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The philosophical innovations of

Margaret Cavendish
a
Susan James
a
The Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge
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 ARTICLE

THE PHILOSOPHICAL INNOVATIONS OF MARGARET

CAVENDISH

Susan James

Between 1653 and 1668, Margaret Cavendish published a series of volumes

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of natural philosophy in which she developed a systematic account of the

principles governing material things, human beings included. These works
bear the marks of her autodidacticism, intellectual confidence, powerful
imagination and drive to overall consistency, features which in some ways
make her work hard to place in the exotic and crowded landscape of late
seventeenth-century explanations of nature. My aim here is to contribute to
the task of characterizing and situating Cavendish's philosophy by isolating
its main explanatory principles and showing how these are a response to
some limitations of mechanism which troubled her and many of her con-
temporaries.1
Margaret Cavendish can be placed among a collection of English vitalists
who, to varying degrees, were not persuaded that all natural phenomena are
mechanically explicable by appeal to the motions and impacts of inert par-
ticles of matter, and who inferred that matter must possess some kind of
active or vital power. However, I shall show that she is, by the standards of
this group, an extremely unusual vitalist, whose theological audacity and
impulse to comprehensiveness lead her (by 1668) towards conclusions
generally associated with Spinoza's Ethics (posthumously published in
1677) and with Leibniz's doctrine of autokinesis. Like Spinoza, Cavendish
holds that the whole of nature consists of infinite self-moving matter which
is in some sense thinking. Like Leibniz, she argues that the harmoniousness
of nature is due, not to the interaction of bodies, but to their own self-
contained properties. These signposts may help us to classify Cavendish's
work and to pinpoint it on our intellectual maps of the seventeenth century,
but they do nothing to explain how she herself arrived at her comparatively
radical position, nor what induced her to hold on to it. To gain an under-
standing of these issues we need to examine the eclectic intellectual milieu
from which her views emerged, a milieu in which the implications of the

1
I am extremely grateful to Desmond Clarke, Sarah Hutton, Quentin Skinner and Cather-
ine Wilson for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

k? British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7(2) 1999:219-244;

V © Routledge 1999 ISSN 0960-8788
 220 SUSAN JAMES
works of two diverse mechanists, Descartes and Hobbes, were being sub-
jected to intense scrutiny.2
Viewing Cavendish's work as a response to the perceived deficiencies of
mechanism offers a way to uncover some of its motivations, and to see how
it contributes to debates which preoccupied natural philosophers of her time.
However, this perspective does not capture her writings in all their diversity,
and the picture I present will inevitably be a simplified sketch, awaiting refine-
ment or revision. It would no doubt be altered by a detailed consideration of
the development of Cavendish's metaphysics, or by further insight into the
range of sources on which she relied. It would be enriched by an analysis of
the relations between her scientific views and the diverse literary genres in
which she expressed them. Nevertheless, since her philosophical work has so
far been little explored, there is room for an attempt to relate it to that of the
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contemporaries she regarded as either her peers or her inferiors.3

2
In 'An Epilogue to my Philosophical Opinions' printed at the beginning of the 1655 edition
of Philosophical and Physical Opinions, Cavendish reports that people have said that she
must have discussed this work with Descartes and Hobbes (a slightly surprising claim in the
light of her text). She replies that although she has met these great men she has barely
spoken to either of them, and has only talked about philosophy with members of her family,
among whom she names her husband William Cavendish, his brother, Charles Cavendish,
and her own brothers, who were not notable for their philosophical interests. Her husband
and brother-in-law would, however, have been useful informants. Both were close associ-
ates of Hobbes who discussed aspects of his natural philosophy with them during the 1640s.
Both met Descartes while they were in exile in Paris, and Charles Cavendish corresponded
with Descartes as well as expressing admiration for his Principles. These connections may
help to explain the fact that, by the early 1660s, Margaret Cavendish was commenting on
the works of both philosophers in print. On the Cavendish family's connections with these
and other philosophers, see Jean Jaquot, 'Sir Charles Cavendish and his Learned Friends',
Annals of Science 8 (1952), pp. 67-91; Robert Kargon, Atomism in England from Hariot to
Newton (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 54-76.
3
For discussions of Cavendish's natural philosophy, see Stephen Clucas, 'The Atomism of the
Cavendish Circle. A Reappraisal', The Seventeenth Century, 9 (1994), pp. 247-73; Sarah
Hutton, 'In Dialogue with Thomas Hobbes: Margaret Cavendish's Natural Philosophy' in
Women's Writing, 4 (1997), pp. 421-32; G. D. Meyer, The Scientific Lady in England. An
Account of her Rise, with Emphasis on the Major Roles of the Telescope and Microscope.
(Berkeley, University of California Press, 1955). On the gendered character of Cavendish's
natural philosophy, see Sarah Hutton, 'Anne Conway, Margaret Cavendish and Seventeenth-
century Scientific Thought' in Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton eds., Women, Science and
Medicine, 1500-1700 (Stroud, Sutton, 1997); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature. Women,
Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (London, Wildwood House, 1982), pp. 253-74; John
Rogers, The Matter of Revolution. Science, Poetry and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca,
Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 177-211; Lisa T. Sarasohn, 'A Science Turned upside
Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish', The Huntington
Library Quarterly, 47 (1984), pp. 289-307; Lorna Schiebinger, The Mind has no Sex? Women
in the Origins of Modem Science (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1989). A great
deal has been written about Cavendish as an author of plays, poems and Utopias. See for
example Kate Lilley, 'Blazing Worlds: Seventeenth-Century Women's Utopian Writing' in
Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss eds., Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760 (Routledge,
London, 1992), pp. 102-33; Emma Rees ed., Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle,
 THE INNOVATIONS OF MARGARET CAVENDISH 221
One of Cavendish's earliest forays into natural philosophy occurs in her
Poems and Fancies (initially published in 1653) in a sequence of verses out-
lining the principles of atomism, and offering atomist explanations of various
phenomena.4 However, by the time she came to write Philosophical and
Physical Opinions, her first philosophical treatise in prose, she had aban-
doned this view on the grounds that 'the opinion of atoms seems not so clear
to my reason as my own and absolutely new opinions'.5 During the eight or
so years after these absolutely new opinions appeared in print, Cavendish
came to believe that some of her objections to atomism also applied to other
forms of corpuscularianism espoused by mechanist philosophers. The posi-
tion she developed in the revised version of Philosophical and Physical
Opinions, published in 1663, was consequently not so much anti-atomist as
anti-mechanist, and contained the distinctive philosophical claims she con-
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tinued to defend for the rest of her life.6 By this stage, too, she was willing to
set her own views alongside those of the most famous philosophers of her
day, and clarified her own position in Philosophical Letters1 by commenting
on Hobbes, Descartes, Henry More, Jan Baptiste van Helmont and William
Harvey. Subverting a genre in which a female pupil seeks enlightenment from
a male philosopher, she casts herself in the authoritative role of teacher and
expounds her criticisms to a female correspondent.
Shortly after completing this work, Cavendish turned her attention to a
further development within natural philosophy - the efforts of the first
generation of English microscopists to acquire a better knowledge of the
visible parts of living things so that they could formulate more probable
hypotheses about the invisible particles and motions governing their struc-
ture and behaviour. Commenting on the work of Hooke, Power and Boyle
in her Observations on Experimental Philosophy,8 Cavendish dismissed
their experimental approach in favour of her speculative one, elaborated
her objections to the principles of mechanism, and reiterated her alterna-
tive view of natural causation. In her final statement, The Grounds of
Natural Philosophy? she once again summarized her position and discussed
some of its implications in a series of appendices.

