The Immortality of the Soul (review)

BOOK REWEWS 453 essay by the late Howard Warrender, who synthesizes his thirty-five years of work on Hobbes. Warrender focuses his discussion on Hobbes's theory of peace and natural justice. He continues to hold, rightly I think, that "natural law forms the basis of Hobbes's political and ethical system" (3oo). The editors did well to try to achieve some general consensus about Hobbes's science of natural justice, and the diversity of perspectives on that one topic is refreshing . Although the price of this volume makes it prohibitive for the individual scholar, it is essential that libraries make this important volume available to them. A. P. M^RTINtCH University of Texas at Austin Henry More. The Immortality of the Soul. Edited by A. Jacob. International Archives of the History of Ideas, 122. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff,' 1987. Pp. ciii + 468. DFL 200. The publication of modern critical editions of noncanonical texts in the history of philosophy is in principle to be welcomed. Henry More has fared better than many of his less well-known contemporaries as far as reprints of his works are concerned? Alexander Jacob's edition of The Immortality of the Soul, published in the year of the tercentenary of More's death, is the first attempt to provide a twentieth-century edition of this work. As a work of psychology (in the old sense of that term, meaning a study of all aspects of the soul), it draws on Renaissance pneumatology, medical theory, and demonology. On the philosophical front it brings into the same arena such eminent contestants as Hobbes, Descartes, Ficino, and Pomponazzi, admirably illustrating More's initial application of Cartesianism as a companion weapon to Platonism in his battle against Hobbesian mechanism. More has in fact done his would-be editors the kindness of supplying copious margin references as a starting point. And Mr. Jacob has, on the whole faithfully, expanded these by supplying the relevant quotations, with translations where necessary. But in other respects this edition disappoints. The text used is that of the second edition, which was printed in the 1662 collection of More's works. The original spelling and italics are preserved, but margin references are relegated, without indication in the text, to the notes, which are placed at the end. Textual variants from the first edition (1659) are supplied in a separate section of the notes, again, without indication in the text. The editor has arbitrarily chosen to ignore the Latin version of 1679 with its important set ofscholia, in which More modifies and defends many of his positions. And he erroneously describes the version printed in the t 712 edition of A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings as a translation from the Latin. In fact this version reproduces the 1662 text but adds a translation of the 1679 scholia. ' Most notably, A CollectionofSeveralPhilosophicalWritings,British Philosophers and Theologians of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 0662; reprint, New York: Garland, 1978), and HenriciMori CantabrigertsisOperaOrama0675-79; reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966). 454 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:3 JULY 199o The introduction does not adequately put More or The Immortality of the Soul into their historical and intellectual context. Mr. Jacob describes More's book as his "principal treatise" (Preface) but does not enlarge on the claim. The only other work of More's to which he relates it is his poem, The Platonick Song of the Soul 0647). Its intellectual context is represented by Walter Charleton, Kenelm Digby, and John Smith, whose connections with More are not made apparent. Space is wasted on the elegant but unoriginal poet, Sir John Davies, which might better have been given to Ficino, or even Cardano, Pomponazzi, or Van Helmont. More's obvious interest in Descartes and Hobbes is discussed, but without regard to obvious points such as More's attempt to employ an axiomatic method of argument, or the way the first two books are designed to answer Hobbes's denial of the intelligibility of the notion of spirit, or indeed More's use of Cartesianism in his answer to Hobbes. Although the editor claims that "the structure of The Immortality of the Soul is extremely complex" (xlix), his analysis is...