and the Pythagoreans recognized only the sensible world and hence did not derive it from immaterial principles.
Rather, the Platonists thought that the first transcendent principle sustained a set of further immaterial principles and forms from which derive the diversity of the natural biosphere and which, through the agency of divine souls and forming principles (logoi principles that form matter at different times and places in its various ways), unfold themselves in space and time.
Descartes's writings about death show that his concept of the soul clearly implied both mind and the immaterial principle of immortality.
Priestley incorporated an explanation of the chemistry of these gases into the phlogiston theory, according to which combustible substances released phlogiston (an immaterial "principle of inflammability") during burning.
The major objection to the theory, that the ash of organic substances weighed less than the original while the calx was heavier than the metal, was of little significance to Stahl, who thought of phlogiston as an immaterial "principle" rather than as an actual substance.
That which feels is an immaterial principle (soul); that which is felt is the term (body) of this principle.
He is then able to use the behaviour of bodies in collisions to confirm the intervention of a necessarily immaterial principle of activity.
Either More is talking loosely, and means to imply there is some active immaterial principle involved in the transfer of motions in collisions, or he has not yet properly grasped how best to use such signs of sottish life in inanimate bodies to show the limits of Cartesian mechanism, and the need for separate (non-material) principles of activity in the world.
Ibn Daud infers the existence of something like the soul from the fact that different natural bodies are characterized by various actions, which can only be explained by positing the existence of an immaterial principle that is added to their corporeality and from which these actions derive.
Another group of criticisms derived from More's dissatisfaction with Descartes's version of mind-body dualism, including aspects of the union and interaction of body and soul, the denial of souls in animals, and major differences about what can be achieved by matter in motion, and what for More requires a more active (and therefore immaterial) principle (Henry 1986 , 1989.
The perceived short-fall would be helpful to religion, according to More, precisely because the deficit could only be made good by acknowledging the role of an immaterial, active principle.