1623-1673. Special Number of Women's Writing, 4 (1997); Sophie Tomlinson 'My Brain and
the Stage: Margaret Cavendish and the Fantasy of Female Performance' in Clare Brant and
Diane Purkiss eds., Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760 (Routledge, London, 1992),
134-63; Susan Wiseman, 'Gender and Status in Dramatic Discourse' in Isobel Grundy and
Susan Wiseman eds., Women, Writing, History 1640-1740 (Batsford, London, 1992), 159-77.
4
Henry More had published Democritus Platonissans, an exposition of atomism in verse, in
1646. It is possible that this was a model for Cavendish, who later commented on two of
More's prose works.
5
'A Condemning Treatise of Atoms', included in the prefatory material of the first edition
of Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 1655.
6
Subsequent references to this work (hereafter PPO) are to the 1664 edition.
7
Published in 1664. Hereafter PL.
8
Published 1666. Hereafter OEP.
9
Published in 1668. Hereafter GNP.
 222 SUSAN JAMES
THE REJECTION OF MECHANISM

The trajectory of Cavendish's thought about the most fundamental com-

ponents of the natural world first becomes visible in the 1655 edition of
Philosophical and Physical Opinions, where she asks the reader to take
account of the fact that she no longer favours atomism. The reason, she
explains, is that a universe of atoms would result in 'such uncertainties, such
disproportionate figures, such confused creations, as there would be an infi-
nite and eternal disorder'.10
Cavendish reiterates this point in two later works. Arguing from the
polity to the natural world, as she frequently does, she claims in 1663 that,
if each atom is an entire body, it is fanciful to suppose that they will all
submit to a single government 'any more than if there were several kings in
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one kingdom'.11 Three years later, in Observations on Experimental Phil-

osophy, she supplements this objection with two others: that there can be
no atoms because there are no indivisible particles of matter;12 and that it
is in any case unclear how atoms get their power. 'There is such a stir kept
about atoms, as that they are so full of action, and produce all things in the
world, and yet none describes by what means they move, or from whence
they have this active power'.13 By this stage, however, she was convinced
that, as well as diminishing the appeal of atomism, the first of her objections
told equally against other corpuscular theories favoured by mechanists.
Even if there were no indivisible atoms (as Descartes, for example,
agreed)14 it remained impossible to see how the concussions of minute par-
ticles of inert matter could explain the sheer variety and orderliness of
nature, or how the physical properties of bodies could ensure that their
motions were both regular and diverse.15 Cavendish could have come across
this point in More's Antidote against Atheism,16 one of the texts discussed

10
'A Condemning Treatise of Atoms' (1655). sig. A, 3v.
11
She repeats it three years later in OEP adding that 'The opinion of atoms is fitter for a poet-
ical fancy than for serious philosophy; and this is the reason I have waived it in my philo-
sophical works' (p. 144). On the relation between the ordered natural world and the
ordered polity in Cavendish's writings see, John Rogers, op. cit., pp. 177-211.
12
OEP, p. 138.
13
OEP, p. 119.
14
Descartes, 'Principia Philosophiae' II. 20 in Oeuvres de Descartes ed. Charles Adam and
Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1964-76), Vol. VIII, p. 51. Cavendish explains in the introduc-
tory material to Philosophical Letters that she has had parts of Descartes translated for her,
and goes on to comment on his Principles.
15
Cavendish is a relentless exponent of natural variety and one of her complaints about
experimental philosophers is that 'they do not consider enough the variety of nature's
actions' (OEP, p. 91). She believes that this stands in the way of general explanations and
cites, for example, the great variety of kinds of cold (OEP, p. 96), and of swimming motions
(PPO, p. 151).
16
Henry More, Antidote against Atheism (London, 1653). See for example Bk. 2, ch. 2, pp.
51-2.
 THE INNOVATIONS OF MARGARET CAVENDISH 223
in Philosophical Letters, where he asserts that no one with the least
command of his wits and faculties should be willing to infer all the con-
trivances that are in nature from no other principle than the jumbling
together of matter.17 Cavendish agrees and goes on to pursue the impli-
cations of More's image. Mechanists, she points out, are content to envis-
age bodies subject to so many motions and impacts as to be, in Thomas
White's vivid phrase, in a tumult which 'is even within all bodies'. But bodies
subjected to such wild jumblings and knockings18 would undoubtedly be
damaged, hurt, or even destroyed. 'The several strokes which the several
imparted motions make upon the sentient, and the reaction from the sen-
tient to the external parts, would cause such a strong and confused agita-
tion in the sentient that it would rather occasion the body to dissolve
through the irregularities of such forced motions.'19
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The sheer unimaginability of mechanism thus counted against it; but so

did its conception of motion. As Cavendish interpreted them, mechanists
believed that bodies can be without motion when they are at rest,20 and also
held that motion 'is not something permanently fixed in given pieces of
matter, but something which is mutually transferred when collisions
occur'.21 These views seemed to her to give rise to a string of intractable
difficulties.

For how can motion, being no substance but only a mode, quit one body and
pass into another? One body may either occasion or imitate another's motions,
but it can neither give nor take away what belongs to its own or another's sub-
stance, no more than matter can quit its nature from being matter... Truly,
Madam, that neither motion norfigureshould subsist by themselves, and yet be
transferable into other bodies, is very strange, and as much as to prove them to
be nothing and yet to say that they are something.22

These puzzles suggested that mechanism was seriously deficient even as an

account of inanimate bodies. When she confronted its attempts to explain
thought, Cavendish found herself still more dissatisfied, both by the sug-
gestions of dualists such as Descartes and More, and by Hobbes's material-
ist programme. Her reservations about the Cartesian division between body
and soul were comparatively straightforward, and also struck many other

17
Ibid.
18
Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul (London, 1659), p . 88.
19
O E P , p. 178. See also P L p. 60 and Cavendish's claim that if all local action proceeded from
one motion pressing o n another 'all c r e a t u r e s . . . would be in a perpetual dance, or sliding,
which would produce a very restless life, and wearisome to such lazy creatures as I am'.
PPO, Second Epistle to t h e Reader.
20
See e.g. Descartes, Principia Philosophiae, II. 27. A T VIII, 55. Hobbes, Leviathan ed. R.
Tuck (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), I. 2. F o r Cavendish's responses to
their views see PL, pp. 21, 97-8.
21
Principia Philosophiae, II. 42. A T VIII, 66.
22
PL, p. 98.
 224 SUSAN JAMES
philosophers, including More. How, she asks, can sensory organs consisting
of inert matter convey sensory perceptions 'and serve only like peeping
holes for the mind'?23 And how can the pineal gland mediate between
thought and extension?24 Pursuing these objections, Cavendish recognized
that any dualist theory which treats body and mind as distinct substances
will need to explain how they relate, and her conviction that this cannot be
done is one of her reasons for rejecting More's conception of a material
world animated by an overarching spirit of nature.25
Cavendish's engagement with Hobbes's conception of thoughts as
motions is a good deal more complicated, but in her Philosophical Letters
she initially criticizes him for his mechanism.26 Starting at Chapter 1 of
Leviathan, and focusing on a passage where Hobbes tries to work within a
narrow mechanical framework, she pounces on his claim that sense results
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from the motions of external things pressing on our sensory organs.27 First,
she objects, pressure on the sensory organs does not always result in sensory
perception - for example, a person deep in contemplation may not hear the
noise around them or feel the touch of a hand on their shoulder. Secondly,
two men at a distance can see and hear each other, even when there are
bodies between them.28 These counter-examples (to which Hobbes had
ready answers) are, however, engulfed by a now familiar type of criticism -
that it is impossible to imagine how bodies as soft and light as air can impress
their motions on our sensory organs.29 Summing up her doubts in Obser-
vations on Experimental Philosophy, Cavendish concludes that 'if motion
be no substance or body, and besides, void of sense, not knowing what it
acts, I cannot conceive how it should make such different strokes upon both
the sensitive organ and the brain, and all so orderly, that everything is per-
ceived differently and distinctly... [H]ow absurd it is to make senseless cor-
puscles the cause of sense and reason, and consequently of perception, is
obvious to everyone's apprehension, and needs no demonstration'.30
If the inadequacies of mechanism stem from its conception of bodies -
from the view that motion is not one of their essential properties, and from
a failure to take account of their fragility - a more satisfactory analysis of
the workings of nature must overcome these deficiencies. In the next section
I shall discuss Cavendish's response to the first problem - her contention
that bodies are not inert pieces of extended matter which can only move
once they are moved, but are, on the contrary, self-moving. After that I shall

23
P L , p . xxx.
24
PL, p. 111.
25
PL, pp. 211-19.
26
O n the philosophical relations between Cavendish and Hobbes, see Sarah Hutton, ' I n Dia-
logue with Thomas Hobbes', op.cit.
27
PL, p. 62.
28
PL, p. 18.
29
PL, p. 81.
30
OEP, p. 176.
 THE INNOVATIONS OF MARGARET CAVENDISH 225
examine the way she resolves her objections to the transfer of motion by
appealing to the perceptive powers of material bodies. Taken together,
these arguments deal with her other objection; they depict a natural world
of bodies too frangible to stand up to continuous concussion, which never-
theless survive.

