God or Space and Nature? Henry More’s Panentheism of Space and Panpsychism of Life and Nature

Abstract

Cambridge Platonism used to be dismissed as a somewhat anachronistic and inevitably forlorn attempt at a humanist defence of a timeless ancient theology in the era of early modern science and empiricism. However, modern research has increasingly revealed the chief representatives of the »school of Cambridge«1 or the »Cambridge Enlightenment«,2 notably Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, John Smith and George Rust, to be pioneering thinkers and precursors of key modern notions in theoretical and practical philosophy alike.3 Their internalist epistemology constituted a powerfully-argued counterpoise to the nascent British empiricism of the likes of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, emphasizing as it did the spontaneity and activity of the subject. Modelled upon Cartesian foundationalism, it views all truth claims as grounded in a first fundamental intuitive insight into divine goodness of which a subject possesses an a priori idea exempt from any doubt whatsoever. Likewise, in anthropology, the Cambridge Platonists propounded seminal theories of consciousness in the Cartesian vein which, for all their debt to Descartes’ cogito, parted ways with the French rationalist in emphasizing accountable practical agency, rather than theoretical reasoning as the chief mode of