Grounds of Natural Philosophy

Self-moving, self-knowing matter set out in thirteen orderly parts, with an appendix that imagines a world free of sickness and predators.

by Margaret Cavendish259 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1668(aged 45)
Original language: English

Report a rights issue

Overview

The title page of 1668 calls the book a second edition, heavily altered, of one that once went under the name Philosophical and Physical Opinions. What Margaret Cavendish kept through the alteration is one idea: nature is a single body of matter that moves itself and knows what it is doing, down to its smallest part. She had first set this out in 1655 and enlarged it in 1663. Since then she had spent two books arguing, with Hobbes and Descartes in 1664 and with the Royal Society's experimenters in 1666, and the new version names none of those opponents. It is laid out in thirteen parts that run from matter and motion through perception, the making of animals, the human body and mind, sleep and dreams, and disease, to the elements, metals and plants. Every part of nature, she argues, mixes three degrees of matter: an inanimate degree that is moved, a sensitive degree that moves it, and a rational degree that directs. Because the three are never found apart, a stone and a plant perceive in their own ways as an animal does in its own, and the order of nature needs no mind outside matter to explain it. In this book she grants that God is immaterial and holds that nothing else is. An appendix follows. It asks whether there could be other worlds and describes two: a regular world whose creatures live long, free of sickness, and do not prey on one another, and an irregular one given over to suffering. It ends with what she calls restoring beds, places where creatures that have come apart might be put together again. The book was printed in London by Anne Maxwell. Cavendish died in December 1673. Broadview Press published Anne Thell's edition of the book in 2020.

Key concepts

What are the three degrees of matter?

They are the inanimate, the sensitive and the rational. Inanimate matter does not move itself. Sensitive matter moves itself and carries the inanimate along, so it does nature's building, and she calls it the labouring part. Rational matter is purer and moves without that burden, which leaves it quicker and free to direct. The three never occur apart: every creature has all of them.

What makes a motion regular or irregular?

A regular motion keeps to the usual order of a creature's kind, and an irregular one departs from it. Cavendish uses the pair to explain what goes wrong in nature with no outside cause. Irregular sensitive motions are weakness, pain and sickness; irregular rational ones are short memory, violent passion and wild fancy. Nature balances her actions by opposites, so irregularity is never wholly absent.

What is double perception?

It is her claim that nature perceives in two ways at once, a sensitive and a rational. Sensitive perception is tied to the heavier matter it works in, so it is slower and hindered. Rational perception is freer, and therefore quicker, more penetrating and more general. When awake, the senses copy an outward object while the mind conceives it; in dreams they act by rote and often err.

Why does she call a creature a society?

Because for her no creature is a single thing: it is a company of parts that have joined and act together. Producing a creature is forming such a society, and death is its dissolving, after which the parts go on to join others. The parts that nourish bone do different work from those that nourish sinew, and that division of labour gives the body its order.

Is anything immaterial in this system?

Only God. Cavendish argues that an immaterial being must be uncreated, and that created spirits or souls, if they were truly immaterial, would stand so near the divine essence as to be petty gods. Everything in nature, the human mind and motion itself included, is therefore body. God is the eternal creator and master, and nature is his eternal creature and servant.

Themes of the book

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

Three degrees of matter in one body

How can a stone, a plant and a person all be made of the same knowing matter and still differ so much? The book answers with three degrees of matter that never occur apart.

Set out without opponents, the system rests on one division. Some matter does not move itself; some moves itself while carrying that burden, and this sensitive degree does the building; the purest, rational degree moves free of any burden and directs. Because the three are joined as one body, every creature has life and knowledge after its own composition, and a creature is a society of parts in which each knows its own work. Perception is double, sensitive and rational at once. No mind outside matter is needed, and God alone is immaterial.

matter
motion
self-motion
perception
composition
natural kinds
knowledge
corporealism
mind

Enter a dialogue

Regular worlds and restoring beds

If sickness and pain are matter moving irregularly, could there be a world where it never does, and could a creature that has come apart be put together again? The appendix lets the parts of her own mind argue it out.

Irregular motion is her explanation for disease, madness and pain, and the appendix follows the thought to its limit. A regular world would be a happy one, whose creatures live long, do not sicken and do not feed on each other; an irregular world would be so wretched that death brings no relief, since dissolved parts only join new miseries. The last chapters ask whether nature has restoring beds, wombs in which a dissolved creature might be renewed. Most of her thoughts want to believe it, and she admits no human being knows where such beds would be.

order and disorder
restoration
disease
health
life
personal identity
imagination
natural order

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 259
distinct concepts: 347
by passages held, corpus-wide: #287

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: “matter” and “motion”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 19 pairings. 88 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
matter	motion	12
bodily motion	disease	9
motion	natural philosophy	9
matter	natural philosophy	8
causation	disease	5
motion	perception	5
causation	motion	4
matter	perception	4
natural philosophy	perception	4
bodily motion	causation	3
causation	natural philosophy	3
nature	perception	3
disease	motion	2
bodily motion	perception	1
causation	matter	1
causation	nature	1
causation	perception	1
matter	nature	1
motion	nature	1

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.

1655 Philosophical and Physical Opinions
Printed in London in 1655 while she lived in exile at Antwerp, this is her first full treatise on nature, and its opening part reprints Philosophical Fancies of 1653. Each of her later books on nature starts from the system laid out here.
EN
1664 Philosophical Letters
Letters to a fictional correspondent, published in 1664, a year after the enlarged second edition of Philosophical and Physical Opinions. Here she tests the system of that treatise, passage by passage, against four named authors and, in a last section, several more.
EN
1666 Observations upon Experimental Philosophy
Her direct reply to the Royal Society's experimental programme, and her longest argument about how nature can be known at all. It was issued in 1666 in one volume with The Blazing World and again in 1668.
EN
1666 The Blazing World
The fiction issued with Observations upon Experimental Philosophy in 1666 and reissued in 1668. It gives her natural philosophy a plot, a heroine and a war, and takes the same side against the experimenters.
EN
1668 Grounds of Natural Philosophy you are here EN

— or open another of their works