SELF-MOVING MATTER

Matter, Cavendish claims, is self-moving, and bodies are individuated by

their properties. 'The infinite matter being divided by self-motion into crea-
tures or parts, these creatures or parts may have exact figures due to their
properties.'31 Furthermore, because motion is as essential to them as exten-
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sion, they can no more be at rest than be unextended.32 So although there

is still a problem about how self-moving bodies originate (an issue to which
I shall return) to ask why a particular body is in motion is to ask why it is
the kind of thing it is. Cavendish uses her view that specific bodies are indi-
viduated by the self-moving matter of which they consist to draw two
immediate conclusions. First, because motion and matter cannot be dis-
united, motion cannot be communicated from one body to another. The fact
that a billiard ball, for example, consists of a certain piece of self-moving
matter implies that, if it were to communicate any of its motion to another
body, its identity would be changed. But since the impact of a billiard ball
clearly does not alter its identity, it follows that motion is not transferred.
Secondly, Cavendish adopts the view that the natural world is entirely
material, and grafts this on to her conception of matter to arrive at the theo-
logically suspect conclusion that the whole of nature consists only of infinite
matter, which is self-moving.33
Cavendish wants these premises to sustain an account of natural bodies
in all their variety, and, to enrich the resources on which she can draw, posits
matter of three degrees: inanimate; sensitive; and rational. Although in-
animate or gross matter is inert, it is always intermixed with, and carried
along by, self-moving sensitive matter, which in its turn intermingles with
self-moving rational matter.34 So all three degrees occur throughout the
natural world, mixed together in varying quantities and in such a way that
each retains its own identity. Inanimate matter constitutes the first qualities
beloved of the Aristotelians - the lightness and heaviness, density and rarity
of bodies; sensitive matter is responsible for sensation and perception; and
rational matter, the most agile, free and pure of the three degrees, accounts
for knowledge.35 In some entities, where, for instance, a small amount of
31
PPO, p. 5.
32
PPO, p. 17.
33
PPO, p . 1.
34
PL, pp. 24-5.
35
PPO, pp. 1-4,8,13-14.
 226 SUSAN JAMES

rational matter is mixed with a large amount of inanimate matter, we may

be unable to detect any manifestations of sense or knowledge; but in enti-
ties containing parts in which these quantities are reversed, such as the
human head and heart, the usual signs of life and intelligence will normally
be found.36
This tripartite distinction gestures towards a deeply-embedded concep-
tion of a hierarchy of rational, sensitive and inanimate beings, but any such
connotations are immediately undercut by Cavendish's claim that all bodies
possess sense and knowledge. 'Whatsoever hath animate matter and
motion, hath life and knowledge, and if all the inanimate matter is mixed
with the animate matter, then the only and infinite matter is living and
knowing.'37 Moreover, 'Nature has placed sense and reason together, so that
there is no part or particle of nature which has not its share of reason, as
well as sense.'38 Here she takes up a vitalist strand of argument which, as
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John Henry has shown, was more widely espoused than the orthodox his-
toriography has acknowledged.39 During the second half of the century, a
good many English writers basically sympathetic to mechanism neverthe-
less maintained that there were certain types of natural phenomena it could
not explain, and appealed to various active material powers to deal with
difficult cases. In some circumstances, these philosophers made explanatory
use of an active power present in all bodies. Henry Power, for example, one
of the targets of Cavendish's polemics in her Observations on Experimental
Philosophy, posits a material spirit pervading the whole universe, and
agrees with her that the motion 'is as inseparable an attribute to bodies, as
well as extension is', so that 'there can be no rest in nature more than a
vacuity in matter'.40 A comparable view is held by Walter Charleton, a fol-
lower of Gassendi, who adopted a rather condescending tone towards
Cavendish in their correspondence.41 Atoms, he asserts, possess 'an internal
energy or faculty motive, which may be conceived the first cause of all
natural actions or motions'.42 Alongside such thoroughgoing vitalism, an

36
PPO, p. 53.
37
PPO, pp. 12-13. For further statements of this view see PPO, pp. 15-16; PL, p. 287.
38
OEP, p. 92.
39
John Henry, 'Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy: Active Principles in pre-
Newtonian Matter Theory', History of Science xxiv (1986), pp. 335-81. See also John
Rogers, The Matter of Reason, op. cit., pp. 177-211.
40
Henry Power, Experimental Philosophy (London, 1664), sig. b4, b3, c2, p. 61.
41
Charleton wrote to Cavendish in 1654 thanking her for copies of The World's Olio and
perhaps Philosophical Fancies, and wrote again in 1663 to thank her for sending him her
books (though he does not say which ones). In 1667 he sent her a more informative letter,
telling her that he was not persuaded by much of her philosophy, but urging her not to be
discouraged because natural philosophers cannot determine what is true, and must content
themselves with offering plausible conjectures. He is somewhat more complimentary about
her moral philosophy and poetry. Letters and Poems in Honour of the Incomparable
Princess, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle (London, 1676).
42
Walter C h a r l e t o n , Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendi-Charltoniana ( L o n d o n , 1654), p . 126.
 THE INNOVATIONS OF MARGARET CAVENDISH 227
overlapping set of authors influenced by the medical tradition appealed to
vital properties of the parts of living things, which they described as sense.
Charleton is a case in point. In the course of explaining how the excretion
of bile is caused by irritation of the gall bladder, he pauses to ask whether
his readers will not object that this talk of irritation implies some sense other
than that of the sensory organs or common sense, and accuse him of imag-
ining it. He argues in reply that the bodily actions and motions which phys-
icians call natural do indeed presuppose a kind of sense, so that parts such
as the heart, stomach, guts and womb all possess natural sense. As he
explains, this view is opposed to that of the Cartesians who believe that all
bodily actions are caused by motions of the animal spirits in the nerves.
However, it is in line with the position taken by William Harvey, who saw,
in Charleton's view correctly, that bodily organs possess a natural sense
which enables them to respond to irritation or injury.43 Cavendish, too,
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believes that bodily organs possess sense,44 as do animals and plants, and
indeed bodies of all kinds. For instance, using an unexceptional example
which she may have taken from Van Helmont, she classifies the purgative
power of rhubarb as a kind of sense.45 How does the rhubarb 'know' when
to purge? It possesses an ability to 'see' differences between the bodies it
encounters which is analogous to our power of vision, so that it is appro-
priate to describe its ability as a kind of sensing, which depends on a kind
of knowledge. 'Certainly sense is knowing, not only in distinguishing several
objects from one another, but for direction... And to prove the senses have
knowledge, I say the eyes direct the whole body . . . to go just to that
designed place without the mind's further notice.'46
Writers whose aim in appealing to vital motions was to strengthen
mechanism rather than attack it evidently saw no incompatibility between
the claim that bodies possessed 'a power motive' and the claim that their
behaviour could be explained as the result of the impacts of bodies on each
other.47 Hobbes, for example, although he does not use the language of
vitalism, explains phenomena ranging from the properties of inflated blad-
ders to sense perception by appealing to the interrelation between the pres-
sure exerted by one body on another, and the respective endeavours of the

43
Walter Charleton, A Natural History of Nutrition, Life and Voluntary Motion (London,
1659), pp. 119-25. For further discussion of the debate about irritability see John Henry,
'Medicine and Pneumatology: Henry More, Richard Baxter and Francis Glisson's Treatise
on the Energetic Nature of Substance', Medical History 31 (1987), pp. 15-40.
44
PL, p. 46.
45
PL, p . 514.
46
PPO, p . 79. See also P L pp. 517-19.
47
At least some of the time, mechanists insisted that matter is inert, and opponents writing
in mid-century such as Cavendish and More fixed on this description. It is interesting that
both parties tied themselves to a characterization of the position which was to some extent
out of line with the claims its exponents made.
 228 SUSAN JAMES
bodies concerned.48 Endeavour, to be sure, is motion; but it is simul-
taneously the capacity of a body to react to external pressure by resisting it,
so that there is a sense in which, by virtue of their endeavour, bodies are
not inert. It is consequently quite a small step from the claim that a body
has endeavour to the claim that it has vital motion. Both More and
Cavendish grasped this implication and seized, for differing reasons, on
Hobbes's view that we see, hear and so on when our sensory organs resist
the motions caused by the pressure of external objects. 'Sense', as Hobbes
had put it, 'is a phantasm, made by the reaction and endeavour outwards in
the organ of sense, caused by an endeavour inwards from the object,
remaining for some time, more or less.'49 But if the endeavour of a sense
organ is sense, and if all bodies possess endeavour, why is it not true,
Cavendish wanted to know, that all bodies sense? And if bodies can sense
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- if they respond selectively and regularly to aspects of their environments

