Margaret Cavendish's Early Engagement with Descartes and Hobbes: Philosophical Revisitation and Poetic Selection

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Notes

¹ This paper is based on research conducted as part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project (2006–08; project number DP0662857) exploring early modern women's learning.1 I thank Peter Anstey, Jocelyn Harris and participants in the Otago-Sydney Early Modern Seminar, ‘Women, Philosophy and Literature in the Early Modern Period’ (University of Otago, Dunedin, 3–4 September 2009), for valuable feedback on an earlier version of this paper. My thanks also to Edel Lamb and the journal's anonymous readers for their helpful comments.

² M. Cavendish, Poems, and Fancies (London, 1653), sig. A6r.

³ M. Cavendish, The Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London, 1655), sig. B3v.

⁴ M. Cavendish, The Worlds Olio (London, 1655), sig. E2r.

⁵ I rely here on the introduction (1–16) and chapters by S. Gaukroger (17–34), C. Condren (66–89), and K. Green and J. Broad (229–53) in The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity, edited by C. Condren, S. Gaukroger and I. Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). My thanks to Conal Condren for helping me consider this point.

⁶ See L.E. Semler, ‘The Magnetic Attraction of Margaret Cavendish and Walter Charleton’, in Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas, edited by J. Wallwork and P. Salzman (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 55–72; for examples of poetic selection from Walter Charleton in Poems, and Fancies. Cavendish's ‘The She Anchoret’, in Natures Pictures drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (London, 1656), [286b]–357, and ‘The Blazing World’, in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. To which is added, The Description of a New Blazing World (London, 1666), could be said to offer examples of poetic selection in fictive prose. Poetic selection is related to the widely noted practice of blending poetry and philosophy. H. More's Democritus Platonissans (1646) is an often-cited example of seventeenth-century English poetic philosophy, and Lucretius' De rerum natura is the primary classical exemplar. On poetical philosophy, Poems, and Fancies and Lucretius, see E.L.E. Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 54–79. See also: Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England, edited by J. Cummins and D. Burchell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); S. Clucas, ‘Poetic Atomism in Seventeenth-Century England: Henry More, Thomas Traherne and “Scientific Imagination”’, Renaissance Studies, 5:3 (1991), 327–40; and S.M. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

⁷ Philosophicall Fancies (London, 1653), sigs. B6r–v.

⁸ K. Whitaker, Mad Madge: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Royalist, Writer and Romantic (2003; reprinted London: Vintage, 2004), 137–8; and J. Fitzmaurice, ‘Cavendish, Margaret, duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne (1623?–1673)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4940, accessed 13 November 2009. See Cavendish's accounts in her autobiography, ‘A true Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life’, in Natures Pictures, 368–91, at 379–80; and in her The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendishe (London, 1667), 70–4.

⁹ The Life of […] William Cavendishe, 74; Natures Pictures, 378–83.

¹⁰ Whitaker, Mad Madge, 163; Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1652–1653, edited by M.A. Everett Green (1878; reprint Vaduz: Kraus, 1965), 467, 469.

¹¹ Cavendish dedicates Poems, and Fancies to Sir Charles (sigs. A2r-v), includes him in one of its concluding poems (213–14), and praises him in an epistle prefacing The Worlds Olio (sig. A3r). The closeness of their relationship is confirmed in her eulogy, which notes that he was ‘so nobly generous, carefully kind, and respectfull to me’, preserved in ‘A true Relation’, 378–9. See also E.I. Carlyle, ‘Cavendish, Sir Charles (1595?–1654)’, revised by T. Raylor, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4928, accessed 24 November 2009; and J. Jacquot, ‘Sir Charles Cavendish and his Learned Friends: A Contribution to the History of Scientific Relations between England and the Continent in the Earlier Part of the Seventeenth Century’, Annals of Science 8 (1952), 13–27, 175–91 (187).

¹² Whitaker arrives at a similar conclusion: ‘By the autumn of 1652, Margaret had completed a large body of verse’ (Mad Madge, 153).

