ABSTRACT
In the 1600s matters of mind were still matters of soul, and the emerging sciences sought to incorporate the mind into God’s natural order, sometimes quite literally. We find vitalism, panpsychism, non-mechanistic materialism, idealism, and still more positions about the mind and its place in creation for which we have no -isms. Methodologically, natural philosophers sought regularities in nature, including regularities that could explain how minds work. Materialism promises to make sense of the mind and nature through unity: it presents a single system of the world that incorporates the mind, quite literally. If materialism faced the problem of distinguishing mental material motions and non-mental material motions, the challenge for dualists like More was to maintain the distinction between the animating spirits that explain and regulate operations in nature and the super-natural spirit that is God.
