ARTICLE Te PHILosopHicaL INNOVATIONS OF MARGARET CAVENDISH Susan James Between 1653 and 1668, Margaret Cavendish published a series of volumes 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.! 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 ' 1am extremely grateful to Desmond Clarke, Sarah Hutton, Quentin Skinner and Cather- ine Wilson for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7(2) 1999: 219-244; © Routledge 1999 ISSN 0960-8788220 SUSAN JAMES works of two diverse mechanists, Descartes and Hobbes, were being sub- jected to intense scrutiny.” 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 contemporaries she regarded as either her peers or her inferiors.* ? 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 10 Newton (Oxford, Oxtord University Press, 1966), pp. 54-76. 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 Tumed 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 Modern 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.* 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’. 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- tinued to defend for the rest of her life. 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 Letters’ 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, 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. ‘ 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. 5A Condemning Treatise of Atoms’, included in the prefatory material of the first edition of Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 1655. ® Subsequent references to this work (hereafter PPO) are to the 1664 edition. 7 Published in 1664. Hereafter PL. * Published 1666. Hereafter OEP. ° 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’.!° 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 one kingdom’.!! 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;!* 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’." 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)" 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.'> Cavendish could have come across this point in More’s Antidote against Atheism,'® one of the texts discussed 10 ‘4 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 22 OP, p. 138. 2 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. '5 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.'? 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 knockings'® 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.” ‘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,2° and also held that motion ‘is not something permanently fixed in given pieces of matter, but something which is mutually transferred when collisions occur’! 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 nor figure should 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.” 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 \" Thid. Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul (London, 1659), p. 88. ° OEP, p. 178. See also PL p. 60 and Cavendish’s claim that if all local action proceeded from one motion pressing on another ‘all creatures . . . would be in a perpetual dance, or sliding, which would produce a very restless life, and wearisome to such lazy creatures as T am’ PPO, Second Epistle to the Reader. » See e.g. Descartes, Principia Philosophiae, Ul. 27. AT VILL, 55. Hobbes, Leviathan ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), I. 2. For Cavendish’s responses to their views see PL, pp. 21, 97-8. °\ Principia Philosophiae, U1. 42. AT VIL, 66. = 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’? And how can the pineal gland mediate between thought and extension?” 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.> 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.”6 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 from the motions of external things pressing on our sensory organs.’ 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.” 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.” 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’*" 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 ® PL, p. x. PL, p. 11. 25 PL, pp. 211-19. 2 On the philosophical relations between Cavendish and Hobbes, see Sarah Hutton, ‘In Dia- logue with Thomas Hobbes’, op.cit. » PL, p. 62. 28 PL, p. 18, » PL, p. 81 © 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.”*! Furthermore, because motion is as essential to them as exten- sion, they can no more be at rest than be unextended.*? 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.** 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. 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.*5 In some entities, where, for instance, a small amount of ™ PPO, p.5 ® PPO, p. 17. * PPO, p. 1. M PL, pp. 24-5. * 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.%6 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.’>” 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.’** Here she takes up a vitalist strand of argument which, as John Henry has shown, was more widely espoused than the orthodox his- toriography has acknowledged.*° 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’.“° A comparable view is held by Walter Charleton, a fol- lower of Gassendi, who adopted a rather condescending tone towards Cavendish in their correspondence.*! Atoms, he asserts, possess ‘an internal energy or faculty motive, which may be conceived the first cause of all natural actions or motions’.*? Alongside such thoroughgoing vitalism, an % PPO, p. 53. 3 PPO, pp. 12-13. For further statements of this view see PPO, pp. 15-16; PL, p. 287. * OEP, p. 92. ® 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. © Henry Power, Experimental Philosophy (London, 1664), sig. b4, b3, c2, p. 61. 4 Charieton 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). “2 Walter Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendi-Charltoniana (London, 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. Cavendish, too, believes that bodily organs possess sense,“ 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.** 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.“ 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.” 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 “8 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, PL, p. 46, “PL, p. S14 * PPO, p. 79. See also PL pp. 517-19. 7 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.** 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.’4? 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 —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 cither sensitive or rational.’° 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’! 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 *8 Thomas Hobbes, ‘Of Body’ in The English Works ed. Sir William Molesworth 11 vols. (London, 1839-45), vol. I, pp. 211, 391. + Thomas Hobbes, ‘Of Body’ in English Works ed. Molesworth, vol. I, p.391, For Cavendish’s criticisms see OEP, p. 235. 5 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 #inerals, metals and sundry meteors may be explained without recourse to any vital principle, the behaviour of living bodies must be attributed to their souls.°? 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 as the 1660s often took care not to say that matter was perceptive or intel- ligent,>3 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. 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 ® More, Antidote, p. 61. See also p. 52. While More allows this much to mechanism, he else- where suggests that all natural motions must be caused by a spirit of nature. * Henry, 1986, op. cit., p. 356. “ PPO, p. 15. Cavendish takes up these speculations in her utopia, The Description of a New World called the Blazing World, ed. Kate Lilley (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1994), pp. 133.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. 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’.°° Indeed, any other view should arouse suspicion. Surely, Madam, the God of nature, in my opinion, will be adored by all crea- tures, and adoration cannot be without sense and knowledge . . . [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.*’ 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’,** and elsewhere she professes her loyalty to the Church, for which, she claims, she would sacrifice her life or suffer torment.* 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. 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 on 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. 5? PL, p. 519. 38 OEP, p. 299. PL, p.17. © 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 commatid-was self-moving nature.