¹³ The poem is preserved in a bound manuscript of Fane's ‘Fugitive Poetry’ (Houghton Library, Harvard, fMS Eng. 645) and printed in The Poetry of Mildmay Fane, Second Earl of Westmorland, from the Fulbeck, Harvard and Westmorland Manuscripts, edited by T. Cain (2000; reprint Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 292. It is also inscribed on the front flyleaf of the Huntington Library copy of Poems, and Fancies. My thanks to Stephen Tabor, Curator of Early Printed Books at the Huntington, for sending me a photocopy of it in August 2007. Fane's poem is calendared in Historical Manuscripts Commission, Tenth Report, Appendix IV: The Manuscripts of the Earl of Westmorland, Captain Stewart, Lord Stafford, Lord Muncaster, and Others (1885; reprint London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1906), 47. H.T.E. Perry relied on this fact in The First Duchess of Newcastle and her Husband as Figures in Literary History (Boston and London: Ginn and Company, 1918) to suggest that Cavendish's ‘book may have been out by 1652’ (173 n1).

¹⁴ Whitaker confirms the evidence for May 1653 (Mad Madge, 382 n79).

¹⁵ Perry, The First Duchess of Newcastle, 172.

¹⁶ See Fitzmaurice, ‘Cavendish, Margaret’.

¹⁷ Whitaker, Mad Madge, 1, 162.

¹⁸ Perry, The First Duchess of Newcastle, 172.

¹⁹ Letters and Poems in Honour of the Incomparable Princess, Margaret, Dutchess of Newcastle (Savoy, 1676), 142–9.

²⁰ Cavendish, The Philosophical and Physical Opinions, sigs. A3v–4r.

²¹ Whitaker, Mad Madge, 175–6.

²² Whitaker, Mad Madge, 184, 384 n. 63, where she notes the three insertions each titled, ‘Epistle’, in The Worlds Olio, sigs. E3r–4r, H3r–v, [93–94].

²³ Cavendish, Philosophical and Physical Opinions, sig. A4r.

²⁴ Whitaker, Mad Madge, 384 n67.

²⁵ A prefatory poem by Newcastle in Natures Pictures notes that Cavendish's ‘Tragedies and Comedies […] will shortly come out’ (b2r). In her CCXI Sociable Letters (London, 1664) we read that the manuscript of her ‘Playes’ went down with the ship carrying it from Antwerp to England to be printed (295–6). Cavendish reveals that, fortunately, she kept the original manuscript and Playes was published finally in 1662. Since it must have contained material composed before 1656, it is to some degree an early work, but will not be addressed in this essay.

²⁶ For a vivid evocation of Cavendish as a wife and writer in Paris and Antwerp, see Whitaker, Mad Madge, 84–136.

²⁷ Philosophical and Physical Opinions, sigs. A3v–4r.

²⁸ Many critics who refer to the atomism of Poems, and Fancies present it as Epicurean and as Cavendish's first coherent philosophical position, displaced by her adoption of vitalism. A seminal text on her ‘fanciful’ Epicurean atomism is R. H. Kargon's Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 68, 73–6. An important, revisionist development may be found in S. Clucas, ‘The Atomism of the Cavendish Circle: A Reappraisal’, The Seventeenth Century 9 (1994), 247–73 (259–64). Increasingly, critics are emphasising the vitalism, and in the case of Sarasohn the fideism, inherent in the atomism of Poems, and Fancies which draws it closer philosophically to the innate matter theory of its companion text, Philosophicall Fancies. On this, see L.T. Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 34–63; L.T. Sarasohn, ‘A Science Turned Upside Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish’, Huntington Library Quarterly 47 (1984), 289–307 (291); Whitaker, Mad Madge, 144–5; D. Boyle, ‘Margaret Cavendish's Nonfeminist Natural Philosophy’, Configurations, 12 (2004), 195–227, at 199–202, 218; and J. Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 149–51. Some scholars query the critical commonplace of Cavendish's philosophical adherence to the atomism in Poems, and Fancies: see, for example, Boyle, ‘Margaret Cavendish's Nonfeminist Natural Philosophy’, 197, 201 n28; E. Lewis, ‘The Legacy of Margaret Cavendish’, Perspectives on Science, 9.3 (2001), 341–65 (343 n6; and E. O'Neill, ‘Introduction’ to her edition of Cavendish's Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xv–xvi, xviii–xix. A. Battigelli, in Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), provides a sophisticated appraisal of Cavendish's atomist thought, noting her cautious presentation of serious views in fictive genres (9) and the importance of her two English books in importing Gassendi's Epicureanism into England and exploring its ‘philosophical implications […] directly and unapologetically’ (50). Battigelli implies that Cavendish did hold to atomism as a matter theory until she ‘dropped’ it in 1655 (39), but her more important argument is that Cavendish retained atomism thereafter as an explanatory metaphor to deal with ‘political and psychological conflict’ (49; see also 39–40).

