wrence Clark Powell, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_
James Sutherland, _University College, London_
H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., _University of California, Los Angeles_

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

Edna C. Davis, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_

INTRODUCTION

Henry More (1614-1687), the most interesting member of that group
traditionally known as the Cambridge Platonists, lived conscientiously
and well. Having early set out on one course, he never thought to change
it; he devoted his whole life to the joy of celebrating, again and
again, "a firm and unshaken Belief of the Existence of GOD . . . , a God
infinitely Good, as well as infinitely Great . . . ."[1] Such faith was
for More the starting point of his rational understanding: "with the
most fervent Prayers" he beseeched God, in his autobiographical
"Praefatio Generalissima," "to set me free from the dark Chains, and
this so sordid Captivity of my own Will." More offered to faith all
which his reason could know, and so it happened that he "was got into a
most Joyous and Lucid State of Mind," something quite ineffable; to
preserve these "Sensations and Experiences of my own Soul," he wrote
"a pretty full Poem call'd _Psychozoia_" (or _A Christiano-Platonicall
display of Life_), an exercise begun about 1640 and designed for no
audience but himself. There were times, More continued in his
autobiographical remarks, when he thought of destroying _Psychozoia_
because its style is rough and its language filled with archaisms. His
principal purpose in that poem was to demonstrate in detail the
spiritual foundation of all existence; Psyche, his heroine, is the
daughter of the Absolute, the general Soul who holds together the
metaphysical universe, against whom he sees reflected his own soul's
mystical progress. More must, nevertheless, have been pleased with his
labor, for he next wrote _Psychathanasia Platonica: or Platonicall Poem
of the Immortality of Souls, especially Mans Soul_, in which he attempts
to demonstrate the immortality of the soul as a corrective to his age.
Then, he joined to that _Antipsychopannychia, or A Confutation of the
sleep of the Soul after death_, and _Antimonopsychia, or That all Souls
are not one_; at the urging of friends, he published the poems in
1642--his first literary work--as _Psychodia Platonica_.

In his argument for the soul's immortality toward the end of
_Psychathanasia_ (III.4), More had urged that there w