 This was an extremely perceptive comment. More was going to go on to develop his concept of the Spirit of Nature (alluded to here as “the shadow of the divine essence”, but which More later referred to as “the vicarious power of God”) which would draw similar criticisms from the leading natural philosophers, Robert Boyle (1627–1691) and Robert Hooke (1635–1703). For them it was merely a fabrication which explained nothing that could not be explained more simply without it; and “Truth”, as Boyle was later to say (1672), “ought to be pleaded for only by Truth” (Boyle 1999, 184; Henry 1990). Descartes called More’s Angels “corporeal” simply because More declared them to be extended entities. More did not see Descartes’s comment until 1655, by which time it was too late. By then, More was already committed to his Spirit of Nature, which he saw as an indispensable feature of the world system (enabling him, for example, to move away from his earlier vitalist materialism, which he now saw as dangerous to religion). It is doubtful, however, that More would have been diverted from this course by Descartes’s words, even if he had seen them in time. The Spirit of Nature was not just pleasing to More; he made it an indispensable feature of his philosophical theology (see next section, and Reid 2012, Leech 2013).