²⁹ H. Chalmers, in Royalist Women Writers 1650–1689 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 22–4, suggests that Cavendish's experience as a petitioner for her husband and her connection with the Henry Lawes circle (Natures Pictures, 379–80, 382) may be ‘catalytic’ factors leading to her ‘finding a voice in print’ during her English stay.

³⁰ See R. Hooke, Micrographia: Or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses. With Observations and Inquiries thereupon (London, 1665); J.B. van Helmont, Oriatrike, or, Physick refined. The common errors therein refuted, and the whole art reformed & rectified: being a new rise and progress of phylosophy and medicine for the destruction of diseases and prolongation of life, translated by J. Chandler (London, 1662); M. Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), 1–154 (on Hooke); and Cavendish, Philosophical Letters: Or, Modest Reflections upon some Opinions in Natural Philosophy, maintained by several Famous and Learned Authors of this Age, Expressed by way of Letters (London, 1664), 234–407 (on van Helmont).

³¹ R. Descartes, The Passions of the Soule. In three Books (London, 1650). Thomason's handwritten date on the title-page is ‘May 24’.

³² See Descartes, Passions of the Soule, 54–5 (‘there are but six primitive Passions’); 25–30 (‘a little kernel in the brain wherein the soul exercises her functions more peculiarly than in the other parts’); 27–28 (‘the seat of the Passions is not in the heart’). Sarasohn notes Cavendish's reference to ‘the kernell of the Braine’ in ‘The City of Fairies’ (Poems, and Fancies, 163) and concludes that ‘[t]he home of the king of these atomic fairies seems to be a Cartesian brain’ (Natural Philosophy, 131).

³³ Philosophicall Fancies, 49–52, 65; Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 19–20, 23.

³⁴ See, for example, Cavendish's essay ‘Of the Senses’ (Worlds Olio, 197) which borrows Descartes' bodily mechanics of perception, including his distinction between brain and soul, and his terminology of motion, strings, pipes and pores (Passions, 11–13). The fact that Descartes addresses the mechanics of perception in a Latin letter to William Cavendish in October 1645 is evidence, as Sarasohn says, that Margaret Cavendish ‘probably knew about Descartes’ theory of perception long before she read about it' (Natural Philosophy, 132). We cannot discount the fact that Descartes wrote about these ideas in numerous (manuscript and printed) works in Latin and French, such as the Treatise on Man, and that English manuscript translations could well have circulated in the 1630s–40s. Sarasohn's argument is that while Cavendish was long familiar with the ‘ideas’ of Descartes through William and Charles, ‘she read his work only after she had some parts of his Principia, Dioptics and Discourse on Reason translated into English before writing Philosophical Letters’ (Natural Philosophy, 130). My argument is that while the Cavendish brothers' personal contact with Descartes and knowledge and presumably possession of numerous of his works in the 1640s are utterly relevant to Margaret's awareness of his ideas, we need also to include her own early reading of the English Passions of the Soule in this scenario, because it seems to contribute to Poems, and Fancies, Philosophicall Fancies and The Worlds Olio. In a letter dated 2 December 1653 the exiled royalist clergyman Robert Creighton thanks Newcastle for earlier passing on a copy of Descartes' English Passions to him and now more recently sending him ‘Books’ in ‘Verse and Prose’ by Margaret which must mean Poems, and Fancies and Philosophicall Fancies (Letters and Poems, 88–90). Clearly Descartes' book was very much of the moment in the Newcastle household and Cavendish's earliest works not only draw on it but share its channels of circulation. The English Passions, and the English A Discourse referred to below, do not feature in the sale catalogue of the Newcastle library, but Descartes' Latin and French works and the English Compendium of Musick (1653) are included. See N. Noel, Bibliotheca Nobilissimi Principis Johannis Ducis de Novo-Castro, &c. Being a large Collection of Books Contain'd in the Libraries of the most Noble William and Henry Cavendish, and John Hollis, Late Dukes of Newcastle (London, 1719), (first pagination series) 15, (second pagination series) 45. Descartes' letter to William (October 1645) is translated in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols, translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch and A. Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–91), vol. 3, 274–6. For the Treatise on Man, see R. Descartes, The World and Other Writings, translated by S. Gaukroger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 99–169.

