Henry More free essay sample

Born: Oct 1614 in Grantham, Lincolnshire, England Died: 1 Sept 1687 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England Henry More s male parent was Alexander More who had been city manager of Grantham on several occasions. Alexander More was financially good off and able to give his boy a top category instruction. Small is known of his childhood except for a few remarks More makes himself in the Foreword of his Collected Works. There he writes that he was brought up ( see or ) : parents who were great Genevans ( but withall really pious and good 1s ) . He was brought up to be ever believing of faith: even in my earliest childhood, an inward sense of the Divine Presence was so strong upon my head, that I did so believe, there could be no title, word, or thought hidden from Him. After go toing Grantham Free School ( the Grammar School ) , More was sent to Eton when he was 14 old ages old. Here he came to alter his spiritual positions, rejecting Calvinism which had the impression of predestination as a metaphysical necessity and the footing of religion. More came to the belief, which he held strongly throughout his life, that redemption was possible though goodness. During this clip his male parent had put his upbringing in the custodies of an uncle who tried to forestall the immature More from being so frontward by welting him to seek to do him return to the Calvinist thoughts about free-will. Floging surely did nil to return More to Calvinism, possibly it had merely the opposite consequence. In 1631 More entered Christ s College Cambridge. He wrote of his experiences as an undergraduate ( see or ) : [ I plunged ] over caput and ears in the survey of doctrine ; assuring a most fantastic felicity to myself in it. Aristotle, hence, Cardan, Julius Scaliger and other philosophers of the greatest note I really diligently pursued. In which the truth is, that I met here and at that place with some things wittily and acutely and sometimes besides solidly spoken: yet the most seemed to me either false or unsure, or else so obvious and fiddling, that I look upon myself as holding obviously lost my clip in reading such writers. And to talk all in a word, those about whole four old ages which I spent on surveies of this sort ended in nil, in a mode, but mere agnosticism. More calibrated with a B.A. in 1636 and remained at Cambridge to go on his surveies being elected a Fellow of Christ s College in 1639. He turned his philosophical surveies towards Plato, the Platonists and the Neoplatonists going a member of the Cambridge Platonists. Possibly we should travel towards the ground why More is included in an archive of mathematicians. He was a adult male of wide acquisition, and the thoughts of experimental natural doctrine were to the bow due to those who would organize the Royal Society. These thoughts of experimental doctrine attracted More and he besides became influenced by the Hagiographas of Descartes which: seemed to demo how to unite a scientific involvement in nature with a primary concern for justifying the world of God and immortal human psyches. However, as he studied the mechanical doctrine of Descartes he became unhappy with it. More argued that Descartes thoughts must necessarily take God from nature and so lead to atheism. During 1648 and 1649 More and Descartes corresponded about the mechanical doctrine and this correspondence was finally published as The Immortality of the Soule ( 1659 ) . More argued that the gesture of a organic structure was an built-in belongings of that organic structure, and that it was impossible for gesture to be transferred from one organic structure to another. This, of class, seems to belie common sense for if a turn overing ball strikes a ball which is at remainder so the ball starts to travel. More does non deny this fact which any simple experiment will verify, but he claimed that the gesture of the 2nd ball is from an internal belongings of its ain, awakened by the impact of the first ball. I am the more inclined to this sentiment, that there is perfectly no transportation of gestures ; but that a 2nd organic structure is as it were awakened into gesture by the impact of the first organic structure, as this or that event awakens the psyche to contemplation. And that the 2nd organic structure does non so much receive gesture from the first, as put itself into gesture at the command of the first. Of class More s thoughts here are wholly unsound but when he attacks Descartes whirl theory planetal gesture the he is on stronger land: Why are non your whirls in the signifier of columns or cylinders instead than el lipses, since any point of the axis of a whirl is as it were a Centre from which the heavenly affair recedes with, every bit far as I can see, a entirely changeless drift? Who causes all the planets non to go around in one plane ( the plane of the ecliptic ) ? And the Moon itself, neither in the plane of the Earth s equator nor in a plane analogue to this? More published Antidote Against Atheisme in 1652. In this work he argues that all countries of natural doctrine necessitate a Spirit of Nature . In peculiar he argued against the mechanical accounts of the spring and weight of the air as Boyle put forwards by Boyle shortly earlier. More wrote in a missive: I be non wholly satisfied that his self-contradictory illations from the experiments are true. There will be a Spirit of Nature for all of this In all his statements one would hold to state that either More had non read the plants of Galileo and Pascal, or that he had failed to understand their statements. Surely More puts forward statements against the spring and weight of air which had already been answered by Pascal. More did non merely utilize philosophical statements against Boyle, nevertheless. He was a committed experimental scientist and he undertook a series of hydrostatic and pneumatic experiments to confute Boyle s theory. More may hold been strongly opposed to Boyle s mechanical doctrine, but he was good fain towards the experimental doctrine of those in the Royal Society. He was proposed for family of the Royal Society by Wilkins on 4 June 1662 and elected on 17 September of that twelvemonth. However, when the Society received its Charter from Charles II on 10 May 1663, More ( and several others ) were omitted from the list of Fellows. On 25 May 1664 Wilkins once more proposed More for the family and he was elected ( for a 2nd clip ) at the meeting one hebdomad subsequently. In 1670 More published Enchridion Metaphysicum. This work repeated More s expostulations to the mechanical doctrine of Boyle and several other members of the Royal Society. Of class there were deep jobs which related to infinite and affair, action at a distance and the vacuity which scientists were fighting with at this clip and More s positions provided motive to many scientists to clear up their ain thoughts and better their statements. Space was a peculiarly hard construct and More basically identifies it with God: I on the contrary when I have obviously proved that the internal infinite is truly distinguishable from affair, I conclude that it is for that ground a certain immaterial substance or spirit, merely as the Pythagoreans once thought. And so through that same gate through which the Cartesian doctrine seemed to mean to except God from the universe, I on the contrary ( and I am confident that success will be vouchsafed me ) strive to re-introduce Him. And this space and immobile extension appears to be non merely existent but Godhead. One other thing about Henry More which we should discourse is his relation to Newton. Newton was born near to Grantham and attended the Free School in Grantham. In fact he had diggingss in Grantham for seven old ages with a Mr Clark, the brother of a instructor at the Free School. More, who was about 30 old ages older than Newton, frequently returned to his place town of Grantham and when he did so he lived with one of the two Clark brothers. Therefore when More was a major figure at Cambridge he must hold got to cognize the immature student Newton. We surely know that there was contact between Newton and More up till the clip More was around 70 old ages of age. Did More s thoughts of infinite influence Newton? It is impossible to state with any certainty, but we can surely observe that Newton s thought of absolute infinite and clip was important to his natural philosophies and that this impression of infinite is closely related to that set frontward by More in his statements against Descartes. Besides in footings of gravitation, for Descartes it was necessary to hold an interaction through affair between the organic structures. For Newton gravitation was a force which acted through empty infinite and although he does non look to hold identified infinite with God as More did, nevertheless the religious facet of infinite supported Newton s gravitative theories. More neer sought promotion within Cambridge, declining to stand for places such as Master. He was a modest adult male who felt that he did non hold the necessary endowments for such functions. He wrote: I have measured myself from the tallness to the deepness ; and what I can make, and what I ought to make, and I do it. J J OConnor and E F Robertson