 The Antidote begins by borrowing Descartes’s ontological proof of the existence of God, but he went on from there to consider other aspects of the fact that we have an “indelible” idea of God and, as Descartes showed, other innate ideas. This led him to consider, for example, the final cause of our idea of God, which in turn led him to consider our innate knowledge of good and evil. The first book is also concerned with the nature of the soul itself, in which More takes pains to persuade his reader that it is distinct from the substance of the body, and that the body is completely incapable not only of thought, without the incorporeal soul, but also of movement. The second book develops the argument from design to oppose atheism, and the third introduces a favourite stratagem of More’s, the rehearsal of well-known or well-attested stories of witchcraft, snake-charming, raising of tempests by the power of words, and other “spiritual” phenomena as evidence for the existence of an immaterial realm (Coudert 1990, Crocker 2003). Throughout More builds up a picture of immaterial spirit as the only substance capable of spontaneous activity, and insists that inert matter is incapable of explaining all physical phenomena on its own.