disappear when men have learned a higher wisdom and a more corroborated faith in Christ. With all the Cambridge divines he emphasizes the moral and practical side of Christianity. Religion was for him, as for all of them, embodied in life rather than in dogma. Not that he disparaged right opinion or true doctrine, but that he desired in a contentious age to draw the earnestness of men from theological disputation to Christian duty. He could very well conceive a Christian man in honest error as to various points of doctrine, but religion without moral aspiration and action was wholly unintelligible. Nay, it was the wildest form of delusion which could only end in fanaticism or imposture. His own proclaimed adherence to the principle of a light within us as the ultimate test of religious truth, presented either by nature or Scripture, made him insist all the more strongly on the application of a moral criterion to all religious profession. It might be a fair question for anyone perplexed amidst the swarming sects around him as to which form of Christian doctrine was the true or divine form. But there could be no real question as to the vital principles lying at the foundation of all religion. To one, thus perplexed, he says, I demand of you, is there any way imaginable but this, viz, to adhere to those things that are incontrovertibly good and true, and to bestow all that zeal and all that heat and all that pains for the acquiring the simplicity of the life of God that we do in promoting our own interest or needless and doubtful opinions? And I think it is without controversy true to any that are not degenerate below men, that temperance is better than intemperance, justice than injustice, humility than pride, love than hatred, and mercifulness than cruelty. It is also incontrovertedly true that God loves his own image, and that the propagation of it is the most true dispreading of his glory, as the light which is the image of the sun is the glory of the sun. Therefore it is as plainly true that God is as well-willing as able to restore this image in men that his glory may shine in the world. This, therefore, is the true faith. To believe that, by the power of God in Christ, we may reach to the participation of the divine nature, which is a simple, mild, benign light that seeks nothing for itself as self, but doth tenderly and cordially endeavor the good of all, and rejoiceeth in the good of all, and will assuredly meet them that keep close to what they plainly, in their own consciences, are convinced is the leading to it. And I say that sober morality, conscientiously kept to, is like the morning light reflected from the higher clouds, and a certain prodrome of the sun of righteousness itself. But when he is risen above the horizon, the same virtues then stream immediately from his visible body, and they are the very members of Christ, according to the Spirit, and he that is come hither is a pillar in the temple of God for ever and ever. Again, when he looks forward to the future, he sees the triumph of Christianity, the dawn of a true millennium, not in the elevation of this or that form of dogmatism, but only in the universal diffusion of a spirit of Christian purity, self-denial, and peace. Quote, Close quote. Two. But more, like Cudworth also, had a determinant philosophic aim which carried him beyond the general teaching of the Cambridge School. He was not only in profession a rational theologian, and an advocate of conciliatory principles in religion and the church, but he was still more characteristically a spiritual thinker who sought to survey the whole field of knowledge in his day and to bring its fresh and in many respects startling discoveries into some new form of theoretic synthesis or satisfactory philosophy. This was undoubtedly his own conception of his mission, as may be gathered from many hints in his writings, and its conscious dignity probably inspired and consoled him more in his solitary life of meditation than we might at first imagine. Footnote. He speaks of himself in his apology as, quote, a fisher for philosophers, desirous to draw them to or retain them in the Christian faith. Close quote. End of footnote. The tone of one who had really worked for his age and led it into a freer and nobler line of speculation, suited to its larger intellectual wants, may be traced throughout the elaborate preface to his collected works, to which we have already so often adverted. His own estimate of his labors has not been verified. Some of his favorite speculations have even perished from the memory of the philosophical student, but the general force of his thinking was not only influential in its day, but has passed into the common inheritance of spiritual or theistic thought as it stands once more in the course of revolution in the front of a materialistic philosophy. While there is much, therefore, in Moore's speculative attitude and theories, which has merely a curious and antiquarian interest, there is also a good deal which is vital and perennially significant. His general attitude as a thinker is to be determined with relation to the two great intellectual forces of the time, Hobbes and Descartes, especially the latter. There is no evidence, indeed, that