Cambridge Platonists stripped nature of all sensation while keeping it alive as a plant

Evidence

Plastic natures were akin to the incorporeal vegetative souls and seminal forms of the older Aristotelian and Neoplatonic philosophies. But More and Cudworth denied to their plastic natures any functions associated with the sensory or rational portions of the soul such as reason, free will, and sensation. All animistic powers and sensations in the earth, sun, and heavenly bodies were likewise negated so that metaphorically nature could no longer be conceived as a living animal as in pantheistic and enthusiastical philosophies. Only its living vegetative characteristics were retained. More warned, “If there be any sense … to be acknowledged in the spirit of nature, a scruple may arise, whether this spirit may not be called the soul of a brute, and so the world itself a brute.” — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 904

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: More’s warning exposes the hidden logical hinge of the whole Scientific Revolution: the boundary between sensing-deity and brute-machine, a line whose policing is doing enormous ideological work here. This is the most concentrated statement in the chapter of what ‘alive but not feeling’ purchases.
• XREF: Links to ch50’s claim that ‘Mechanism killed the female world-soul by reducing nature to dead moving corpuscles’ — this passage shows the transitional half-step before total death. — connects to: Plato’s devaluation targeted internal nature for discipline, not external nature for control — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 411; The warrior-hero’s choice of honour over life structures Plato’s devaluation of nature — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 377; Severing the organic bond turned nature from partner into passive object — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 514

Broader Connections

• Severing the organic bond turned nature from partner into passive object #expands (0.80) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 514
• Plato’s devaluation targeted internal nature for discipline, not external nature for control #qualifies (0.75) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 411
• The warrior-hero’s choice of honour over life structures Plato’s devaluation of nature #expands (0.75) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 377