 Another striking indication of the development of More’s thinking on this issue can be seen by comparing his early vitalistic concept of matter to his later insistence that matter is completely inert. In his early philosophical poems and in his correspondence with Descartes, More evidently felt he could dismiss mechanistic materialism by indicating that even supposedly inanimate bodies were alive in some way (Reid 2012, 2018). We can see this, for example, in his objection to Descartes’s claim that motion could be transferred from one moving body to another: