Why this seventeenth-century philosopher argued that God and souls must occupy physical space

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Henry More, a leading Cambridge Platonist, famously broke with René Descartes by insisting that immaterial entities like spirits and God possess spatial extension. He feared that defining spirit as non-extended would render it powerless, eventually leading to atheism. His radical solution involved proposing an entirely new dimension of existence.

Born in 1614, Henry More was a central figure among the Cambridge Platonists, a group dedicated to reconciling Christian theology with the burgeoning scientific advancements of the seventeenth century. Although he initially admired the work of René Descartes, More eventually turned against Cartesian dualism. He believed that Descartes’s strict separation of mind and matter—specifically the idea that only matter occupies space—would inevitably collapse into a mechanical naturalism that left no room for the divine.

More’s counter-argument was bold: he maintained that to exist at all, a substance must possess extension. If spirit were truly non-extended, he argued, it would be a nonentity incapable of influencing the physical world. Consequently, he asserted that not only individual souls but God himself must be extended in space. To reconcile this with the physical world, he introduced the concept of 'essential spissitude' and is credited with coining the term 'fourth dimension' to describe the spatial nature of immaterial substances.

To bridge the gap between his spiritual metaphysics and the mechanical laws of nature, More proposed an 'unconscious, incorporeal agent' he called the Spirit of Nature. This entity served as a secondary cause, acting as a vehicle for divine power to maintain order in phenomena like gravity and magnetism that he felt mechanical philosophy failed to explain. His influence was profound, potentially shaping the ideas of Sir Isaac Newton regarding the nature of space, and his work remains a fascinating attempt to defend the necessity of immaterial principles in a world increasingly defined by matter and motion.

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