Panentheism, Dualism, and the Life of Nature between Henry More and Anne Conway

Henry More’s Spirit of Nature, or hylarchic principle, is well-known as one of the signature doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists by means of which they navigated between materialist atheism and hylozoic pantheism. Anne Conway’s Middle Nature occupies a similar position as it mediates between God and creatures, but it operates within a seemingly quite different, less dualist and more gradualist metaphysics. The relationship between the two, and to the deeply Plotinian panentheism of More’s early poetry, is a complex one. This paper will re-examine this relationship, arguing that Conway’s gradualist metaphysics, devised in part to overcome the difficulties of More’s dualism, approximates the metaphysics of his poetry, and there is evidence that More too, late in his career, inclined hestiantly back toward his earlier positions. Conway emerges not so much as departing from More as completing her teacher’s original system more thoroughly than he himself was able to achieve.