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ABSTRACT
In this paper, I explore Margaret Cavendish’s engagement with mid-seventeenth-century debates on spirits and spiritual activity in the world, especially the problems of incorporeal substance and magnetism. I argue that between 1664 and 1668, Cavendish developed an increasingly robust form of materialism in response to the deficiencies which she identified in alternative philosophical systems – principally mechanical philosophy and vitalism. This was an intriguing direction of travel, given the intensification in attacks on the supposedly atheistic materialism of Hobbes (whom she knew personally and to whom she was intellectually indebted). While some scholars claim that Cavendish’s views were not formed out of extensive engagement with contemporary thinkers, I suggest that, on the contrary, Cavendish engaged very closely with the views of More, Hobbes and others – including the vitalist thinker Johannes Baptista van Helmont and the mechanical philosopher Henry Power – on the subject of spirits and spiritual activity.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Professor Sarah Hutton and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
Notes
1 On atheism, see Hunter and Wootton, Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment; Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England, Chap. 7.
2 When quoting from seventeenth-century texts, I always modernise ‘knowledg’ to ‘knowledge’ and ‘then’ to ‘than’ where appropriate.
3 For Hobbes on spirits, see Martinich, ‘The Bible and Protestantism in Leviathan’; Wright, ‘The 1668 Appendix and Hobbes’s Theological Project’; Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan.
4 On personal connections between Cavendish and Hobbes (a long-standing client of the Cavendish family), see Whitaker, Mad Madge; Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind.
5 Cavendish’s views on natural philosophy were not exclusively confined to these seven works (which are listed in the bibliography). However, these are the key texts which mainly deal with important issues in natural philosophy rather than other subjects. In total, Cavendish published more than 20 volumes including poetry, plays, orations, a biography (of her husband) and an autobiography.
6 Cunning (‘Cavendish on the Intelligibility of the Prospect of Thinking Matter’) explores Cavendish’s views on thinking matter; for Cavendish’s correspondence with Glanvill on witchcraft, see Broad, ‘Margaret Cavendish and Joseph Glanvill’. Semler (‘The Magnetic Attraction of Margaret Cavendish and Walter Charleton’) compares some aspects of Cavendish and Charleton’s views on magnetism but his analysis focuses on the early 1650s.
7 Duncan’s analysis, ‘Debating Materialism’, of Cavendish’s materialism relates to her views in 1664.
8 For attacks on the alleged atheism of Hobbes, see Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, and Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan.
9 Glanvill (Scepsis Scientifica, sig. b1r), an Anglican divine and fellow of the Royal Society, was probably thinking (inter alios) of Hobbes, whom he accused of being ‘not very fond of Religion’.
10 On philosophical differences between Cavendish and Hobbes, see Ankers, ‘Paradigms and Politics: Hobbes and Cavendish Contrasted’; Sarasohn, ‘Leviathan and the Lady’; Detlefsen, ‘Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes on Freedom, Education, and Women’; Clucas, ‘A Double Perception in All Creatures’. Hutton, ‘In Dialogue with Thomas Hobbes’, brings out some of the similarities between Cavendish and Hobbes.
11 Duncan explains that he bases this view on Cavendish’s The Philosophical and Physical Opinions ‘Epilog to my Philosophical Opinions’ where she claimed to have read only Hobbes’s De Cive and half of Descartes’s Passions of the Soul. But Cavendish, who had faced allegations of plagiarism at some point between 1653 and 1655, was dissembling – underplaying her knowledge of other philosophers in order to appear more original. On her reading in the 1650s, see Semler, ‘Margaret Cavendish’s Early Engagement with Descartes and Hobbes’.
12 Cavendish lived in exile in Paris and Antwerp with her husband William, a Royalist general, throughout the 1650s, returning to England at the Restoration in 1660. For Cavendish’s intellectual relationship with Sir Charles, see Sokol, ‘Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies and Thomas Harriot’s Treatise on Infinity’.
13 On isolation and exclusion, see Lewis, ‘The Legacy of Margaret Cavendish’, 350; Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish, 7, 13.