- must they not be guided by knowledge? Hobbes, she thinks, resists this
conclusion on inadequate grounds: 'But your author seems to make all
sense, as it were, one motion, but not all motion sense, whereas surely there
is no motion but is either sensitive or rational.'50 As we have seen,
Cavendish found these conclusions profoundly attractive; and as we shall
see in a moment, Henry More found them completely unacceptable. For
him, the suggestion that 'if any matter have sense it will follow upon reac-
tion and all shall have the like; and that a bell while it is ringing and a bow
while it is bent shall be living animals'51 amounted to a reductio, and inval-
idated a premise with dangerous theological implications.
As well as taking the road from vital motion to sense, it was possible to
argue in the other direction. The proposition that a complex body such as a
gall bladder has natural sense may be understood as a way of saying that it
possesses certain distinctive internal motions which enable it to respond to
particular stimuli, for example to excrete bile. A philosopher in a position to
analyse this capacity would no doubt find that the pressure exerted by one
sub-body on another played some role in explaining it; but - so the advo-
cates of vital motion surmised - he or she would also have to take account
of the internal motions of these sub-bodies - their endeavours or motive fac-
ulties. Ingenious exponents of the New Science were often content to
hypothesize along these lines without paying much attention to the precise
border between strict mechanism and appeals to vital motion. There was,
however, a border to be respected, and writers such as Cavendish and More,
who continued to believe that mechanists were committed to the inertness
48
T h o m a s H o b b e s , ' O f Body' in The English Works ed. Sir William Molesworth 11 vols.
(London, 1839-45), vol. I, pp. 211, 391.
49
Thomas Hobbes, 'Of Body' in English Works ed. Molesworth, vol. I, p. 391. For Cavendish's
criticisms see OEP, p . 235.
50
PL, p. 27.
51
Cavendish quotes and comments on this passage from The Immortality of the Soul at PL,
pp. 168-9.
 THE INNOVATIONS OF MARGARET CAVENDISH 229
of matter, insisted that one had to remain on one side or the other. From this
shared premise, they arrived at radically divergent conclusions. More argued
that, since all matter is inert, any natural phenomena which cannot be
explained in strictly mechanist terms must be the result of the activating
power of non-material spirit. So while the effects of minerals, metals and
sundry meteors may be explained without recourse to any vital principle, the
behaviour of living bodies must be attributed to their souls.52 Cavendish,
however, jumped the other way. Because inert matter cannot account for any
features of the diverse and ever-changing natural world, all matter is self-
moving and possesses both sense and knowledge.
In the context of seventeenth-century natural philosophy, this vitalism is
not extraordinary; but Cavendish's wholehearted version of it is neverthe-
less unusual. If, as John Henry has recently argued, vitalists writing as early
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as the 1660s often took care not to say that matter was perceptive or intel-
ligent,53 Cavendish is certainly an exception. She repeatedly makes these
very claims, and when discussing the objection that some bodies do not, so
far as we can tell, either sense or reason, counters that just because they do
not possess animal sense and knowledge (the sort we can detect) it does not
follow that they possess no sense or knowledge at all.

All things have sense, by reason all things have animate matter, and if all things
or creatures have sensitive animate matter, why not rational animate
matter? . . . If so, why may not vegetables, minerals and elements have as much
animate matter, both sensitive and rational, as animals? which is, to have a sen-
sitive life and rational knowledge, only they want the animal shape or figure,
and such sorts of motions as are proper to the animal creature, to express their
sense and knowledge in the animal way; for had vegetables, minerals and ele-
ments the same shape created by the Creator, which is the animate matter and
motion, there might be vegetable, mineral and elemental men, beasts, fowls and
fish, as also there might be animal vegetables, minerals and elements.54

More cautious vitalists may have been sensitive to the difficulty of making
non-reductive sense of the idea that a stone, for example, can know, and
may also have been anxious to avoid sliding back into a world of
unanalysable occult qualities from which, as they saw it, they had only just
emancipated themselves. But they were also moved by religious consider-
ations, and by the danger (voiced by More and subsequently by Cudworth)
that vitalism amounted to a form of atheism. If mechanism already mar-
ginalized the place of God in the material world, vitalism seemed to make

52
More, Antidote, p . 61. See also p . 52. While More allows this much t o mechanism, h e else-
where suggests that all natural motions must be caused by a spirit of nature.
53
Henry, 1986, op. cit., p . 356.
54
P P O , p . 15. Cavendish takes u p these speculations in her Utopia, The Description of a New
World called the Blazing World, ed. Kate Lilley (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1994),
pp. 133f.
 230 SUSAN JAMES
the problem worse. Self-moving matter did not need God to start it up, let
alone to maintain it in motion; and once sense and reason (the traits tra-
ditionally associated with the immaterial soul) were transferred to matter,
nature emerged as self-sufficient. The doctrinal consequences of this were
deftly identified by More, who regarded the view 'that everything has sense,
imagination and a fiducial knowledge of God in it, metals, meteors and
plants not excepted' as a kind of enthusiasm tantamount to atheism.55 Yet
this is the very position that Cavendish holds. Nature, she explains at the
beginning of her discussion of More's work in Philosophical Letters, fears,
adores, admires, praises and prays unto God, as do all her parts and crea-
tures, including man, 'so that there's no atheist in infinite nature'.56 Indeed,
any other view should arouse suspicion.
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Surely, Madam, the God of nature, in my opinion, will be adored by all crea-
tures, and adoration cannot be without sense and knowledge... I should rather
think it irreligious to confine sense and reason only to man, and to say that no
creature adores and worships God but man; which, in my judgement, argues a
great pride, self-conceit and presumption.57

Cavendish never qualifies this view, although she is aware of the challenges
to which it exposes her. In Observations on Experimental Philosophy she
denies that atheism and materialism are connected, denouncing those who
think 'that the exploding of immaterial substances, and the unbounded pre-
rogative of matter, must needs infer atheism',58 and elsewhere she professes
her loyalty to the Church, for which, she claims, she would sacrifice her life
or suffer torment.59 At a less declamatory level, she also counters an argu-
ment discussed by Boyle to the effect that the conception of the world as
eternal, espoused by the atheists Lucretius and Anaxagoras, depended on
the claim that motion is an essential property of material bodies, so that
people who adopted this latter view (as Cavendish did) undermined the
Christian doctrine of the creation.60 Cavendish addresses this argument in
her Philosophical Letters by putting it into the mouth of her anonymous
lady correspondent, who proposes that if nature is self-moving and there-
fore eternal, it is coeval with God. God, Cavendish responds, is certainly
eternal and the creator of matter; but because He is not bound by time we
do not need to infer that matter is not eternal from the fact that He created
55
More, Brief Discourse of... Enthusiasm (1656). Ralph Cudworth, True Intellectual System
of the Universe ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1820), vol. 1, pp. 234-6; vol. 3, pp. 275-6. It has
been argued that Cudworth's attack o n hylozoism is aimed at Cavendish. See John Rogers,
op. cit., p . 194.
56
PL, pp. 145-6. See also PL, p . 318; GNP, p . 237.
57
PL, p. 519.
58
O E P , p . 299.
59
PL, p . 17.
60
Robert Boyle, 'Some Considerations touching the usefulness of Experimental Natural Phil-
osophy' (1663) in Works ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1772) Vol. II, pp. 42-3.
 THE INNOVATIONS OF MARGARET CAVENDISH 231
it. Furthermore, although God created matter, he may have played an indi-
rect role in the creation of this world which, as we know from the Bible,
took seven days. Since there may have been worlds before ours, this world
may have been created out of previously existing matter. If so, it was created
by God's command, but the executor of the command was self-moving
nature.61
Speculations like this were hardly calculated to strengthen Cavendish's
claims to religious conformity. They are, however, of a piece with her strict
separation of philosophy and religion, which was in turn calculated to leave
philosophers free to speculate about nature. Philosophy, she asserts, is built
on sense, reason and observation, and theology on implicit faith, so the two
cannot agree. Furthermore, while God is unknowable, philosophy is the
light he gives to man to direct him in the course of his life. This attempt to
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remove the interests of philosophers from those of the Church would not
have satisfied many of Cavendish's contemporaries, and some of the terms
in which she describes her work would if anything have reinforced their
view of the connections between vitalism and atheism. Introducing her
readers to the revised edition of Philosophical and Physical Opinions, for
instance, Cavendish asks them to note that she does not meddle with the
particular souls of men, but concerns herself only with the general soul of
nature or rational matter, and the general life of nature or sensitive matter.
Here she allows that men have particular souls, and elsewhere distinguishes
natural souls from divine ones.62 But it is striking that the latter play no role
at all in her inclusive notion of nature, and their function is not discussed.