our author was a student of Hobbes in any such sense as Cudworth, or that the speculations of the Decivet or the Leviathan had impressed him in the same manner. To Cudworth's more severe moral temper, Hobbes was an alarming phenomenon. He never speaks of him with any complementary respect. He seems to have felt too closely, and, so to speak, too solemnly, the hostile bearing of his materialistic theories. But to Moore, from the more serene heights of his meditative enthusiasm, the author of the Leviathan did not bulk with any such formidable significance. He was merely a hostile power among many other hostile powers, and when he alludes to him, which he does very seldom, he uses language more genial and respectful than he frequently applies to Quakers and other fanatical opponents. He is our countryman Mr. Hobbes, whose speculative confidence, quote, may well assure any man that duly considers the excellency of his natural wit and parts that he has made choice of the most demonstrative arguments, close, quote, in favor of his own conclusions. Footnote. Immortality of the Soul, Chapter 9, II. He speaks of Hobbes again in the same treatise as, quote, that confident exploder of immaterial substance out of the world, close, quote. End of footnote. Probably the very distance and elevation of Moore's mind from the peculiar principles that animated Hobbes led him to look with comparative composure on the philosophy of the latter. He was too much above it or apart from it to understand it fully or the attraction which it possessed from many minds. His own mode of thought was too diffusive, genial, and indistinct to enable him to realize all the strength of a system so simple, compact, and definite. Two minds more different it would be hard to conceive. The one full of eager enthusiasm and aspiring dreams of human philanthropy, fertile, earnest, and vaguely ingenious. The other sober, contemptuous, and severely thoughtful, with the most keen and shrewd insight into the difficulties of life and society, but without any faith or enthusiasm, content if only it could weave the conflicting threads of human interest and passion into a web of theory which would hold them together and give them solidarity in their natural and constant tendency to repulsion and dissolution. It was easy for minds so entirely separate and so unlike to be mutually respectful. With so few common sympathies and such divided aims they could salute each other deferentially at a distance. For the story is that Hobbes reciprocating Moore's feeling was in the habit of saying that if ever he found his own opinions untenable, quote, he would embrace the philosophy of Dr. Moore, close quote. Footnote. We have not ascertained the authority for this story, but it is commonly told in notices both of Moore and Hobbes. He will mention it in his lectures, History of Moral Philosophy, page 61. End of footnote. It is pleasant to note such interchanges of personal compliment betwixt the opposing camps of thought, but they do not, of course, any more than the salutations of other combatants pass for anything in the grave crisis of the struggle. Moore's only direct polemic with Hobbes is to be found in his treatise on the immortality of the soul. Here he quotes at length the statements in the Leviathan and elsewhere about the nature and universality of body and attempts a detailed refutation of them. It is unnecessary in the meantime to enter into this polemic because it joins on to our author's general views respecting the existence and nature of incorporeal substances discussed at length in his metaphysics and his correspondence with Descartes. It is enough to say that it strongly illustrates what we have already remarked as to the general relation of the two thinkers. Their primary position or starting point is so diverse that they cannot get together for fair argument and encounter. As Hobbes admits no other evidence than what he calls conception and all conception he adds is imagination and precedence from sense, so, of course, he can find no rational or intelligent evidence for the existence of spirits, which he supposes to be those substances which work not upon the sense and therefore are not conceptual. To a philosophy which provides no inlet for any other form of truth and reality than that which is corporeal or sensible it necessarily follows that there is nothing in the universe but body. Quote, body and substance are but names of one and the same thing which is called body as it fills a place and substance as it is subject to various accidents or alterations. Close quote. But it is plain to all the world as more retorts that this is not to prove but to suppose what is to be proved. To shut the window may exclude the light but does not prove that the light does not exist. On the other hand the philosophy of more opening from the commencement a higher inlet of fact starting not from sense but from the spiritual reason not only has no difficulty in recognizing spiritual or immaterial substance but finds its highest evidence in this very region of truth which Hobbes deliberately shuts out of sight. End of Chapter 5, Part 3. Section 18 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy, Vol. 2 by John Tulloch. