Henry More was one of the most important members of the seventeenth-century group of philosopher-theologians known as the Cambridge Platonists. The denomination "Platonist" was coined by nineteenth-century historians on account of the fact that the group drew significantly on the corpus of Platonic philosophy. The label, however, detracts from the fact that they had considerable importance as a third alternative to the outdated Aristotelianism of schools of the time and the uncompromising modernity of Thomas Hobbes. Central to their philosophy was a metaphysics of spirit, which they proposed as a corrective supplement to contemporary natural philosophy. In moral philosophy they emphasized practical ethics founded on absolute and self-existing moral principles coterminous with Christian values. They were, moreover, the first English thinkers to employ consistently the vernacular as the language of philosophy.

Henry More published considerably more than his Cambridge Platonist colleagues, and he had a large readership: according...