EXPLAINING CHANGE - PERCEPTION

Self-motion enables Cavendish to deal, after a fashion, with the first of her
objections to mechanism: that if matter is inert, we cannot explain the prop-
erties of natural things. But she still has to cope with her second reserva-
tion: that these properties cannot result from the transmission of motions
from one body to another, whether they are self-moving or not. In develop-
ing an alternative account of natural causation, Cavendish relies on the stan-
dard distinction between processes by which new entities are created, and
processes in which the contingent properties of existing entities alter -
between, for example, the generation of an embryo and a change of colour
in a flower. With some minor qualifications, she believes that many natural
events belong to one of these kinds, so that a philosopher who could account
for both of them would have provided a fairly comprehensive theory of
change.
Taking the second type of causation, Cavendish attributes changes in the

61
PL, pp. 13-17. For Cavendish's view that matter is eternal see PPO, p. 2.
62
PL, p. 111.
 232 SUSAN JAMES
contingent properties or accidents of bodies to what she calls perception, a
process which has a familiar ring in the context of animal perception, but
which she also extends to bodies of other kinds. The motions intrinsic to a
body, which distinguish it from the rest of matter, form it into a figure - an
object with a particular set of properties such as shape, density or colour.63
So, for example, a dog has a figure. When a woman sees the dog, its figure
is copied, imitated, printed or 'patterned out' by the sensitive matter of her
eye which senses or perceives it; when she hears the dog bark, the figure of
the sound is patterned out in her ear; and so on.64 At the same time, each
of these figures is patterned out by the rational matter in the woman's body
to form an integrated figure of a dog with several sensory properties.
Cavendish appeals to this notion of perception to explain a formidable
variety of changes in what are normally considered both animate and in-
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animate bodies. The eye patterns out light (which, being a body, possesses
self-motion and consequently figure)65 and the external parts of bodies
pattern out heat and cold. A looking-glass patterns out a face, a billiard ball
patterns out a figure of another ball which collides with it (and in each case,
the rational matter patterns out this figure in its turn). The lens of a micro-
scope patterns out the figure of a louse;66 a shadow may be patterned out
by the ground;67 and snow patterns out a footprint.68 The crucial thing to
grasp about all these cases is that perception does not depend on the move-
ment of species, atoms, or corpuscles, or on the pressure exerted by one
body on another. 'I see a man or beast; that man or beast doth not touch
my eye in the least; but the sensitive corporeal motions straight upon the
sight of the beast or man make the little figures in the sensitive organ, the
eye.'69 Equally, when a person throws a ball into the air, the ball is the cause
of its own movement. 'I will not say', Cavendish qualifies, 'but that it may
have some perception of the hand according to its own figure; but it does

63
Cavendish does not accept a distinction between primary and secondary qualities, so that
in her view colour, as much as shape, is a real property of the object. PPO, pp. 81-6; OEP,
p. 175.
64
PL, p. 127. Cavendish's preferred term is 'patterning' or 'patterning out': PL pp. 539-40. It
is used by Hobbes, in a passage Cavendish quotes and discusses. 'Some natural bodies have
in themselves the pattern of almost all things, and others none at all.' Hobbes, 'Of Body',
in English Works, ed. Molesworth, vol. 1, p. 389. It is also used in the English translation of
Jan Baptiste Van Helmont's work, Oriatrike or Physic Refined, which Cavendish discusses
at length in Philosophical Letters: 'The seminal efficient cause containeth the types of pat-
terns of things to be done by itself, the figure, motion, hour, respects, inclinations, fitness,
equalisings, proportions, alienation, defects and whatsoever falls under the succession of
days, as well in the business of generation as of government' (p. 29).
65
PL, p . 541.
66
OEP, p. 8.
67
P L o n More, xxiv.
68
PL, pp. 104-5.
69
PL, p. 70. 'The sensitive and rational corporeal motions in one body pattern out the figure
of another body, as of an external object, which may be done easily without any pressure
or reaction.' PL, p. 68. See also PL, p . 20.
 THE INNOVATIONS OF MARGARET CAVENDISH 233
not move by the hand's motion but by its own', and the hand is only the
occasion of its moving.70
Perception, itself a kind of autokinesis, was a reasonable hypothesis for
someone who believed that bodies would be destroyed by concussions, and
that motion cannot be transmitted. Nor was it entirely novel. Although
Cavendish presumably did not know it, More and Descartes had discussed
something along these lines in a correspondence dating from 1649. More
had confessed:

I feel more disposed to believe that motion is not communicated, but that from
the impulse of one body another body is so to speak roused into motion, like
the mind to a thought on this or that occasion . . . neither [the motion nor the
thought] is received into the subject, in fact, but both arise from the subject in
which they are found.71
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'You rightly judge', Descartes responded, 'that motion in so far as it is a

mode of the body, cannot pass from one body to another. But I have never
asserted it to be so transmissible.'72 It is hardly surprising that this aspect of
Descartes's view escaped Cavendish. It also escaped many people who were
able to read his work more thoroughly than she, and only began to be
explored in print by Cartesians in the second half of the 1660s.73 Like
Descartes himself, they of course rejected the idea that bodies were capable
of self-motion, and argued instead that they were moved by God.
Other exponents of the non-transmissibility of motion, including two
writers with whom Cavendish was familiar, leaned more in the direction of
autokinesis. One of these was the elder Van Helmont, sometimes cited as
an influence on Leibniz.74 Van Helmont does indeed argue that the gener-
ation and government of bodies (vegetable and mineral as well as animal
ones)75 is controlled by the Archeus or 'inward worker or agent'. In the case
of animal generation, a father 'hath the reason of nought but an external
cause and occasionally producing', whereas the efficient cause is the
Archeus. 'The seminal efficient cause containeth the types or patterns of

70
OEP, p. 163.
71
A T (NP), 5: 383. Quoted in Alan Gabbey, 'Philosophia Cartesians Triumphata: Henry
More (1646-1671)' in T. M . Lennon, J. M . Nicholas, J. W. Davis eds., Problems of Car-
tesianism (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1982), p . 211.
72
Letter to Henry More, August 1649, A T 5, 403-4. O n Descartes's efforts to explain t h e
motion of bodies, see D e s m o n d M. Clarke, 'The Concept of Vis in Part III of the Principia'
in Descartes: Principia Philosophiae (1644-1994). Atti del Convegno per il 350° anniversario
della publicazione dell'opera (Napoli, 1996), pp. 321-39.
73
e.g. Geraud de Cordemoy, Discernment du corps et de l'ame (1666) and Louis La Forge,
Traité de l'esprit de l'homme (1666). See C. McCracken, Malebranche and British Philos-
ophy (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 94-5.
74
S e e e.g. Catherine Wilson, Leibniz's Metaphysics (Manchester, Manchester University
Press, 1989), p . 175.
75
Oriatrike, p . 30.
 234 SUSAN JAMES
things to be done by itself, the figure, motion, hour, respects, inclinations,
fitness, equalisings, proportions, alienation, defects, and whatsoever falls
under the succession of days, as well in the business of generation, as of
government.'76 Cavendish relentlessly satirizes this view (which is not to say
that she learned nothing from it), criticizing Van Helmont for obscurity,77
and for appealing to immaterial entities to explain how the soul moves the
body.78 It is therefore not clear how far she relies on his work, and to what
extent her account of perception derives from it. Closer to home, the idea
of autokinesis is also indirectly raised by Hobbes in De Corpore which
Cavendish had read carefully in the English translation of 1656. In this
work, Hobbes takes motion to be an accident of bodies, and holds the
general view that accidents do not go out of one subject into another. It
follows that motion cannot leave the body in which it occurs; 'for example,
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when the hand, being moved, moves the pen, motion does not go out of the
hand into the pen;... but a new motion is generated in the pen, and is the
pen's motion'.79 In Philosophical Letters, Cavendish comments approvingly:
'I am of his opinion that the motion doth not go out of the hand into the
pen, and that the motion of the pen is the pen's own motion.'80 She also
develops a comparable example — carving a piece of wood by hand — to
explain patterning out to her correspondent.

