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WorkAnne Conway

The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy

A viscountess's private notes against Descartes, printed without her name in Amsterdam eleven years after her death.

by Anne Conway126 passages held

  • English, a translation held here, and your language
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Original title
Principia philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae
First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
Latin

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Overview

Descartes had taught Europe that a body is dead matter, moved like the parts of a machine, and that only minds think and feel. Anne Conway answered that nothing made by a living God can be dead. Her argument starts from the creator: he is life and goodness, a creature must resemble its maker, and so everything he made has some share of life and perception. Body and spirit are one substance in different degrees, and a body is spirit grown thick and heavy. That conclusion also went against Henry More, the Cambridge philosopher who had taught her by letter since 1650 and who kept body and spirit apart. She charges Hobbes and Spinoza with the opposite mistake: merging God with his creatures. Because all creatures share one substance, each can change into another: the spirit of a horse, she argues, may over many lives become that of a human being. Pain repairs a creature that has fallen, and so no punishment lasts for ever. Conway worked this out in her last years at Ragley Hall in Warwickshire, disabled by headaches. William Harvey, the physician who discovered the circulation of the blood, had been unable to cure them. Her companion there was Francis Mercury van Helmont, a Flemish physician who introduced her to the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. She died in 1679. Van Helmont had her notes printed in Amsterdam in 1690, in Latin and without her name; the English original was lost, and the English text of 1692, signed only J. C., is a translation back from the Latin. Leibniz owned a copy, and in 1697 he told a correspondent that his own philosophy came close to hers. After that the book went largely unread until the late twentieth century, when scholars began to look for the women philosophers of her period.

Key concepts

What does Conway mean by one substance?

She means that every creature, from a grain of sand to an angel, is made of the same stuff and differs from the others only in its manner of being. Conway counts three kinds of being in all: God, Christ and creation. Within creation the differences are like those between water and ice, so that one kind of creature can in time turn into another.

How do body and spirit differ for Conway?

Only in degree. A body is the thicker and darker part of a thing, a spirit the finer and quicker part, and neither exists without the other. She compares the spirit to an eye and the body to the dark back of a mirror, which catches and keeps the image. A body can grow more spiritual without limit, though no creature is ever wholly bodiless.

What is vital action in Conway's book?

It is the motion that comes from a creature's own life and will, as distinct from being pushed from outside. A stone thrown into the air moves only mechanically, because the motion is foreign to it. Seeing is vital: light entering the eye is mere motion, and the seeing it stirs up is an act of life. Mechanical motion, for Conway, is only the instrument life uses.

What is the middle being?

It is Christ, understood as a being that stands by nature between God and creatures. God cannot change at all, and creatures can change for better or worse, while the middle being can only grow better. Conway compares it to silver between tin and gold. She identifies it with Adam Kadmon, the heavenly first man of the Jewish mystical writers called Kabbalists, and says God works in creatures through it.

What is time, according to Conway?

Time is nothing but the successive motion of creatures, by which each moves on toward greater perfection. If that motion stopped, time would stop and the creatures with it. God has no time in him, because he has nothing left to become. Her image is a wheel turned from its centre: the rim is always moving, and the centre that moves it stays at rest.

Does Conway believe in eternal punishment?

No. She holds that every punishment is medicinal, meant to cure the creature and return it to a better state than before. The reasoning is that God's justice fits each penalty to its sin, and that a creature cannot go on sinking into evil for ever. The common teaching of endless hell fire for every sin, she says, makes God look like a cruel tyrant and not a gracious father.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Nothing God made is dead

Can a living and good God have made anything wholly without life? If he cannot, the stone and the body are not machines, and the wall between mind and matter comes down.

Conway's opponents hold that a body is a dead mass, unable to feel to all eternity, and a spirit its opposite in every property. She asks what, in that case, joins the two: why a soul should love its body, need an eye to see, or feel pain when the flesh is cut. Her answer is that they differ only in degree. A body is spirit fixed and condensed, a spirit is body made subtle and volatile, and each can pass into the other. She grants Descartes his mechanics and denies that nature is a clock.

  • body and spirit
  • matter
  • spirit
  • vitalism
  • substance
  • mind-body problem
  • dualism
  • life
  • motion
  • mechanism
  • perception
  • sensation
  • extension
  • impenetrability
  • embodiment

Enter a dialogue

A ladder every creature climbs

If all creatures are one substance, how far can one of them change, and who decides the direction? A horse may in time become a human being, a brutish man a beast, and justice governs both journeys.

The kinds of creatures are for Conway steps on an endless ladder, and steps cannot be infinitely far apart, or nothing could climb. A horse that has served well has knowledge, love, fear and memory, and she asks what becomes of its spirit after many deaths. The same law works downward: someone who lives like a beast earns a beast's body. Yet the fall has a floor. Nothing can be evil without limit, and pain thins out whatever has grown coarse in a creature, so every punishment is a medicine. What stays fixed is the individual: Paul never becomes Judas.

  • transmutation
  • species
  • mutability
  • change
  • divine justice
  • punishment
  • perfection
  • sin
  • animal souls
  • restoration
  • human nature
  • degrees of being

Enter a dialogue

A God who cannot stop creating

What follows if God is good by nature and cannot change? Then he was never idle, never free to withhold creation, and the world is without number in time and in extent.

Indifference of will, the power to act or not act at pleasure, is for Conway the mark of tyrants, and she denies it to God. A God whose wisdom and goodness are his law creates as soon and as much as he can: through times without number, in worlds without number, with countless creatures inside the smallest one. Those who make the universe finite confine him, she says, like a few bees in a hive. Between the unchanging God and creatures that can turn good or evil she sets a middle being, Christ. Hobbes and Spinoza err by merging creator and creature.

  • creation
  • time
  • infinity
  • divine eternity
  • divine attributes
  • christology
  • divine mediation
  • free will
  • divine necessity
  • infinite divisibility
  • kabbalah

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
126
distinct concepts
186
by passages held, corpus-wide
#458

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “creation” and “time”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 18 pairings. 92 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
creationtime4
mattermotion4
motiontime4
body and spiritmetaphysics3
matterspirit3
motionspirit3
creationmetaphysics2
creationmotion2
body and spiritmotion1
creationdivine justice1
creationmatter1
creationspirit1
divine justicemotion1
divine justicespirit1
divine justicetime1
metaphysicsmotion1
metaphysicsspirit1
metaphysicstime1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1690 The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (Principia philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae) you are here EN
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