³⁵ See Descartes, Discourse on the Method, in Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol.1, 139–41.

³⁶ R. Descartes, A Discourse of a Method. For the well guiding of reason, And the Discovery of Truth In the Sciences (London, 1649), 93–5.

³⁷ William Cavendish was intimately aware of the argument from at least the time of Descartes' letter to him of 23 November 1646, and probably much earlier. This letter pursues the same line of reasoning as the passage in the Discours and is part of an exchange between the marquess and the philosopher dealing with the rationality of animals. It is translated in Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 3, 302–04.

³⁸ The section responding to Descartes' ideas is Philosophical Letters, 97–136.

³⁹ On Cavendish's Restoration responses to these Cartesian ideas see J. Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 44–55. See also Sarasohn, whose useful discussion of Cavendish's responses to Descartes includes reference to the two letters to Newcastle, Philosophical Letters, and other details (Natural Philosophy, 129–35).

⁴⁰ Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, 111.

⁴¹ Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, 113–14

⁴² See R. Perry, ‘Radical Doubt and the Liberation of Women’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 18 (1985), 472–93 (477–8); E. Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); and the works listed above in note 5. Green and Broad's chapter in Condren, Gaukroger and Hunter (The Philosopher, 229–53) notes Cavendish's ‘unlearned thinker’ persona (240) and its alignment with the English philosophical and scientific interests of men such as William Cavendish, Hobbes, Charleton, and Glanvill rather than merely with Cartesianism (234–5).

⁴³ See Cavendish, Worlds Olio, 139; Poems, and Fancies, 163, 199, 204.

⁴⁴ See Cavendish, Worlds Olio, 138–44; Poems, and Fancies, 93–116.

⁴⁵ See: C. Condren, Thomas Hobbes (New York: Twayne, 2000), 1–10; R. Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 1–39; N. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), 1–26; A.P. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography (1999; reprint Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); L.T. Sarasohn, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Duke of Newcastle: A Study in the Mutuality of Patronage before the Establishment of the Royal Society’, Isis, 90 (1999), 715–37; and Letters 10, 16, 18–19, 21–2, 24 in The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, edited by N. Malcolm, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). In 1645 Hobbes and John Bramhall debated human freedom at Newcastle's house in Paris: see Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity, edited by V. Chappell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Other philosophical discussions there involving Hobbes are noted in The Life of […]William Cavendishe, 143–5. Hobbes wrote a thank-you letter to Margaret Cavendish on 9 February 1662 for a gift copy of her Playes (1662): see Letters and Poems, 67–8; Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, Letter 145.

