Margaret Cavendish

Margaret Cavendish

Margaret Cavendish ended her strangest book by telling every reader a startling thing: that each of them could be the absolute monarch of an entire world. Not by conquest, but by imagination, for anyone may build a whole universe in the privacy of the mind and rule it without rival. It reads like a flourish at the close of a fantastical tale, and it is in fact the conclusion of a philosophy. Cavendish held that nature is one infinite, self-moving, thinking body, alive in every part, and that the mind, being itself a portion of that same self-moving matter, possesses in little the very creative power that nature has in large. The eccentric duchess the wits of Restoration London laughed at as "Mad Madge" was quietly assembling one of the boldest materialist systems of the century.

One self-moving body. The thesis at the center of everything Cavendish wrote is compact: "Nature is but one Infinite Self-moving Body, which by the vertue of its self-motion is divided into Infinite parts." Against the mechanical philosophy then conquering Europe, which pictured the world as dead particles shoved about by external forces and wound up like a clock by God, Cavendish insists that matter is everywhere alive and moves of itself. There is one substance, matter, and it is self-moving and self-knowing through and through. Nothing in nature is truly inert; the world is not a machine but an immense, living, perceiving body endlessly composing and dividing itself.

Three degrees of matter. To explain the differences among things without leaving matter behind, Cavendish distinguishes three degrees of one material substance, blended everywhere together. There is rational matter, the most subtle and free, which is the seat of reason and mind; sensitive matter, the active, laboring stuff of sense and motion; and inanimate matter, the dull and heavy part that the other two move and shape. All three are mixed in every body, so that even a stone has its portion of rational matter. Mind, on this view, is not a separate substance set over against the body, as Descartes had it, but simply the finest and most self-moving grade of the one material nature. It is a thoroughly materialist account of thought that nonetheless makes the whole world capable of perception.

No part moves another. Cavendish's sharpest break with the mechanists is her denial that motion is ever transferred. One body cannot hand its motion to another, she argues, because motion is inseparable from the matter that moves, and a thing cannot give away part of its own substance and keep moving. What looks like one billiard ball driving another is really the self-motion of each part, patterning itself upon the others by a kind of agreement. Order in nature comes not from external impacts, and not from a divine clockmaker, but from the self-knowledge of rational matter and the voluntary harmony of self-moving parts. It is a genuine and worked-out alternative to the mechanical worldview, not a refusal of it.

Against the experiment. Cavendish turned this philosophy into one of the earliest sustained critiques of the new experimental science. In her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy she takes aim at the microscope and the apparatus of the Royal Society: the instruments deceive, she argues, magnifying the outer husk of a thing while telling us nothing of its inner self-moving nature, and the senses they extend are unreliable guides where reason would do better. She was the first woman ever invited to attend a meeting of the Royal Society, where she watched the very experiments she had criticized, and she came away unpersuaded that peering harder at surfaces could reveal the living causes beneath them.

The Blazing World. Her boldest vehicle is a fiction, the first work of science fiction in English. A lady is carried through the North Pole into another world, becomes its empress, and questions its scholar-creatures, the bird-men, bear-men, fly-men, and worm-men, on every branch of natural philosophy, in dialogues that expound Cavendish's own views and gently mock the experimentalists. At the climax the empress, with the help of the Duchess of Newcastle, who is Cavendish writing herself into her own story, creates a fresh world entirely out of her imagination. The whole fantasia is an argument: the mind is a portion of self-moving nature, and so it can do in thought what nature does in fact, make worlds.

What this room reads. The corpus is The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666), from Project Gutenberg, which carries Cavendish's natural philosophy in its dialogues and reflections as well as its fable. Her denser prose works, the Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), the Philosophical Letters (1664), and the Grounds of Natural Philosophy, survive in seventeenth-century printings whose old typography resists clean transcription and were not freely available, so the room reads her system through the Blazing World and from training knowledge, and says so. Citations run by work, and the corpus preserves her original spelling.

The wits named her Mad Madge and laughed at her clothes and her certainty; the gentlemen of the new science were courteous and unconvinced; and for three centuries she survived as a curiosity, the flamboyant duchess who happened to write the first science fiction. Philosophy has since recovered her as a serious and systematic natural philosopher, among the first women to publish under her own name, who built a complete vitalist materialism of self-moving, self-knowing matter against the dead mechanism of Descartes and Hobbes, both of whom she knew and answered, and who mounted one of the first philosophical critiques of the experimental method she watched the Royal Society perform. She makes an extraordinary pair with Anne Conway, her near-contemporary: two women of the English seventeenth century who each dissolved the Cartesian split into a single living substance, Conway from the side of spirit and Cavendish from the side of matter, meeting in the conviction that the world is alive to its smallest part. Read now, the empress of the Blazing World turns out to have been a philosopher all along.