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 5, Henry Moore, Christian Theosophy and Mysticism, Part 4. With Descartes the connection of our author is far more intimate as well as definite. We do not trace its first beginnings or the points by which he traveled from his favorite neoplatonic studies to the writings and system of the great modern thinker the contemporary of his early manhood but we have abundant evidence in his letters and elsewhere how heartily for a while he embraced Cartesianism. It would be too much to say that he ever did so entirely for the letters themselves are occupied with the discussion of their points of difference. Even in the height of his first admiration Moore mixed together as he himself said some main points of Cartesianism and Platonism. He was never a follower of Descartes in the sense of having ceased to be a disciple of Plato. In other words he never abandoned the platonic or neoplatonic basis of his thought. But there was plainly a far more complete agreement betwixt them at first than afterwards. His statements in the correspondence and subsequently apart from the general evidence furnished by the course of his writings show this beyond doubt. Moore's first letter to Descartes bears the date of December 1648. It is subscribed Cultor Divotissimus and commences in the following exalted strain. Quote, You alone can imagine the pleasure I have had in perusing your writings. I can assure you that I have felt not less exaltation in apprehending and appreciating your admirable theories than yourself in discovering them and that these fine productions of your genius are really as dear to me as if they had been the children of my own brain. In a sense indeed they appear to be my own, so entirely have my own thoughts run in the same channel in which your fertile mind has anticipated me. So much is this the case that I cannot expect to meet anywhere with speculations more congenial to me or more consonant with sound reason wherever it is to be found. I speak freely what I feel. All the great leaders of philosophy who have ever existed or who may exist are mere Pygmies in comparison with your transcendent genius. And no sooner had I made acquaintance with your works than I formed the conjecture that your illustrious pupil, the princess Elizabeth, had shown herself wiser not only than all the rest of her sex, but even the philosophers in Europe. And the more thoroughly I became acquainted with them the more reason did I find to apprehend this. For at length the Cartesian light shone upon me in all its fullness, a reason free, distinct, and self-consistent marvelously illuminating nature and your pages alike, so that there are but few hidden recesses which remain unexplored by it or which at least with a little trouble may not be explored. All is so perfectly harmonious in your principles of philosophy and other writings and so conformable with itself and with nature that the human mind could scarcely desire a more pleasant and agreeable spectacle. In your method also there is a certain elegant and modest playfulness which shows that nothing can be more amiable, lofty, and generous than your character as a man." Then with a sentence or two in justification of his enthusiasm which he is sure he shares only in common with his countrymen he concludes, But there is no one who loves you more heartily than myself or who has embraced more thoroughly your excellent philosophy. The point says to which he differs or feels hesitation, do not, he says, refer to fundamental principles but would leave all the noble essence of Cartesianism untouched or rather more coherent and satisfactory. He then enters with some detail upon those points of difference. They refer to Descartes' definition of matter and the consequences arising from it such as the possibility of a vacuum and the divisibility of atoms and further to his famous doctrine as to the motions of animals being merely mechanical. From this doctrine which more characterizes as internessina illa et eugulatrix sententia he expresses his strong descent. Altogether it may be inferred even from this early correspondence that with all our author's enthusiasm for Descartes' genius and the general character of his philosophy he differed more from him than he himself supposed. The simplicity and thoroughness of the great French thinker were at variance with his own more complex and traditional modes of thought. This was evident to Descartes and betrays itself beneath all the courtesy of his replies and his expressions of astonishment at more not more fully understanding his meaning. He declines to argue about words but explains clearly and at length what he intends by extension and how much more radically and essentially it defines matter than such terms as sensibility, tangibility, and impenetrability suggested by his correspondent. He shows further that in speaking of the movements of animals as only mechanical he did not so much wish to disparage the lower animals as to discriminate and exalt man. In man there is, so far, the same sort of movement as in other animals, a movement automatic or self-regulating yet purely mechanical as depending upon external influences and the adaptation of the sensitive