Madam, give me leave to ask you this question: whether it is the motion of the
hand, or the instrument, or both, that print or carve such and such a body? Per-
chance you will say that the motion of the hand moves the instrument, and the
instrument the wood which is to be carved; but I answer, how can it be the
hand's motion if it be in the instrument? You will say, perhaps, the motion of
the hand is transferred out of the hand into the instrument, and so from the
instrument into the carved figure; but give me leave to ask you, was this motion
of the hand, that was transferred, corporeal or incorporeal? If you say corpo-
real, then the hand must become less and weak, but if incorporeal, I ask you
how a bodiless motion can have strength to carve and cut?... But I pray,
Madam, consider rationally, that though the artificer or workman be the
occasion of the motions of the carved body, yet the motions of the body which
is carved are they which put themselves into such and such a figure, or give
themselves such and such a print as the artificer intended... Wherefore I say
that some things may be the occasional causes of other things, but not the prime
or principal causes.81

76
Oriatrike, p . 29.
77
'For who is able to conceive of all those chimeras and fancies as the Archeus, Ferment,
various Ideas, Blas, Gas and many more, which are neither something nor nothing in
nature, but betwixt both, except a man have the same fancies, vision and dreams your
author had.' PL, p. 238.
78
PL, p . 276.
79
T h o m a s H o b b e s , ' O f Body' in Molesworth ed., English Works, vol. 1, p . 117.
80
PL, p. 54.
81
PL, pp. 77-9.
 THE INNOVATIONS OF MARGARET CAVENDISH 235
Cavendish seems to have developed this view around the time when she was
systematically working through the texts discussed in Philosophical Letters.
We first encounter it in the 1663 edition of Philosophical and Physical
Opinions, and she struggled to refine it in the works she published over the
next five years. By this stage she was already committed to the view that
nature is entirely material, and so was in a position to reject Van Helmont's
and More's immaterial principles and to welcome Hobbes's materialism.
She had also arrived at the judgement that matter is self-moving, and there-
fore disagreed with More and Descartes who, as she read them, regarded it
as inert. Finally, she was clear that there was no transmission of motion, and
was therefore ready to agree with both Hobbes and Van Helmont on this
score. That left the question: What explains sensory perception, and a vast
range of other alterations in the properties of bodies? At this point Van
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Helmont's notion of autokinesis may have proved suggestive; but it is also

significant that, in one of her principal expositions of patterning out,
Cavendish adapts an argument offered by Hobbes.
Working with her conception of patterning out, it remained for Cavendish
to provide a fuller account of natural causation. Why do bodies of different
kinds pattern out different kinds of figures? More generally, what enables
bodies to respond to one another at all? Cavendish's answer to the first
question presupposes that she can deal with the second. The responsiveness
of a particular type of body is determined by the combination of inanimate,
sensitive and rational matter of which it is composed, and the motions to
which this mixture gives rise. For example, the composition and associated
motions of a body explain the fact that it possesses, or fails to possess,
animal sense.82 However, while the language of sensory perception and
knowledge lends an impression of completeness to this account, the second
question remains to be answered. If there is no physical contact between
bodies, how are we to account for the co-ordinated character of the inter-
actions? Why, for instance, does snow pattern out the print of a boot just at
the moment when (as Hobbes would say) the boot exerts its pressure?
Cavendish acknowledges the validity of this question, but does not regard
it as posing a serious threat, partly because she believes she can answer it,
and partly because she is persuaded that her view is in fundamental ways
superior to its competitors, dualism and mechanism. This latter conviction
emerges in her discussion of a series of objections raised by More, where
she freely admits that certain features of patterning out remain deeply mys-
terious.83 Although we know from experience that the sensory organs (and
by inference other bodies as well) can pattern out many figures at once, and
that comparatively small organs can pattern out much larger figures, we do
not understand how this is done, and can only imagine nature as a supreme

82
PL, p. 169.
83
PL, pp. 154-81.
 236 SUSAN JAMES
artist, like a carver who can carve several figures on a cherry stone.84
Although we know that rational matter can pattern out millions of figures,
and although we can speculate about its physical structure, which may, for
instance, resemble that of a screen or a fan, we cannot give a satisfactory
account of its power.85 Nevertheless, this level of ignorance is less grave than
that faced by More himself, who is unable to explain how immaterial souls
can animate material bodies,86 or by mechanists who can only appeal to the
patently inadequate properties of inert matter.87
Focusing for a moment on mechanist accounts of causation, Cavendish
adds a further objection to those already discussed. We know that our
sensory organs can pattern out a figure of a body when both light and the
body are absent.88 We perceive figures in dreams, in various kinds of illness
and in waking fantasies, and can infer that a man who was blind, deaf and
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dumb would still pattern out some figures, although we cannot say what they
would be like. Since such non-veridical figures are sometimes qualitatively
indistinguishable from veridical ones, an adequate theory of perception
must not only account for both, but also account for both in the same way.
Philosophers who believe that normal sensory perceptions have external
causes meet the first of these conditions, usually by attributing veridical per-
ceptions to the motions of external objects and non-veridical ones to
motions of the body or soul. But precisely because they distinguish these
processes, they fail to satisfy the second condition. In adopting this
approach, Cavendish seems to believe that they illicitly divide a class of
events which, on phenomenological grounds, requires to be treated as one,
thereby falling short of a theory such as her own, which consequently pos-
sesses a significant advantage.
It is possible that this assimilation of perception to imagination has auto-
biographical roots in Cavendish's own fantasy, which seems to have been
exceptionally vivid, and a source of great pleasure to her.89 Nonetheless, it
has radical implications. Like the causes of our involuntary fantasies, those
of our perceptions lie within the body, and our capacity to pattern out
depends not so much on our environment as on our own physical organiz-
ation. Cavendish may have been aware of the sceptical drift of this argu-
ment. (If the causes of a non-veridical perception of a candle are the same
as those of a veridical one, can we reliably tell the difference between

