More, HENRY

More, HENRY, one of the Cambridge Platonists, was born at Grantham in Lincolnshire in 1614. He was educated at Eton and Christ's College, Cambridge, revolted early against the Calvinism of his parents, and gave himself entirely to philosophy, especially to Plato and more particularly the Neoplatonist writers. He took his Bachelor's degree in 1635, his Master's in 1639, when he was elected fellow of his college. Here he remained all his life, nor could he be prevailed upon to accept church preferment. He lived in an atmosphere of unusual spiritual elevation, and exercised a great influence on the young men that gathered round him. Among his pupils was a young lady of family who became Viscountess Conway, and at whose seat of Ragley in Warwickshire More often stayed. This lady's sympathies with the mystic and the occult extended also to Van Helmont and Valentine Greatrakes, and she ultimately found rest among the Quakers. More's earlier rationality gradually gave place to hopeless mysticism and theosophy, and his successive works decline correspondingly in value. He died September 1, 1687, and was buried in the chapel of his college. His Divine Dialogues (1668) is a work of altogether unusual interest. His Opera Theologica were collected in 1675, his Opera Philosophica in 1678. See the Life by Richard Ward (1710), and Tulloch's Rational Theology in England in the Seventeenth Century (vol. ii. 1874).