organs. The spring of this movement may be called an animal or corporeal soul, anima corporea. But in man there is, over and above, a thinking soul or men's incorporeas or substantiacogitans. He had pondered carefully as to whether there was any trace of this latter power in the lower animals and could find no such trace. All their characteristic movements, on the contrary, appear to him explicable and he engages to explain all by the conformity of their organs to the external world. They continue the general discussion as to the true nature and definition of matter and spirit through several letters, and in his last letter more diverges into mathematical and physical details. Through all he retains something of the same enthusiasm for Descartes personally and the same lofty admiration for his philosophy of which he subscribes himself in the end a faithful student and adherent. The same tone or nearly so is found in his reply seven years later, or in May 1655, to the request of Descartes' editor, Clarcellier, to be allowed to publish Moore's letters amongst the remains of the French philosopher, whose death follows shortly after Moore's last letter, November 1649. The first ardor of his Cartesian enthusiasm had evidently, by his own confession, begun to die away before this, very much he says from lack of new materials to feed upon. Yet he remembers his old enthusiasm with pleasure and renews his raptures over the splendid attributes of Descartes' genius and the admirable order and consistency of his theories. A thousand times read, they never failed to interest any more than the light of the sun and its daily rising ceased to fill man, cattle, and birds with daily rejoicing. Nor is the Cartesian philosophy only pleasant to read, but also, whatever some babblers may say, in the utmost degree useful for the highest end, the support of religion. Quote, there is no philosophy indeed except perhaps the Platonic, which so firmly shuts the door against atheism. Close quote. Still later, in his letter to V.C., first published in 1662, he defends Descartes at length from the vulgar charge of atheism, and while not withdrawing any of the objections formerly urged against some of his principles, points out how far he had by the application of mathematical and mechanical laws, elevated the study of physics and liberated it from the substantial forms or occult qualities and other nonsense of the schoolmen. He does credit also to his great services in metaphysics, especially the clear distinction which he had drawn between soul and body, his vindication of innate ideas, and his demonstration of the existence of deity from our idea of a necessary and perfect being. It is all the more wonderful that, within a few years, we find his tone entirely changed and changed clearly in the view of what he had formerly said. The evidence of this is the curious address under the title of The Publisher to the Reader, which he prefixed to the Divine Dialogues published in 1667. There can be no doubt that this address is from Moore's own pen, although somewhat disguised, with a view to preserve the anonymous character of the publication. After premising the subject of the Dialogues and glancing contemptuously at the Cartesians under the name of Nulubists, he proceeds to explain his opposition to, quote, that so much-admired philosopher Renatis Descartes, on whom persons so well versed in philosophical speculations have bestowed so high encomiums, especially a writer of our own, himself, who, besides the many commendations he up and down in his writings adorns him with, compared him to Bezaliel and Aholiab, as if he were inspired from above with a wit so curiously mechanical as to frame so consistent a contextual of mechanical philosophy as he did. Close, quote. He questions whether, as the writer of the Dialogues, he does not risk his credit by venturing to impugn so great a name and authority. Yet the cause of truth and the glory of God force the task upon him, in which, besides, he is encouraged by the example of that very encomiasse of Descartes philosophy, himself again, who, in his letter to V.C., quote, when he makes it his business to apologize for Descartes and extol and magnify him to the skies, yet does plainly and expressly declare that it is a kind of vile and abject hula-latrea or superstitious idolizing of matter to pretend that all the phenomena of the universe will arise out of it by mere mechanical motion. Close, quote. The author of this letter, with all his admiration of Descartes' mechanical genius, only acknowledged some few effects to be purely mechanical, and he is now convinced, after more serious consideration, that there is no purely mechanical phenomenon in the whole universe. He then endeavors to explain his scriptural complement to Descartes as meaning nothing more than that, quote, he had a great deal of wit and sagacity to find out the most credible material causes and their specious contextual, so as to explain the existing system of things. But that these things can neither arise nor hold together without an higher principle, he had always maintained, and plainly declared in several writings long before. He has now come to the conclusion that what is really good in the