Page:A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings of Dr. Henry More.djvu/195

Rh will ever lie loose, unless there be some cement to hold them together, And this union once admitted, Motion, Activity and Agitation being so easie and prone a conception of the property of a Spirit, it will as easily and naturally follow that it does move or agitate the Matter it is thus united to.

8. But again to answer more closely, I say, this present Objection is nothing else but a Sophism of the Phansy, conceiving a Spirit as a Body going through some pervious hole or passage too wide and patent for it, in which therefore it cannot stick or be firmly settled in it. To which Imagination we will oppose, that though Spirits do penetrate Bodies, yet they are not such thin and lank things that they must of necessity run through them, or be unable to take hold of them, or be united with them, but that they may fill up the capacity of a Body penetrable by Spirits: which penetrability of a Body or Matter when it is satiated or fill'd, that Spirit that thus fills it is more strongly riveted in, or united with the Body or Matter, then one part of the Matter can be with another.

And therefore we will acknowledge one speciall faculty of a Spirit, which after penetration it doth either naturally or arbitrarioully exert, which is this, to fill the Receptivity or Capacity of a Body or Matter so far forth as it is capable or receptive of a Soul or Spirit.

And this affection of a Spirit we will make bold to call, for more compendiousness, by one Greek term hylopathy which, that there may be no suspicion of any fraud or affected foolery in words, we will as plainly as we can define thus, A power in a Spirit of offering so near to a corporeal emanation from the Center of life, that it will so perfectly fill the receptivity of Matter into which it has penetrated, that it is very difficult or impossible for any other Spirit to possess the same, and therefore of becoming hereby so firmly and closely united to a Body, as both to actuate and to be acted upon, to affect and be affected thereby.

And now let us appeal to Imagination her self, if Matter does not fit as close, nay closer, to a Spirit then any one part of Matter can do to another: For here union pervades through all, but there conjunction is onely in a common Superficies, as is usually fancied and acknowledged. And this Hylopathia which we thus suppose in a finite Spirit or Soul, I further adde, may well answer in Analogy to that power of creating Matter which is necessarily included in the Idea of God.

9. But lastly, if the manner how a Spirit acts upon a Body, or is affected by a Body, seems so intricate that it must be given up for inexplicable; yet as the mobility of an exact Globe upon a Plane is admitted as an evident and undeniable property thereof by our Understanding, though we cannot imagine how it always touching in a point should by its motion describe a continued line, (and the like may be urged from the other following instances of Intricacy and perplexedness:) so supposing such manifest operations in Nature,that Reason can demonstrate not to be from the Matter it self, we must acknowledge there is some other Substance besides the Matter that acts in it and upon it, which is Spiritual, though we know not how Motion can be communicated to Matter from a Spirit. Rh