14 On Cavendish and the Royal Society, see Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish, 33, and – for an alternative view – Wilkins, ‘Margaret Cavendish and the Royal Society’. Cavendish’s correspondence with Huygens and Glanvill is in Letters and Poems in Honour of the Incomparable Princess Margaret, Dutchess of Newcastle.
15 James, ‘The Philosophical Innovations of Margaret Cavendish’, 220. Cavendish’s relationship with vitalism was complex; on the one hand, she rejected Van Helmont’s view that the world was ‘alive’ with spiritual forces, but at the same time, she embraced the vitalist concept of nature as self-moving, living and knowing. See O’Neill, Margaret Cavendish, x. Cavendish’s adaptation of vitalism with materialism was unique in terms of seventeenth-century natural philosophy and it is for this reason that James, ‘The Philosophical Innovations of Margaret Cavendish’, 219, has described her as ‘an extremely unusual vitalist’; cf. Detlefsen, ‘Reason and Freedom’, 163. Difficulties over which terms to use to describe Cavendish’s thought reflect a broader problem in how to categorise many seventeenth-century natural philosophers; for example, there was a vitalist flavour to the thought of Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, as John Henry, ‘Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy’, 335–81, has shown.
16 By making water his ‘chief Principle of all Natural things’ Van Helmont was dangerously close to the pagan water-worship of antiquity. See Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, 256–7. For an analysis of Cavendish’s critique of Van Helmont in Philosophical Letters, see Clucas, ‘Margaret Cavendish’s Materialist Critique of Van Helmontian Chymistry’.
17 Spirits must be extended in More’s view (A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings, [Immortality], 3) because ‘[…] if a thing be at all, it must be extended’. For influences on More’s concept of incorporeal substance, see Henry, ‘Francesco Patrizi da Cherso’s Concept of Space and its Later Influence’. On the distinction between immaterial spirits and ‘animal spirits’ – the subtle fluid supposedly flowing through the ventricles of the human brain and directing motion in the muscles, see Henry, ‘A Cambridge Platonist’s Materialism’, 173. For Descartes’s views on substance, see Gaukroger, Descartes, 12.
18 Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, 10, 11, 13; Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 155–6; Grounds of Natural Philosophy, 2, 237–8.
19 Van Helmont, Oriatrike, or Physick Refined […], 27; Pagel, Reformer of Science and Medicine; on Conway, see Clucas, ‘The Duchess and the Viscountess’, 132–3.
20 Cavendish’s vitalist concept of matter was in place by 1653 (Philosophicall Fancies). In her first work (Poems, and Fancies), she had adopted an atomistic matter theory inspired by Pierre Gassendi’s revival of Epicurus. On Cavendish’s journey away from atomism, see Detlefsen, ‘Atomism, Monism, and Causation in the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish’.
21 On substance monism, see Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, 111.
22 On similarities between Cavendish’s commixture and Stoic blending, see O’Neill, Margaret Cavendish, xxi–xxii.
23 See also Cavendish, Grounds of Natural Philosophy, 7. Cavendish cannot be described as a thoroughgoing hylozoist since, in her view (Philosophical and Physical Opinions, sig. e1r), the inanimate part of matter was (at least on a conceptual level) dull and ‘Dead’.
24 Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, 178, 188; O’Neill, Margaret Cavendish, xix; Sarasohn, ‘Leviathan and the Lady’, 47 and The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish, 15.
25 Cavendish, Poems, and Fancies, 18 (wrongly paginated as 20); Philosophical Letters, 42.
26 For a discussion of Cavendish’s critique of Hobbes and Descartes’s views on ‘modes’ and ‘accidents’, see Wilkins, ‘The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’, Chap. 5 and Clucas, ‘A Double Perception in All Creatures’, 131, 133. On Hobbes, Descartes and Aristotelian terminology, see Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism, 222.
27 For a slightly different (earlier) view, where she appears to deny that the mind is extended, see Cavendish, The Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 119 (wrongly paginated as 109).