Cartesian philosophy is borrowed from the ancient Kabbalah of Moses and the traditions of Pythagoras and his followers and no new inventions of the Cartesian wit. The rest of the philosophy is rather pretty than great and in that sense that he drives at of pure mechanism erroneously and ridiculously false. Close, quote. This is a very different tone indeed from that of his early letters and in his elaborate Manual of Metaphysics or N. Caridium Metaphysicum published some few years later, 1671, he speaks in still more disparaging terms of Descartes whom he now identifies with the materialists and atheists. It is true that the French thinker has declared incorporeal substance to be the proper object of metaphysics and vindicated a distinction betwixt soul and body. But on the other hand he has so conceived and defined both spirit and matter that they lose their essential distinction and thus he leaves the triumph to the materialist. What if God be represented as absolutely perfect and his existence deduced from the idea of necessary and absolute perfection if, at the same time, he is conceived as unextended and therefore nowhere. And if matter, in its own proper idea, no less necessarily exists and cannot be thought away from the universe of space. What is the use of a God that cannot act upon matter or a divine providence whose ends are not to be inquired into? And many other objections more insist upon at length within acerbity and exaggeration of statement no less remarkable than his previous raptures. His Cartesian enthusiasm has at length not only died down but turned into sourness and bitterness of spirit. The expressed design of the N. Curidium metaphysicum is, in fact, as implied on the title page to refute Cartesianism or, in his own language, to estimate its mechanical explanations of the universe and expose their vanity and falsehood. This cursory statement of our author's relations to Descartes is interesting in itself but chiefly for the light which it throws upon Moore's mental character and his real philosophical bias. Enamored at first by the rational clearness and originality of the Cartesian speculations, he could not long maintain the higher attitude of pure reason to which they raised him. Strongly rational on one side of his nature against the extremes of enthusiasm and the prejudices of religious party spirit, he was yet continually lapsing on the other side into mystical extravagances. His reason was never a dry light like that of the French philosopher which penetrated all disguises and brought him face to face with the secrecies of nature. Moore loved, even in his highest exaltations of thought, the shadow of mystery and the clear simplicities of the mechanical philosophy appeared bald and false when he had time to reflect upon them. They hid from his view the presence of the divine life and even of any lower spermatical life in nature and seemed to leave nothing but a conjuries of self-acting phenomena. The truth is that he was not only by education but essential nature a transcendentalist. In mixing up Cartesianism with his original Neoplatonism he never abandoned any of the distinctive ideas of the latter. A temporary enthusiasm for Descartes carried him away and a generous spirit could not find words large enough to convey his admiration. But he was altogether of a different temper of mind. He never quite thoroughly entered into the meaning of the Cartesian philosophy and in natural course his mind reverted to its original bias with something of the disappointment which comes from baffled enthusiasm and the injustice with which all thinkers absorbed in a religious aim are apt to regard a rejected idol. Moore's great aim and the aim throughout of the Cambridge philosophy was the vindication of a true sphere of spiritual being. That there is an incorporeal world and incorporeal substances transcending and embracing the physical system of things was the animating idea of all his chief writings from his early poems to his metaphysical manual. The manual is devoted exclusively to the proof and definition of such substances. It is Existencia at Natura Rerum in Corporearum. This is with him the sole object of metaphysics. It is the science of spiritual being and treats first of the fact of such being and then of its nature and attributes. All that is further distinctive of our author's thought and more than has any longer any living meaning may be gathered up in a brief exposition of his views on this great subject and of his attitude as a moralist in his ethical manual. Besides the incorridium metaphysicum there are two of his earlier and most elaborate writings, the antidote against atheism and the treatise on the immortality of the soul, which both specially deal with the question of the existence of spirit. The treatment is less formal and extended in the antidote but the essay on immortality is scarcely less elaborate and technical than the manual. His object is exactly the same in both but his attitude is somewhat different. In the earlier work Hobbes is his chief opponent and in the later work Descartes. We shall endeavour to collect his views in relation to both. His own thought is so embedded in controversy that it can only be thus clearly