2011
8. 31
The spirit of nature, as More describes it, bears obvious similarities with the ancient, especially Platonic notion of the anima mundi, a living hylarchical principle which penetrates matter and whose active powers are expressed in the larger astronomical and physical phenomena of nature. In fact More occasionally calls it "the universal soul of the world." The idea was quite common throughout the later Middle Ages, being appealed to frequently by mystics, theosophists and speculative natural philosophers; in Kepler, for example, we find each planet, including the earth, endowed with a soul, whose constant powers are shown in the planetary whirling. More's main purpose, however, was to reinterpret this vagrant idea in terms which would give it better standing in the new scientific current, and, of course, without prejudice to his religious views. In the preface to the Immortality of the Soul he calls the spirit of nature "the vicarious power of God upon matter; that is, the immediate plastic agent of God through which his will is fulfilled in the material world. It corresponds in nature as a whole to the animal spirits supposed to pervade the circulatory systems of an individual, through whose agency the purpose of the soul is transmitted to the various organs and limbs. Its functions are vital, vegetative, and directive, but it is not itself conscious."
More defines it more carefully as "a substance incorporeal, but without sense and animadversion, pervading the whole of matter of the universe, and exercising a plastic power therein, according to the sundry predispositions and occasions in the parts it works upon, raising such phenomena in the world, by directing the parts of the matter, and their motion, as cannot be resolved into mere mechanical powers." (Burt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, p. 140-141)
