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قراءة كتاب Democritus Platonissans
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Ἀγαθὸς ἦν τὸ πᾶν τόδε ὁ συνιστὰς
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Introduction (1968)
Author’s Preface
Democritus Platonissans
Cupids Conflict
Particular Interpretation ...
Philosopher’s Devotion
Augustan Reprint Society
The General Interpretation (“Interp. Gen.”) referenced in the Particular Interpretation is not part of this text.
The Augustan Reprint Society
HENRY MORE
Democritus
Platonissans
(1646)
Introduction by
P. G. Stanwood
PUBLICATION NUMBER 130
WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY
University of California, Los Angeles
1968
GENERAL EDITORS
George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles
Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles
Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
ADVISORY EDITORS
Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan
James L. Clifford, Columbia University
Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia
Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles
Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
Louis A. Landa, Princeton University
Earl Miner, University of California, Los Angeles
Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles
Lawrence 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 was no need to plead for any extension of the infinite (“a contradiction,” and also, it would seem, a fruitless inquiry); but he soon changed his mind. The preface to Democritus Platonissans reproduces those stanzas of the earlier poem which deny infinity (34 to the end of the canto) with a new (formerly concluding) stanza 39 and three further stanzas “for a more easie and naturall leading to the present Canto,” i.e., Democritus Platonissans, which More clearly intended to be an addition, a fifth canto to Psychathanasia (Book III); and although Democritus Platonissans first appeared separately, More appended it to Psychathanasia in the second edition of his collected poems, this time with English titles, the whole