have felt uneasy delight on reading “that it is not needful to enter into disputes regarding the infinite, but merely to hold all that in which we can find no limits as indefinite, such as the extension of the world . . . .”[4] More asked Descartes to clarify his language in their correspondence of 1648-49, the last year of Descartes’ life.
Democritus Platonissans is More’s earliest statement about absolute space and time; by introducing these themes into English philosophy, he contributed significantly to the intellectual history of the seventeenth century. Newton, indeed, was able to make use of More’s forging efforts; but of relative time or space and their measurement, which so much concerned Newton, More had little to say. He was preoccupied with the development of a theory which would show that immaterial substance, with space and time as attributes, is as real and as absolute as the Cartesian geometrical and spatial account of matter which he felt was true but much in need of amplification.
In his first letter to Descartes, of 11 December 1648, More wrote: “. . . this indefinite extension is either simpliciter infinite, or only in respect to us. If you understand extension to be infinite simpliciter, why do you obscure your thought by too low and too modest words? If it is infinite only in respect to us, extension, in reality, will be finite; for our mind is the measure neither of the things nor of truth. . . .” Unsatisfied by his first answer from Descartes (5 February 1649), he urges his point again (5 March): if extension can describe matter, the same quality must apply to the immaterial and yet be only one of many attributes of Spirit. In his second letter to More (15 April), Descartes answers firmly: “It is repugnant to my concept to attribute any limit to the world, and I have no other measure than my perception for what I have to assert or to deny. I say, therefore, that the world is indeterminate or indefinite, because I do not recognize in it any limits. But I dare not call it infinite as I perceive that God is greater than the world, not in respect to His extension, because, as I have already said, I do not acknowledge in God any proper [extension], but in
respect to His perfection . . . . It is repugnant to my mind . . . it implies a contradiction, that the world be finite or limited, because I cannot but conceive a space outside the boundaries of the world wherever I presuppose them.” More plainly fails to understand the basic dualism inherent in Cartesian philosophy and to sense the irrelevance of his questions. While Descartes is really disposing of the spiritual world in order to get on with his analysis of finite experience, More is keenly attempting to reconcile neo-Platonism with the lively claims of matter. His effort can be read as the brave attempt to harmonize an older mode of thought with the urgency of the ‘new philosophy’ which called the rest in doubt. More saw this conflict and the implications of it with a kind of clarity that other men of his age hardly possessed. But the way of Descartes, which at first seemed to him so promising, certainly did not lead to the kind of harmony which he sought.
More’s original enthusiasm for Descartes declined as he understood better that the Cartesian world in practice excluded spirits and souls. Because Descartes could find no necessary place even for God Himself, More styled him, in Enchiridion Metaphysicum (1671), the “Prince of the Nullibists”; these men “readily acknowledge there are such things as Incorporeal Beings or Spirits, yet do very peremptorily contend, that they are no where in the whole World [;] . . . because they so boldly affirm that a Spirit is Nullibi, that is to say, no where,” they deserve to be called Nullibists.[5] In contrast to these false teachers, More describes absolute space by listing twenty epithets which can be applied either to God or to pure extension, such as “Unum, Simplex, Immobile . . . Incomprehensible ”[6] There is, however, a great difficulty here; for while Space and Spirit are eternal and uncreated, they yet contain material substance which has been created by God. If the material world possesses infinite extension, as More generally believes, that would preclude any need of its having a creator. In order to avoid this dilemma, which Democritus Platonissans ignores, More must at last separate matter and space, seeing the
latter as an attribute of God through which He is able to contain a finite world limited in space as well as in time. In writing that “this infinite space because of its infinity is distinct from matter,”[7] More reveals the direction of his conclusion; the dichotomy it embodies is Cartesianism in reverse.
While More always labored to describe the ineffable, his earliest work, the poetry, may have succeeded in this wish most of all. Although he felt that his poetry was aiming toward truths which his “later and better concocted Prose”[8] reached, the effort cost him the suggestiveness of figurative speech. In urging himself on toward an ever more consistent statement of belief, he lost much of his beginning exuberance (best expressed in the brief “Philosopher’s Devotion”) and the joy of intellectual discovery. In the search “to find out Words which will prove faithful witnesses of the peculiarities of my Thoughts,” he staggers under the unsupportable burden of too many words. In trying so desperately to clarify his thought, he rejected poetic discourse as “slight”; only a language free of metaphor and symbol could, he supposed, lead toward correctness. Indeed, More soon renounced poetry; he apparently wrote no more after collecting it in Philosophical Poems (1647), when he gave up poetry for “more seeming Substantial performances in solid Prose.”[9] “Cupids Conflict,” which is “annexed” to Democritus Platonissans, is an interesting revelation of the failure of poetry, as More felt it: he justifies his “rude rugged uncouth style” by suggesting that sweet verses avoid telling important truths; harshness and obscurity may at least remind one that there is a significance beyond mere words. His lament is characteristic: “How ill alas! with wisdome it accords/ To sell my living sense for liveless words.”
In spite of these downcast complaints, More was quite capable of lively and meaningful poetic ideas. One is the striking image of the cone which occurs in Democritus Platonissans (especially in stanzas 7-8, 66-67, and 88) and becomes the most essential symbol to More’s expression of infinitude and extension. The figure first appears in Antipsychopannychia
(II.9) where his purpose is to reconcile the world Soul with Christian eschatology. In Democritus Platonissans, the cone enables More to adapt the familiar Hermetic paradox:
A Circle whose circumference no where