Abstract
The main focus of the paper is to examine the origins of Henry More's notion of the Spirit of Nature in his early Neoplatonic poems. This requires an analysis, in his early works, of the hypostasis Psyche (as both the Holy Spirit and the world soul) and of the Mundane Spright, a related intermediary entity acting as a vehicle for the soul.
The paper tries to show that the later notion of the Spirit of Nature arose out of these two as an inferior (vegetative) form of a world soul, making the universe similar to a plant, rather than an animal. Finally, we also turn our attention to the spirit of God, an entity that acts as a sort of counterpart, taking up all the "superior" functions previously associated with the world soul but, for theological reasons, remaining completely separate from both the world and the Spirit of Nature.