ur common thought, or more grossly when a ghost is our
visitor. It should be no great feat, once those images have dipped into
our vehicle, to take their portraits in the photographic camera. Henry
More will have it that a hen scared by a hawk when the cock is treading,
hatches out a hawkheaded chicken (I am no stickler for the fact), because
before the soul of the unborn bird could give the shape "the deeply
impassioned fancy of the mother" called from the general cistern of form a
competing image. "The soul of the world," he runs on, "interposes and
insinuates into all generations of things while the matter is fluid and
yielding, which would induce a man to believe that she may not stand idle
in the transformation of the vehicle of the daemons, but assist the
fancies and desires, and so help to clothe them and to utter them
according to their own pleasures; or it may be sometimes against their
wills as the unwieldiness of the mother's fancy forces upon her a
monstrous birth." Though images appear to flow and drift, it may be that
we but change in our relation to them, now losing, now finding with the
shifting of our minds; and certainly Henry More speaks by the book,
claiming that those images may be hard to the right touch as "pillars of
crystal" and as solidly coloured as our own to the right eyes. Shelley, a
good Platonist, seems in his earliest work to set this general soul in the
place of God, an opinion, one may find from More's friend Cudworth now
affirmed, now combated, by classic authority; but More would steady us
with a definition. The general soul as apart from its vehicle is "a
substance incorporeal but without sense and animadversion pervading the
whole matter of the universe and exercising a plastic power therein,
according to the sundry predispositions and occasions, in the parts it
works upon, raising such phenomena in the world, by directing the parts of
the matter and their motion as cannot be resolved into mere mechanical
powers." I must assume that "sense and animadversion," perception and
direction, are always faculties of individual soul, and that, as Blake
said, "God only acts or is in existing beings or men."

VII

The old theological conception of the individual soul as bodiless or
abstract led to what Henry More calls "contradictory debate" as to how
many angels "could dance booted and spurred upon the point of a needle,"
and made it possible for rationalist physiology to persuade us that