More, Henry (1614-1687)

The Immortality of the Soul, so Farre Forth as it is Demonstrable from the Knowledge of Nature and the Light of Reason

London

Printed by J. Flesher, for William Morden

1659

"For that the Soul should be the Vital Architect of her own house, that close connexion and sure possession she is to have of it, distinct and secure from the invasion of any other particular Soul, seems no slight Argument."

3. In the next place we are to take notice, That the immediate Instrument of the Soul are those tenuious and aereal particles which they ordinarily call the Spirits; that these are they by which the Soul hears, sees, feels, imagines, remembers, reasons, and by moving which, or at least directing their motion, she moves likewise the Body; and by using them, or some subtile Matter like them, she either compleats, or at least contributes to the Bodies Organization. For that the Soul should be the Vital Architect of her own house, that close connexion and sure possession she is to have of it, distinct and secure from the invasion of any other particular Soul, seems no slight Argument. And yet that while she is exercising that Faculty, she may have a more then ordinary Union or Implication with the Spirit of Nature, or the Soul of the World, so far forth as it is Plastick, seems not unreasonable: and therefore is asserted by Plotinus; and may justly be suspected to be true, if we attend to the prodigious effects of the Mothers Imagination derived upon the Infant, which sometimes are so very great, that, unless she raised the Spirit of Nature into consent, they might well seem to exceed the power of any Cause. I shall abstain from producing any Examples till the proper place: in the mean time I hope I may be excused from any rashness in this assignation of the cause of those many and various Signatures found in Nature, so plainly pointing at such a Principle in the World as I have intimated before.
(II.17.3, pp. 298-9)

Architecture::Architect Architecture::House

Reading Simon Varey, Space and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), 57.

Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul, so Farre Forth as it is Demonstrable from the Knowledge of Nature and the Light of Reason (London: Printed by J. Flesher, for William Morden, 1659). <Link to EEBO>

12/23/2011