Locke and Holenmerism

Abstract

Locke’s conception of God’s manner of being present everywhere is unclear. As Jasper Reid noted in The Metaphysics of Henry More, Locke seemed to agree with the Cambridge Platonist Henry More that God, like spirits, is substantially present in space (a conception which More labelled “anti-Nullibism”); however, it is not clear whether he endorsed More’s idea of God as an infinitely extended being, filling space with His amplitude of presence, or rather the alternative, scholastic conception, which More named “holenmerism” and which affirmed that God is present everywhere as a whole in the whole and a whole in the parts. The paper attempts to explore this question in detail by focusing on an episode in Locke’s later correspondence, which suggests that he voluntarily maintained an ambiguous attitude towards holenmerism. The episode focuses on the dispute which Locke had with Johannes Hudde in 1697 on how to prove God’s uniqueness; the “physical” proof he provided to settle the dispute could support both holenmerism and anti-holenmerism. However, Locke’s proof relied heavily on the analogy between spirits and bodies which he had drawn in the Essay, when he had defined their identity over time in the same way; the paper suggests that this and other evidence coming from the Essay, involving Locke’s reading of Newton’s De gravitatione, seems to indicate that he conceived of anti-holenmerism as the hypothesis to be preferred from an epistemic point of view.