 The Cartesian claim that animals were more splendid versions of artificial automata, “which move without thought” (Letter to More, February 1649; Descartes 1991, 366), for example, was seen by More as providing hostages to atheists. In the scholastic tradition the ability to move oneself was seen as evidence of the presence of a soul, and therefore of life. Descartes, pointing out that clocks and other automata are capable of moving themselves, denied this traditional view and held the soul to be responsible only for thinking; movement was exclusively a feature of bodies. In the Cartesian system, consequently, plants and animals were living creatures without souls. Evidently, More regarded this position as likely to lead to the conclusion that humans could also be counted as living creatures without souls (it is not clear whether there were contemporary Cartesians who held this, but it certainly became at least a minority view in the period of the Enlightenment) (Cohen 1936, Henry 1989, Thomson 2008, Muratori 2017, Reid 2018).