 In the Immortality of the Soul (1659) More accepts the fundamental precepts of the mechanical philosophy, and acknowledges the Cartesian claim that “Matter it self once moved can move other Matter” (More 1662, in Immortality of the Soul, separately paginated, 21), but insists that it cannot move itself. So far, Descartes would agree. Unlike Descartes, however, More refuses to accept that all the phenomena of the universe can follow from an original push by God, setting in train an endless cosmic chain reaction of colliding particles. Even though Descartes talks of the continued action of God in preserving the same quantity of motion in the world, as far as More is concerned the Cartesian account concedes too much to the mechanical interactions of material entities. Although both More and Descartes agree that God, the primary cause of all things, operates in the world by means of delegated secondary causes, they differ radically about the correct secondary causes. For Descartes, bodies in motion, acting in conformity with his laws of nature and rules of collision, are the secondary causes; but More cannot accept that bodies can perform all that is required. More recognises that Descartes’s view could undermine his own prior commitment to his dualistic theology, because it could be made to lead to a monistic materialist system of mechanical philosophy (in which God’s role is simply written out). In an attempt to avoid this, More says that the fact that matter can be brought to rest “is an Argument not only that Self activity belongs to a Spirit, but that there is such a thing as Spirit in the world”. Presumably the point is that if matter was self-active it could not stop its own activity, and therefore could never come to rest. Anyone who denies this, More insists, “must of necessity (as I have intimated already) confess that this Matter moves it self, though it be very incongruous so to affirm” (More 1662, Immortality of the Soul, separately paginated, 31).