84
PL, p. 172.
85
PPO, p. 268. Descartes, too, when discussing memory, hypothesizes that the matter in our
brains is folded like paper or cloth. See e.g. Letter to Mesland, 2 May, 1644. AT IV, 114-15.
86
P L , p . 149.
87
OEP, p. 163.
88
GNP, pp. 55-6; PL, p . 63.
89
F o r instance, she describes a winter during her exile in Antwerp when she watched young
men and women sliding on t h e ice, longing to join them, yet too careful of her dignity to
leave her carriage. Instead, she went home and imagined how she 'would slide as one of the
skilfullest and most practised'. Sociable Letters, cxc.
 THE INNOVATIONS OF MARGARET CAVENDISH 237
them?) However, she does not take it up and, throughout her work, defends
a common-sense kind of realism.90
While Cavendish frequently works with a relatively small number of
explanatory categories and resists what she regards as an excessive tendency
to multiply types of natural causes, she does not spell out the strengths of a
unified account of perception and imagination in any more detail, or explain
why the phenomena should be granted such authority in this case, although
not in others. In general, however, her arguments in favour of patterning out
are underpinned by her firm conviction that her view achieves more than its
rivals. By positing a single, natural substance, it sidesteps the need to explain
how distinct substances interact, a rock on which dualism founders. By posit-
ing self-moving matter, it provides a comprehensible ontological basis for
explanations of natural phenomena, which mechanism lacks. Nevertheless,
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her claim that concussion plays no part in accounting for the behaviour of
bodies generates enormous difficulties, among them the issue of harmonious
interaction exemplified by the snow and the boot. Solutions to this problem
that we now classify as occasionalist are barred by Cavendish's refusal to
allot God any active role in nature, and while she describes the presence of
one body as the occasional cause of its figure being patterned out by another,
she does not recognize the kind of deity who might guarantee the coinci-
dence of these events, or produce co-ordinated streams of figures.91 Instead,
she rehearses three naturalistic lines of response. First, nature is full of sym-
pathies and antipathies or 'plain ordinary passions and appetites'.92 Sympa-
thies, she writes, are 'such agreeable motions in one part or creature as do
cause a fancy, love or desire to some other part or creature', and they can
account for several types of phenomena, including actions indifferent to dis-
tance such as the attraction of a compass needle to the North Pole, actions
which require a certain distance such as the attraction of iron to a magnet,
and actions which depend on the contiguity of bodies such as infection by a
disease.93 This somewhat old-fashioned view, which can be applied to the
relations between people or to the destruction of one figure by another,94 as
easily as to the behaviour of minerals and elements, proposes that particu-
lar sympathies and antipathies are activated in particular circumstances, and
that this is why things respond just as and when they do.
Talk of sympathies and antipathies is, for Cavendish, talk of the know-
ledge that bodies possess, but she finds the subject of this knowledge harder
90
See note 63 above.
91
Cavendish argues, against the occasionalist positions which emerged from Descartes's
work, that if God can decree anything, he can decree that nature moves itself: OEP, p. 280.
She may have taken the term 'occasional cause' from Van Helmont (see note 76) but it was
also wider English currency. The OED cites Thomas Wilson's Logicke of 1551, 'Those
causes that are fetched far off, and being but half causes, partly and by the way, give only
the occasion.' 1. I. iii.
92
PL, p . 289.
93
PL, pp. 289-90. See also PPO, p. 70.
94
PPO, p. 110.
 238 SUSAN JAMES
to specify. At some points she claims that individual bodies do not them-
selves contain the knowledge that enables them to respond to external
objects. A knowledge of how to see is not contained in an eye but in a whole
animal body. By some sort of analogy, the knowledge of how to turn to the
sun is not contained in a flower, but in a larger body of which the flower and
the sun are parts. And by inference, the knowledge of all natural responses
is contained in the whole body which is nature itself. How, though, is this
knowledge communicated, so that particular bodies pattern out appropri-
ate and harmonious figures? Reflecting on this problem, Cavendish arrives
at the view that all the figures patterned out by a body are in it eternally.
When a house is pulled down, its figure remains in the materials of which it
was built, however much they are scattered. Moreover, they always did
contain the figure of the house, even before it came into existence. 'Yet
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those infinities would remain in those particular materials eternally and

were there from all eternity.'95 Because nothing in nature is lost or annihi-
lated, Cavendish argues against Hobbes, past and future figures, as well as
present ones, have a being.96 Consequently, as she repeats in her comments
on More, 'although a creature is dissolved and transformed into numerous
different figures, yet all the several figures remain still in the parts of the
matter whence that creature was made'.97 A figure, then, is not just an acci-
dent of a material body, a motion which it contains at one point and subse-
quently loses. Instead it seems to be an entity in its own right which in some
sense survives over time. Moreover the ability of bodies to respond har-
moniously to one another is at least partly due to the fact that they contain
within them all the figures they ever pattern out.98 In these rather inchoate
arguments, Cavendish anticipates some of the ideas subsequently devel-
oped by Anne Conway," and later by Leibniz.
The scope of this set of claims is extended by the fact that Cavendish also
appeals to patterning out to explain voluntary actions. In humans, rational
matter is able to initiate perception by voluntarily patterning out a figure,
as when a builder imagines a house.100 And if the figure is in turn patterned
out by the builder's sensitive matter, he may start to build. At one level, this
naive account of the springs of action rewrites a familiar account of the
transactions between the human body and mind: by some means, mechan-
ical or otherwise, the body receives information from the external world and
passes it on to the rational soul; the rational soul can reflect on it, and signal
back to the body which moves accordingly. Cavendish's distinction between
sensitive matter capable of sensation and perception, and rational matter
95
PPO, p. 96.
96
PL, p. 34.
97
PL, p. 148.
98
PPO, pp. 94-5.
99
A n n e Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. Alison
Coudert and Taylor Corse (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996).
1OO PPO, p. 49.
 THE INNOVATIONS OF MARGARET CAVENDISH 239
capable of imagination, conception, contemplating, understanding and so
forth,101 has about it an orthodox air which to some extent conceals its char-
acter, a character perhaps most clearly brought out by her comments on
Hobbes. For her, as for Hobbes, rational matter is in no way separate from
the body, and voluntary perceptions are no less material, no less embodied
than perceptions of any other kind. But for her, all the operations of rational
matter are instances of patterning out, and there is in this respect no differ-
ence between, say, imagining and reasoning. Whereas Hobbes believes that
there is a distinctively human kind of thinking - reckoning - which
depends on language, and also implies that the capacity to reckon makes
humans superior to animals of other kinds, Cavendish denies this. Reckon-
ing, or making deductive inferences from definitions (which in the Hobbes-
ian account presupposes the capacity to use words), is, she argues, just one
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manifestation of the reason and sense which are possessed by all natural
things,102 and the fact that creatures other than man cannot speak should
not lead us to the conclusion that their intelligence is inferior to ours. Do
not fish know more than we do about water? Birds about the air? Worms
about the earth?103 This is an unusual way of attacking the view that humans
are the pinnacle of creation. While Hobbes and some other philosophers of
the period allowed that non-human animals were capable of making certain
kinds of inference, they all believed that human rationality was superior to
that of other creatures.104 Cavendish, however, suggests that different kinds
of knowledge are unevenly distributed between species.

For there is only different knowledge belonging to every kind, as to animal kind,
vegetable kind, mineral kind, and infinitely more which we are not capable to
know... so that if a man have different knowledge from afish,yet thefishmay
be as knowing as the man.105

What distinguishes men is just the fact that they possess immortal souls;106
when they imagine themselves to be petty gods,107 they overrate their own
power by underestimating the epistemological variety of nature.

EXPLAINING CHANGE - GENERATION

Cavendish sometimes finds it difficult to keep the character of patterning

out in mind when explaining particular phenomena. In Philosophical and

101
PPO, Part II, ch. 9.
102
PL, p. 40.
103
PL, pp. 35-6.
104
PL, pp. 30-5.
105
PPO, pp. 113-14. See also PL, p. 40.
106
PL, p. 35.
107
OEP, pp. 6, 280.
 240 SUSAN JAMES
Physical Opinions, for instance, she claims that sound is received by the
sensory organs in the same manner as light, except that 'instead of drawing
or printing the outward objects received through the eye, the sensitive
matter sets or pricks down notes, or draws lines on the drum of the ear'.108
This passage, and some others like it, are in fact copied straight out of the
first edition of the work;109 and Cavendish adds a note at the end of Philo-
sophical Letters to remind her readers that in later volumes she does not
always manage to express herself accurately. When she talks about printing,
and about 'what the senses bring in',110 she explains, she means patterning:
'not that the external object prints its figure on the external sensitive organs,
but that the sensitive motions in the organ pattern out the figure in the
object.. .'1U Alongside this unclarity, she is not completely sure whether all
perception works by patterning out. In Philosophical Letters she confidently
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asserts that

upon better consideration and more diligent search into the causes of natural
effects, I have found it more probable that all sensitive perception is made by
the way of patterning out, and so consequently the perception of sound and of
light.112

But two years later, in Observations on Experimental Philosophy, she is

more cautious.

