ual training, combined with the English attribute of
solid practical sense, that had saved him from running utterly wild in
fanciful and visionary speculations. As it is, he has been
occasionally[470] classed among the so-called Theosophists, such as
Paracelsus and Jacob Behmen. His exuberant imagination delighted in
subjects which, since his time, have been acknowledged to be closed to
all efforts of human reason, and have been generally abandoned to the
dreams of credulity and superstition. He revelled in ingenious
conjectures upon the condition of the soul in the intermediate state
after death, upon the different stages and orders of disembodied
spirits, and upon mysterious sympathies between mind and matter. We have
continually to remember that he wrote before the dawn of the Newtonian
philosophy, if we would appreciate his reasonings and guesses about
strange attractions and affinities, which pointed as he thought to an
incorporeal soul of the world, or spirit of nature, acting as 'a great
quartermaster-general of Providence' in directing relations between the
spiritual and material elements of the universe.[471]

Such was Henry More in one side of his character. The counterbalancing
principle was his unwavering allegiance to reason, his zealous
acknowledgment of its excellence as a gift of God, to be freely used and
safely followed on every subject of human interest. He held it to be the
glory and adornment of all true religion, and the special prerogative of
Christianity. He nowhere rises to greater fervour of expression than
where he extols the free and devotional exercise of reason in a pure and
undefiled heart; and he is convinced of the high and special spiritual
powers which under such conditions are granted to it. 'I should commend
to them that will successfully philosophise the belief and endeavour
after a certain principle more noble and inward than reason itself, and
without which reason will falter, or at least reach but to mean and
frivolous things. I have a sense of something in me while I thus speak,
which I must confess is of so retruse a nature that I want a name for
it, unless I should adventure to term it Divine sagacity, which is the
first rise of successful reason.... All pretenders to philosophy will
indeed be ready to magnify reason to the skies, to make it the light of
heaven, and the very oracle of God: but they do not consider that the
oracle of God is not to be heard but in his Holy Temple