28 On the ‘Spirit of Nature’ as an explanatory principle responsible for a wide range of natural phenomena (for example, thought and motion), see Gabbey, ‘Henry More and the Limits of Mechanism’ and Henry, ‘Henry More Versus Robert Boyle’. For More’s extraordinary claim that Boyle’s pneumatological experiments confirmed the existence of the Spirit of Nature, see Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 207, 211–12. Hutton, ‘Margaret Cavendish and Henry More’, 191, has noted some ‘uncanny’ parallels between the Spirit of Nature and Cavendish’s concept of Nature. Sarasohn (The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish, 136) sees Cavendish’s critique of More in gender terms; it was ‘about sex and power’.
29 Sottish meant foolish, but with connotations of drunkenness.
30 Cavendish (Poems, and Fancies; Philosophicall Fancies; The Philosophical and Physical Opinions) explained natural change in terms of a variety of motions acting upon matter. The absence of God as an explanatory principle looked dangerously impious to contemporaries; Cavendish (The Philosophical and Physical Opinions, sig. (a)3r) assured her readers that she was not an atheist but her defensive remarks about God’s omnipotence – placed in the final pages of her text (The Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 172–3) – gave the impression of an afterthought.
31 More proposed a form of dualism in which there were two natural and extended substances: incorporeal substance (what we might loosely call ‘spirits’) and corporeal substance (bodies). Extension was thus not a property exclusively of ‘body’ but of ‘being’.
32 See also Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, Further Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, published within Observations but paginated separately, hereafter FO, 25.
33 Van Helmont’s Oriatrike, or Physick Refined […] translator was John Chandler.
34 The Witch of Endor was a necromancer who raised the spirit of Samuel on the instructions of Saul. See Samuel I, ch. 28: 3–25. Cavendish frequently declared that she wanted to keep matters of natural philosophy separate from theological issues, but this was rather a forlorn hope in the context of seventeenth-century natural philosophy, as a recent volume on the role of God in her thought (Siegfried and Sarasohn, God and Nature in the Thought of Margaret Cavendish) illustrates very well.
35 Cavendish always differentiated between the immortal soul (unknowable and supernatural) and the ‘rational soul’ which was comprehensible, material, diffused throughout the body and synonymous with rational matter. She was not a mortalist, but argued that both souls were immortal (the rational soul’s immortality was due [Philosophical Letters, 223] to continual regeneration in Nature).
36 In other cases, angels were described by Hobbes (Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, 436) as supernatural images raised (by God, in a supernatural way) in men’s ‘fancy’ in order ‘to signfie the presence of God in the execution of some supernaturall work […]’.
37 We can still call Cavendish a substance monist with respect to nature because, in her view, there was only one created natural substance; God was uncreated and supernatural. Boyle (A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, 143) also held the view that uncreated immaterial substance was none other than ‘God under another name’.
38 For Glanvill’s response in 1667 to a letter from Cavendish on this subject, see Letters and Poems, Margaret, Dutchess of Newcastle, 126.
39 Wright, ‘The 1668 Appendix and Hobbes’s Theological Project’, 399–400.
40 Cavendish, Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 88–9; Philosophical Letters, 230–1; Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, sig. g1r-v; Grounds of Natural Philosophy, 240. Cavendish’s interesting response to Charleton’s views on the vacuum (1644, 451–2) included her assertion that – in describing void space – he was, in fact, describing body.
41 Gilbert’s De Magnete […] was published in 1600. I use the modern edition (On the Magnet). For a general overview, see Pumfrey, Latitude & The Magnetic Earth.
42 Pumfrey, Latitude & The Magnetic Earth, 213; Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, 242–72 (part IV, arts. 133–83); Gaukroger, Descartes, 380–3.
43 On sympathy, see Van Helmont, Oriatrike, or Physick Refined […], 759, 772, 787. On the appeal of sympathy as an explanatory principle of nature – even among the mechanical community – see Henry, ‘Robert Hooke: The Incongruous Mechanist’.
44 Intrinsic magnetism had a wide appeal within and beyond the vitalist community. For example, this view was held by Jacques Grandami, a Jesuit natural philosopher, whose 1645 tract on magnetism prompted Power’s response.