Neither can I certainly affirm that all perceptions consist in patterning out ex-
terior objects, for although the perception of our human senses is made that
way, yet Nature's actions being so various, I dare not conclude from thence that
all the various parts and figures of nature are all made after the same manner.
Nevertheless, it is probable to sense and reason that the infinite parts of nature
have not only interior self-knowledge but also exterior perception of other
figures or parts and their actions; by reason there is a perpetual commerce and
intercourse between parts and parts; and the chief actions of nature are com-
position and division which produces all the variety of nature; which proves
there must of necessity be perception between parts and parts.113

This qualification is of a piece not only with her belief that the speculations
of natural philosophers are at best probable,114 but also with her conviction
that several distinct processes contribute to natural change. While percep-
tion may account for some of these, it does not involve any transfer of

108 P P O , p . 302.
109
Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1653), pp. 121, 123.
110
PL, p. 540.
111
PL, pp. 539-40.
112
PL, p. 541.
113
OEP, pp. 163-4.
114
See Lisa Sarasohn, 'A Science Turned upside Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy
of Margaret Cavendish', Huntington Library Quarterly, 47 (1984), pp. 289-307.
 THE INNOVATIONS OF MARGARET CAVENDISH 241
matter, and therefore cannot explain generation or the creation of new
things. As she puts it, 'The action of patterning out is not the action of gener-
ation . . . and generation must needs be performed by the way of trans-
lation.'115
Since there is in the natural world no creation of new matter, any new
object must be made from matter that already exists,116 and when the
motions constituting a body are dissipated, the matter of which it is com-
posed goes to form new entities.117 Destruction therefore precedes creation,
and every new thing is made from something old.118 For generation to occur,
the producers of a body must transfer or translate matter to it, and humans
and many other animals form their progeny by transferring some of their
own parts. As we know, the translation of matter is the translation of
motion, so a creature is capable of moving itself in some fashion from the
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moment of conception. But only as it grows, and its body becomes more
complex, does it gradually develop motions which allow it to manifest more
elaborate forms of behaviour. The motions of a complex body such as a
human cannot be created in an instant;119 instead, it takes time to produce
its various parts, and to enlarge and strengthen them, to the point where it
is capable of animal motion.120 Moreover, this is also true of artificial bodies.
For example, as a shipbuilder gradually adds to the matter of a vessel it
acquires the motions typical of vessels of that kind and the properties (or
as Cavendish would say, perceptions) to which they give rise, such as being
able to float while heavily loaded, or to remain upright in rough water.121
Cavendish is especially interested in the creation of humans and other
animals, but since she believes that all natural bodies are animate, one
would expect her account to apply to at least some minerals, insects and
plants. What, then, of objects which enlarge by accumulation, such as a
deposit of coal? In this case, the initial pieces of plant matter cannot develop
themselves into coal, but must wait for further dead plants and the action
of external forces. This example helps to illuminate two aspects of
Cavendish's account. First, the plant bodies which eventually become coal
must presumably possess motions or sympathies which enable them to
respond appropriately to one another, and to external pressures; and some
of these capacities are only acquired as a comparatively large body of plant
matter accumulates. So some of the motions which account for the behav-
iour of natural things are in this sense emergent. Secondly, many newly-
created bodies, animal and otherwise, are incomplete; they depend on
further transfers of matter both for their physical growth and for the
115
PPO, p. 428.
116
PPO, pp. 20, 419-20.
117
PPO, pp. 95-6.
118
PPO, p. 17.
119
PPO, p. 29.
120
P P O , pp. 31-3.
121
PPO, p. 24.
 242 SUSAN JAMES
development of their appropriate motions or capacities. Returning to the
case of human beings, the motions intrinsic to a foetus become increasingly
complex and various as its body becomes more differentiated. As this
occurs, and by virtue of the very same motions, it becomes capable of an
expanding repertoire of sensations, perceptions and so on, all of which are
manifestations of its bodily structure.122 This process does not stop at birth,
and only when a human is fully physically developed does it attain perfec-
tion.

As all animal creatures require time in their creation, so in their perfection,

which is to have a perfect shape, strength and knowledge proper to the nature
or kind of its figure, by which we may perceive it is not only the motion, but the
quantity of matter that brings a creature to perfection... For if perfection were
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at the first instant, and not by degrees, a child in the womb, or at least a
newborn, would be as big, strong, sensible and knowing as at a ripe old age.123

In this description, human beings are presented as part of nature, and

although Cavendish adds that they possess divine souls, her discussions of
human generation and destruction are wholeheartedly naturalistic. Our
bodies are composed of other bodies, and when we die they dissolve into
their component parts which then recombine into yet further bodies. This
account offsets the idea explored in the previous section, that there exist
self-sufficient bodies which somehow contain within themselves all the
knowledge they need in order to respond to the world around them. It also
fits better with Cavendish's more Spinozist line of argument to the effect
that this knowledge belongs to nature as a whole. The capacities of many
kinds of animals, we can now see, are only acquired gradually, and emerge
from the knowledge contained in the smaller bodies which are progressively
added to them as they grow. At the same time, the fact that nature does not
grind to a halt shows us that part of the knowledge contained in natural
bodies is knowledge of how to transfer parts of themselves to their progeny.
Each species achieves this in its own way. (Cavendish infers that 'black-
amoors or negroes' were produced from Adam because they have the same
way of generation as white men.)124 And the differences between individual
members of a species are due to variations and irregularities in the motions
of their producers.125

122
Cavendish discusses William Harvey's On Animal Generation i n her Philosophical Letters,
agreeing with him about some points, such as that an animal is not perfectly shaped at con-
ception, though criticizing his view that generation occurs by contagion. Her own account
has a good deal in common with Walter Charleton's Natural History of Nutrition, Life and
Motion (1659).
123
PPO, p. 32.
124
OEP, p. 120.
125
PPO, p. 23.
 THE INNOVATIONS OF MARGARET CAVENDISH 243
CONCLUSION

Cavendish has often been presented as an eclectic and wilfully eccentric

author, an image reinforced by her playful fantasies, irreverence towards
other scholars, refusal to be confined by empirical observations, and artfully
undisciplined style of writing. This picture is not completely unfounded, but
it underrates the incisiveness with which she worked through the impli-
cations of her criticisms of mechanism, and created out of them a philo-
sophical position of her own. The distinctiveness of her work was in fact
acknowledged by some of the men to whom she sent copies of her books,
though in ambiguous terms. Joseph Glanvill remarks that her conceptions
are her own, 'your Grace being indebted to nothing for them, but your own
happy wit and genius; a thing so uncommon even among the most cele-
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brated writers of our sex that it ought to be acknowledged with wonder in

yours'. Walter Charleton, writing with heavy eloquence, also extols
Cavendish's originality. '[U]pon all occasions you either produce new
things, or speak old ones after a new manner; so that you stagger the truth
of the saying of the wise man, That nothing is new under the sun'. Such
doubled-edged tributes from members of a philosophical establishment to
a comparatively uneducated, though aristocratic, woman are perhaps not
surprising, and are arguably more generous than the brief letters of thanks
Cavendish received from Hobbes and More. But, with the single exception
of Glanvill, there is no sign that any of these men regarded her work as a
worthwhile engagement with some of the most pressing issues of the time.
Nevertheless, amidst a great deal of detail (such as is to be found in the
writings of many of her male contemporaries) Cavendish outlines a reason-
ably coherent programme, designed to improve on mechanism. She allies
vitalism to materialism to produce the view that the world consists solely of
self-moving matter, and then replaces a mechanist account of efficient
causation with the twin notions of perception and generation. The first of
these moves was accomplished gradually, though it was completed by the
time she revised Philosophical and Physical Opinions. So by 1663
Cavendish had come to espouse a more comprehensive and theologically
unorthodox form of vitalism than those developed by other English writers
later in the century, in which God had only to create self-moving matter.
The second move was made during the 1660s, when Cavendish's repeated
definitions of patterning out testify to her attempts to get it clear. At this
stage one can see her experimenting with ideas which received somewhat
more coherent expression in subsequent decades, in the work of authors
such as Cudworth, Conway, Leibniz and Spinoza.
Increasing interest has recently been shown in seventeenth-century vital-
ism, both as an implicit feature of mechanism,126 and as a doctrine developed

126
See Clarke, op. cit., Gabbey, op. cit., Henry, op. cit., Rogers, op. cit.
 244 SUSAN JAMES
by critics of the New Science.127 Cavendish undoubtedly fits into this tra-
dition. But whereas English vitalism has often been regarded as broadly
Platonist in inspiration, evolving largely under the influence of Henry More,
her work suggests that its sources and forms are more eclectic than this view
allows. As we have seen, Cavendish shared a certain critical stance with
More, while rejecting some of his most deeply held philosophical beliefs. But
both her materialism and her analysis of perception are indebted - in so far
as they are indebted to anyone - to Hobbes, and it is its peculiar blend of
Platonist and materialist strands of argument that marks out her philosophy.

The Faculty of Philosophy

University of Cambridge
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127
See Gabbey, op. cit.; Sarah Hutton, Introduction to Anne Conway, The Principles of the
Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. Alison Coudert and Taylor Corse (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1996).