®! Speculations like this were hardly calculated to strengthen Cavendish’s claims to religious conformity. They are, however, of apiece 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 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." 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 5! PL, pp. 13-17. For Cavendish’s view that matter is eternal see PPO, p. 2. © PL,p. 11.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 partitular set of properties such as shape, density or colour. 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. 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- animate bodies. The eye patterns out light (which, being a body, possesses self-motion and consequently figure)® 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;® a shadow may be patterned out by the ground;*’ and snow patterns out a footprint. 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.’ 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 © 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. 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). 6 PL, p. 541. % OEP, p.8 © PL on More, xxiv. 8 PL, pp. 104-5. © 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 casily 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.”” 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.”! “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.’” 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.”> 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.” Van Helmont does indeed argue that the gener- ation and government of bodies (vegetable and mineral as well as animal ones)’ 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 7 OEP, p. 163. 7 AT (NP), 5: 383. Quoted in Alan Gabbey, ‘Philosophia Cartesiana 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 ” Letter to Henry More, August 1649, ATS, 403-4, On Descartes’s efforts to explain the motion of bodies, see Desmond M. Clarke, “The Concept of Vis in Part III of the Principia’ in Descartes: Principia Philosophiae (1644-1994). Atti det Convegno per il 350° anniversario della publicazione dell’opera (Napoli, 1996), pp. 321-39. ® e.g, Geraud de Cordemoy, Discernment du corps et de !ame (1666) and Louis La Forge, Traité de Vesprit de Vhomme (1666). See C. McCracken, Malebranche and British Philos- ophy (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 94-5, % See e.g. Catherine Wilson, Leibniz’s Metaphysics (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 175. % 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.’ Cavendish relentlessly satirizes this view (which is not to say that she learned nothing from it), criticizing Van Helmont for obscurity,” and for appealing to immaterial entities to explain how the soul moves the body.’8 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, 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’.” In Philosophical Letters, Cavendish comments approvingly: ‘Lam 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.’ 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.‘ % 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. %8 PL, p. 276. * Thomas Hobbes, ‘Of Body’ in Molesworth ed., English Works, vol. 1, p. 117. 8 PL, p. 54, §! 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 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.§* 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.§> 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 ® PL, p. 169. ® 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.*5 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,® or by mechanists who can only appeal to the patently inadequate properties of inert matter.*” 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.'® 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 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.” 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 5 PL, p. 172. 85 PPO, p. 268. Descartes, 100, 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. % PL, p. 149. ® OEP, p. 163. 58 GNP, pp. 55-6; PL, p. 63. © For instance, she describes a winter during her exile in Antwerp when she watched young men and women sliding on the 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, exe.‘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.” 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, 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.! Instead, she rehearses three naturalistic lines of response. First, nature is full of sym- pathies and antipathies or ‘plain ordinary passions and appetites’.°? 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.°3 This somewhat old-fashioned view, which can be applied to the relations between people or to the destruction of one figure by another,” 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 ® Sce note 63 above. % 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 ii, % PL, p. 289. ® PL, pp. 289-90. See also PPO, p. 70. % 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 those infinities would remain in those particular materials eternally and were there from all eternity.”®5 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. 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’.” 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. 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.!° 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 %5 PPO, p. 96, % PL, p. 34. * PL, p. 148, %® PPO, pp. 94-5. %® Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. Alison Coudert and Taylor Corse (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996). 9 PPO, p. 49.‘THE INNOVATIONS OF MARGARET CAVENDISH 239 capable of imagination, conception, contemplating, understanding and so forth,'©' 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 manifestation of the reason and sense which are possessed by all natural things,'°? 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?!" 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.'°4 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 a fish, yet the fish may be as knowing as the man. "05 What distinguishes men is just the fact that they possess immortal souls;!% when they imagine themselves to be petty gods,!"” 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 ‘1 PPO, Part II, eh. 9. “2 PL, p. 40. 105 PL, pp. 35-6. 8 PL, pp. 30-5. 15 PPO, pp. 113-14. See also PL, p. 40. 16 PL, p. 35 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’.!08 This passage, and some others like it, are in fact copied straight out of the first edition of the work;! 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’,!! 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. ..”!!! Alongside this unclarity, she is not completely sure whether all perception works by patterning out. In Philosophical Letters she confidently 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.!!2 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.!!5 This qualification is of a piece not only with her belief that the speculations of natural philosophers are at best probable,!"* 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 PPO, p. 302, 1° Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1653), pp. 121, 123. 0 PL, p. 540. PL, pp. 539-40. PL, p. 541. OEP, pp. 163-4. 14 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. 15 Since there is in the natural world no creation of new matter, any new object must be made from matter that already exists,''© and when the motions constituting a body are dissipated, the matter of which it is com- posed goes to form new entities.!"” Destruction therefore precedes creation, and every new thing is made from something old.''® 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 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;!!9 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.'2" 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.2! 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 4S PPO, p. 428. 46 PPO, pp. 20, 419-20, 4? PPO, pp. 95-6. "8 PPO, p. 17. "8 PPO, p. 29. 120 PPO, pp. 31-3. "21 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.!”? 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 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.!2> 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.)!4 And the differences between individual members of a species are due to variations and irregularities in the motions of their producers.!?5 122 Cavendish discusses William Harvey’s On Animal Generation in 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). 1 PPO, p. 32. 24 OEP, p. 120. 25 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- 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,!” 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.!27 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 "27 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).