understood. Our analysis will fall under the following heads. A. The notion of spirit. B. The fact or proof of the existence of spirit. And C. Its special nature or qualities. On all these points, and especially the first, he comes into direct conflict with Hobbes and Descartes. A. The notion of spirit is one of his main points to the exposition of which he repeatedly recurs. While Hobbes appears to him to deny altogether the notion as valid or natural, as indeed anything but a figment or creature of the fancy, he contends that the notion is equally clear and distinct with that of body as intelligible and conger was to reason. F. The opinion that such spirits, as men commonly fancy ghosts, for example, were incorporeal or immaterial, could never enter into the mind of any man by nature, because though men put together words of contradictory signification as spirit and incorporeal, yet they can never have the imagination of anything answering to them. L. XII. This, with many other passages, chapters 34, 45, 46, are quoted at length by Moore, immortality of soul, book 1, chapter 9, and a footnote. A spirit is to him a substance penetrable and indiscerptible, that is to say, capable of penetration and incapable of distribution. The capacity of penetration implies self-motion, self-contraction, and dilation, while indiscerptibility implies that spirit of its own nature invincibly holds itself together so that it cannot be disunited or dissevered. His notion of body or matter is exactly the converse, the substance impenetrable and discerptible. The idea of matter is resistance, or the capacity of keeping out stoutly and irresistibly another substance from entering into the same space or place with itself, and again, the capacity of endless subdivision and distribution into parts. There is nothing more conceivable to him in the one idea than the other, or in other words, more natural and rational. So far, therefore, he opposes Hobbes with assumption against assumption. For the latter to affirm that, quote, everything in the universe is body, and that body and substance are one and the same thing, it being called body as it fills a place, and substance as it is the subject of several alterations and accidents, is not to prove but to suppose what is to be proved, close quote. Such an affirmation professedly rests, and can only rest, on the presupposition that body is the only conceivable substance. But this is so far from being true that the notion of spirit is the more direct and immediate, and therefore natural of the two. There is certainly as much reason for the one as the other. So far as our mere conception or notion is concerned, it is as easy or difficult for us to hold the one before our minds as the other. There is nothing more inconceivable in indiscerptibility than resistance, the absolute holding together implied in the one, than the absolute holding out implied in the other. And so far, therefore, there can be no prejudice to the notion of spirit. With Descartes, of course, he can have no quarrel on the primary point of the validity of the notion of spirit. For the French thinker has put this point far more clearly and effectively than himself. He has vindicated the idea of spirit and thought as the primary datum of all knowledge, the original certitude out of which all other certitude and science comes. And it is highly singular, as we have already remarked, that neither more nor Cudworth does any justice to this fundamental aspect of the Cartesian philosophy, nor, so far as we remember, alludes to it. Passing by the service which Descartes could hear have rendered against Hobbes, he forces a vigorous quarrel upon the former, respecting the manner in which he has conceived or defined his notion of both spirit and matter, vis as thought in the one case and extension in the other. On the first point he does not dwell at much length, but the Cartesian definition of matter as extension may be said to be Moore's philosophical bugbear, which he is never tired of chasing, returning to it on all occasions and assaulting it with renewed weapons of argument and abuse. It is the point we have seen from his correspondence with Descartes, which he repudiates even in the first fervor of his admiration and enthusiasm. You define, he then said, quote, matter or body in too general a manner as extension. For all existence, even God, must be conceived as extended or race extensa. All substances are extended. Close quote. In his metaphysical manual he returns to the subject and argues it at great length. To define matter by extension appeared to Moore to invest it with eternal and immutable qualities. If we must conceive matter wherever we conceive extension, then we must admit matter everywhere and admit it as necessarily subsisting for we cannot think away the idea of extension. Its existence becomes necessary of itself, quote, because in its very notion or idea it cannot but be conceived to be. We being not able otherwise to conceive but that there is an indefinite extension round about us. Close quote. In short, extension and space become interchangeable. And Moore, so far from regarding space as material, made it the primary basis of his elaborate proof in his metaphysics for