⁴⁶ Important discussions of Hobbes' closeness to William and Charles Cavendish and/or his philosophical influence on or relevance to Margaret Cavendish's philosophy include A. Battigelli, ‘Political Thought/Political Action: Margaret Cavendish's Hobbesian Dilemma’, in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, edited by H.L. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 40–55; Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish, 57–84; S. Hutton, ‘In Dialogue with Thomas Hobbes: Margaret Cavendish's Natural Philosophy’, Women's Writing, 4.3 (1997), 421–32; S. James, ‘The Philosophical Innovations of Margaret Cavendish’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 7:2 (1999), 219–44; D. Barnes, ‘Familiar Epistolary Philosophy: Margaret Cavendish's Philosophical Letters (1664)’, Parergon, 26 (2009), 39–64; O'Neill, ‘Introduction’, x–xxxvi, and her notes throughout the edition; Rees, Margaret Cavendish, 134–63; L.T. Sarasohn, ‘Leviathan and the Lady: Cavendish's Critique of Hobbes in the Philosophical Letters’, in Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish, edited by L. Cottignies and N. Weitz (London: Associated University Presses, 2003), 40–58; Sarasohn, Natural Philosophy, 48, 56–8, 70–72, 76, 85–102, 114–25; Broad, Women Philosophers, 35–64; J. Broad and K. Green, A History of Women's Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 199–224; N. Ankers, ‘Paradigms and Politics: Hobbes and Cavendish Contrasted’, in A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, edited by S. Clucas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 242–54; J. Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 177–211; and Kargon, Atomism in England, 54–92. Battigelli (Margaret Cavendish, 62) and Hutton (‘In Dialogue’, 422) are absolutely correct to say that Hobbes' influence on Cavendish's work is significant and deserves more attention. E. Spiller, in Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), explores Cavendish's re-use of her own text from Philosophical and Physical Opinions within her Philosophical Letters as part of her response to Hobbes (144–51). This interesting case of philosophical revisitation includes Cavendish's self-revisitation.

⁴⁷ T. Hobbes, Leviathan, Or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (London, 1651); and T. Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy, The First Section, Concerning Body (London, 1656).

⁴⁸ S.B. Blaydes, ‘Nature is a Woman: The Duchess of Newcastle and Seventeenth-Century Philosophy’, in Man, God, and Nature in the Enlightenment, edited by D.C. Mell, T.E.D. Braun, and L.M. Palmer (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1988), 51–64 (54); and Sarasohn, Natural Philosophy, 58.

⁴⁹ Rees, Margaret Cavendish, 161 n88; Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish, 57.

⁵⁰ Sarasohn, Natural Philosophy, 56; Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish, 57.

⁵¹ Sarasohn, Natural Philosophy, 71–125.

⁵² Barnes, ‘Familiar Epistolary Philosophy’, 54–64.

⁵³ She claims only to know English, and not to know Latin or French. See, for example, Poems, and Fancies, sig. A6r; and Philosophical and Physical Opinions, sig. a2r (‘An Epistle to the Reader, for my Book of Philosophy’).

⁵⁴ T. Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (London, 1651). On Cotton as the translator, see Malcolm, Aspects, 234–58. Cavendish's brother-in-law, Sir Charles, was friends with Hobbes, took his own notes on De Cive (1642), as Jacquot notes in ‘Sir Charles Cavendish’, 189 n63, and must be considered a key figure in Cavendish's early awareness of Hobbesian ideas.

⁵⁵ Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments, 15.

⁵⁶ Cavendish, Philosophicall Fancies, 10–14.

⁵⁷ Cavendish, Philosophicall Fancies, 11.

⁵⁸ Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments, 14–16, 14.

⁵⁹ Sarasohn, Natural Philosophy, 58.

⁶⁰ On these publication dates, see Tuck, Hobbes, 26–7.

⁶¹ Cavendish, Philosophicall Fancies, 11–12

⁶² Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments, 14, 15.

⁶³ Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments, 14.

⁶⁴ Cavendish, Philosophicall Fancies, 10.

⁶⁵ Cavendish, Philosophicall Fancies, 10–12, 14.

⁶⁶ ‘Strife’ and ‘strive’ also feature in the account of war given in ‘A Dialogue betwixt Peace, and War’ in Poems, and Fancies (91).

⁶⁷ T. Hobbes, De Corpore Politico. Or the Elements of Law, Moral and Politick (London, 1650). On the complexities of Hobbes' multiple presentations of this theory, see F. Tricaud, ‘Hobbes’ Conception of the State of Nature from 1640 to 1651: Evolution and Ambiguities', in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, edited by G.A.J. Rogers and A. Ryan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 107–23.

⁶⁸ The Newcastle library sale catalogue does not record De Cive, Philosophicall Rudiments or De Corpore Politico, but does list Humane Nature and English and Latin versions of both Leviathan and Elements of Philosophy […] Body. See Noel, Bibliotheca (first pagination series) 15, 17; (second pagination series) 41, 42, 58.

⁶⁹ Cavendish, Philosophicall Fancies, 14.

