 Although More professes to subscribe to a philosophy which is significantly distinct from that of Vaughan, it is by no means clear that contemporary readers would have been able to see what the differences were. With hindsight, it can be seen that in these two polemical works More was trying to protect the concept which he had very briefly introduced in his poetical works and which was to prove so important in his subsequent philosophy, namely the Spirit of Nature (discussed fully below). What is most obvious here, however, is not how More conceived of this universal spirit, but that he did not see it in the same way that Vaughan did in his Anima magica abscondita: Or, A Discourse of the universall Spirit of Nature (1650). He objects unequivocally, for example, to the fact that Vaughan seems to imply (on More’s reading, anyway) that a universal world spirit or soul is divided and parcelled up into all creatures, to give them life. More objects not only to Vaughan’s suggestion that the whole world is “an Animal”, but also to the idea that the world soul can be “either barrel’d up or bottled up, or tied up in a bag, as a pig in a poke!” (More 1650, 51). More’s objection, reflecting his strict dualism, is that an immaterial soul could not be trapped inside body. When More subsequently develops his own concept of the Spirit of Nature into its mature form it is to be a continuous and all pervasive immaterial (but extended) substance which is capable of operating within bodies by virtue of its ubiquity, but is not confined by them. The contemporary reader, however, could not have gleaned from More’s Observations upon Anthroposophia Theomagica (1650), or his Second Lash of Alazonomastix (1651), anything other than his objections to Vaughan’s views; there was little or no intimation of More’s own still developing ideas.