“Thence gathering plumes of perfect speculation, To impe the wings of thy high flying mynd, Mount up aloft through heavenly contemplation, From this darke world, whose damps the soule do blynd, And like the native brood of Eagles kynd, On that bright Sunne of glorie fixe thine eyes, Clear’d from grosse mists of fraile infirmities.” Then comes in the sense of sin, and he approaches God in a different spirit. He continues: “Humbled with feare and awful reverence, Before the footestoole of his Maiestie, Throw thy selfe downe with trembling innocence, Ne dare looke up with corruptible eye, On the dred face of that great _Deity_, For feare, lest if he chaunce to looke on thee, Thou turne to nought, and quite confounded be. “But lowly fall before his mercie seate, Close covered with the Lambes integrity, From the just wrath of his avengefull threate, That sits upon the righteous throne on hy.” (ll. 130–152.) II. NATURE OF THE SOUL The nature of the soul from the standpoint of Plotinian metaphysics was treated by Henry More in his two poetical treatises, “Pyschathanasia” and “Anti-psychopannychia.” In the former he follows the course of the argument set forth in the seventh book of the fourth “Ennead” of Plotinus. In the Plotinian defence two propositions are established; namely, that the soul is not body, and that it is not a function of body. By demonstrating these, it followed that the soul is an immaterial thing, a real being, and consequently eternal. This is the drift of More’s argument in “Psychathanasia.” The first and second books are devoted to the establishment of the definition of the soul as an incorporeal substance, and the proof of its incorporeality is deduced from considerations of its functions. The soul, More holds, is an incorporeal thing because it is a self-moving substance present in all forms of life. Plotinus had taught that soul was everywhere. “First, then,” he says, “let every soul consider this: how by breathing life into them soul made all animals, the creatures of earth, sea, air, the divine stars in heaven; made the sun, made the great firmament above us, and not only made but ordered it, so that it swings round in due course. Yet is this soul a different nature from what it orders, and moves, and vivifies. It must needs then be more precious than its creations. For they are born, and when the soul which ministers their life abandons them, they die; but the soul ever is because it never abandons itself.” (“Enneads,” V. i. 2.) More finds this soul present in the growth of all forms of vegetation, the sphere spermatic (I. ii. 30), in the life of animals, sensation, and self-directed motion; and in the intellectual life of man. (I. ii. 17–22.)