the existence of spirit. Space is with him the necessary ideal background of matter, but it is in no sense itself material or of the nature of body. For body is definite and movable. Space is indefinite and immovable. Body can only be conceived in relation to it and we can readily think it away as non-existent. But space survives all our attempts to think it away. Is it then a mere abstraction? No. It has real attributes of unity, immensity, immobility, eternity, and these must have some reality answering to them. For an abstraction is a mere void or negation. What then is space? It is not only something real but something divine. It represents to us in a confused and general manner the divine essence. It is a manifestation of God. It is confusior quedam a generalier representatio essentiae si ve essentialis presentiae divine quartenos avita atque operatianibus preceditur. So far, therefore, from conceiving matter as extension, extension became to more a direct indication of a spiritual or divine substance. To confound matter and extension with Descartes appeared to him to end in materialism. But not only so. Such an idea of matter not only invested it with indestructible and necessary qualities but on the other side had detracted from the essential character of deity as everywhere present. For supposing God to be unextended he is necessarily nowhere. The unextended thing is a thing not in space. Is a thing nowhere and nonexistent. Into such an abyss of atheism, on the one side and the other, did the Cartesian definition seem to lead him. These ideas, at first vaguely entertained, evidently acquired a vivid hold of Moore's mind and inspired the anti-Cartesian furor of his later years, which he has vented in his divine dialogues and metaphysics. He has gone the length of characterizing the Cartesians as nulobists and devoting a lengthened chapter to their refutation under this name. Footnote. In addition to nulobists or those who affirm that a spirit is nulubi or nowhere, he distinguishes those whom he calls holenmerians, holenmerea, as maintaining that spirit is not only somewhere or present in a definite locality, but wholly present in every part or point of that locality. Quote. This the Greeks would fitly call wuzion holenmere, an essence that is all of it in each part and the propriety thereof, the holenmarism, tain holenmerean, of incorporeal beings, whence these other philosophers, the opposite of the former, may significantly and compendiously be called holenmerians. Close quote. End of footnote. The nulobists are those who affirm that a spirit is nulubi or nowhere and their chief author and leader is that pleasant wit Descartes who in his jocular metaphysical meditations has so argued as to imply this extraordinary conclusion. Four says our author, the whole force of such conclusion is comprised in the axioms, first, that whatsoever thinks is immaterial, second, that whatever is extended is material, third, that whatever is unextended is nowhere. The last appears to him a consectory or corollary from the two first. On the contrary, he maintains that whatever is spiritual or material substance in virtue of its simple being is somewhere and therefore extended. And to the difficulty which ensues from this of conceiving a being at once spiritual that is indivisible, indisruptible, and yet extended or located in space, he replies as formerly by representing space as twofold, at once as material and spiritual, external and internal or in special phrase as extensive and intensive. To this latter conception he has given the name of essential consistency, specitudo essentialis, and it may be held as answering in some degree to the modern conception of force. This is indeed the one fruitful issue of Moore's speculations on this subject. In his reaction against the bare idea of thought as constituting spirit and his difficulty of conceiving mere thought in relation to matter, he brought out the necessity of contemplating spirit not merely as cogitation or intellection, but also as activity. The operation of spirit and spirit itself, thought and thought in action, are essentially united and cannot even be conceived apart. Thought is activity and no mere abstract entity and activity of course is somewhere. Spirit in its essence is not merely thought but force going forth forever into the world of external being and animating and illuminating it. There was something therefore in Moore's criticism of the Cartesian notion of spirit. Under all the absurdity and irrelevance of many of his detailed arguments he probed its deficiency and vaguely indicated a higher unity of conception in which life, united with thought, in indistinguishable union, now presenting the side of will and now the side of reason, constitutes spirit. The Cartesian world of mere thought and extension appeared to him a bald and imperfect world from which the living energy of the divine was banished. He sought therefore to clothe both factors with a richer meaning and while translating matter into something more than extension he expanded this category so as to embrace mind and only in the idea of thought operating or actively manifesting its presence found his complete notion of spirit. End of chapter 5 part 4