⁷⁰ Blaydes rightly observes that Hobbesian theory ‘lurks’ here, and uses Leviathan as evidence (‘Nature is a Woman’, 54).

⁷¹ My argument here has synergies with Rogers and Barnes. Rogers believes that violent force inflects Hobbes' theory of bodily motion as much as his politics and that Cavendish was alert to and resisted this (Matter of Revolution, 184–7). Barnes presents Cavendish as resisting the ‘unsociable’ implications of Hobbesian force by delineating a theory of nature's innate sociability (‘Familiar Epistolary Philosophy’, 57).

⁷² See Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy […]Body, 8, 84–5, 247–9, 379; and Cavendish, Philosophicall Fancies, 20–67. Cavendish ably defends nature's harmonious self-motion throughout Philosophical Letters (for example, 94–101), in accordance with her mature theory.

⁷³ Cavendish, Philosophicall Fancies, 14–15.

⁷⁴ Battigelli makes a related observation that Cavendish ‘viewed society as a Hobbist-atomist system perpetually on the brink of war, in which mind confronts mind, and moral certainty, moral certainty’ (Margaret Cavendish, 69). My following paragraphs suggest possible sources for the notion of warring atoms.

⁷⁵ See for example, Philosophicall Fancies, 10–15, 37–8.

⁷⁶ See W. Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana: Or A Fabrick of Science Natural Upon the Hypothesis of Atoms (London, 1654), 117–21, 428–34.

⁷⁹ Digby, Two Treatises, 37–8.

⁷⁷ See Semler, ‘The Magnetic Attraction’.

⁷⁸ Sir K. Digby, Two Treatises. In the one of which, The Nature of Bodies; In the other, The Nature of Mans Soule (Paris, 1644). The relevance of Digby and Charleton to Cavendish has been mentioned by a number of scholars but not pursued in detail. See D. Grant, Margaret the First: A Biography of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle 1623–1673 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957), 117, 192–3; Whitaker, Mad Madge, 144; and Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish, 46.

⁸⁰ For example, J. Stevenson, ‘The Mechanist-Vitalist Soul of Margaret Cavendish’, Studies in English Literature, 36 (1996), 527–43 (535).

⁸¹ The theorisation of harmony in warring nature is a challenging objective. Sarasohn's analysis draws parallels with Hobbes' theory. In Philosophicall Fancies, she says, ‘a hierarchy of matter emerges that is both theological and political’, while conflicts between notions of tyranny and unity in nature persist in Philosophical and Physical Opinions (Natural Philosophy, 57, 71).

⁸³ Cavendish, Worlds Olio, 161.

⁸² Cavendish, Worlds Olio, [160]–61.

⁸⁴ See for example, J. Woolfson, ‘The Renaissance of Bees’, Renaissance Studies, 24 (2010), 281–99.

⁸⁵ See Aristotle, Politics, 1252a1–1255a2, translated by B. Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols, edited by J. Barnes (1984; revised edition Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), vol. 2, 1986–91.

⁸⁶ Cavendish, Worlds Olio, 161.

⁸⁷ Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, 279–80.

⁸⁸ T. Hobbes, Humane Nature: Or, The fundamental Elements of Policie (London, 1650).

⁸⁹ Hobbes, Humane Nature, sigs. A6v–7r, A8v.

⁹⁰ Hobbes, Humane Nature, 62–4.

⁹¹ Cavendish, Worlds Olio, 23.

⁹² Cavendish, Worlds Olio, 23–4.

⁹³ Hobbes, Humane Nature, 46.

⁹⁴ See Poems, and Fancies, 58–9, 70–75, 93–5, 98–106.

⁹⁵ See Philosophical Letters, 35–44 (against Hobbes via Leviathan) and 113–14 (against Descartes via Discours). Her defence of animals had for long included a rebuke of human pride (Poems, and Fancies, 93–5, 112–13).

⁹⁶ Cavendish, Poems, and Fancies, 204.

⁹⁷ Rees notes the Cartesian and Hobbesian inflection of the Rational Lord's remarks, but seems unaware of the exact sources (Margaret Cavendish, 143–4). Rees gives an admirably nuanced reading of ‘The Animall Parliament’ that connects it strongly with Hobbes and Harvey (134–63).