Observations upon Experimental Philosophy

The year after Hooke's *Micrographia*, a duchess argues that the microscope shows a distorted surface and that reason sees further than any lens.

by Margaret Cavendish465 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1666(aged 43)
Original language: English

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Overview

In 1665 Robert Hooke, curator of experiments at the Royal Society, published Micrographia, with engravings of a louse, a flea and a fly's head as his microscope showed them. Margaret Cavendish answered within a year: a lens shows only the outside of a thing, and often shows it falsely, so no instrument will reach the inner motions by which nature works. Only reason can. Her examples are Hooke's own, among them the fly's eyes, the point of a pin and the edge of a knife. She also answers Robert Boyle and Henry Power, whose Experimental Philosophy of 1664 reported his work with the microscope. A cracked glass, she points out, shows many pictures of a single object. If a painter drew a louse as large as a crab, in the shape the microscope gives it, a beggar would not believe the picture. What the glass delivers is a mixture, partly nature and partly the maker's art, and she asks what use it is to anyone. In place of experiment she sets out her own account, in which all matter moves itself and every part of it senses and reasons in some degree; matter can always be divided further, so there are no atoms. A final section measures this view against the ancient philosophers. The book came out in 1666 with a work of fiction, The Blazing World, bound in behind it. On 30 May 1667 the Royal Society received her at Arundel House in London, the first woman to attend one of its meetings. Boyle and Hooke weighed air for her. Samuel Pepys, the diarist, recorded an experiment that turned a piece of roast mutton to blood, and the crowds that came to look at her. The Society elected its first women fellows in 1945. The book itself had a second edition in 1668, and Cambridge University Press published Eileen O'Neill's edition of it in 2001.

Key concepts

What does Cavendish mean by 'art'?

Art, in this book, means anything produced by human skill, from pewter to a ground lens, as opposed to what nature produces. Cavendish treats art as nature's imitator, more apt to alter than to inform. What it makes is a mixture of the natural and the artificial, which she calls hermaphroditical. Experiment counts as art for her because it works through instruments.

How do speculative and experimental philosophy differ?

Speculative philosophy studies nature by reasoning; experimental philosophy studies it by trials and instruments. Cavendish ranks the first above the second, because most experiments start from an idea and none can give a reason for itself. She does not reject observation. The best study, she says, is rational contemplation joined with the observations of regular sense, by which she means healthy senses used without devices.

What are the exterior and interior of a thing?

The exterior is a body's outward figure, its surface and shape. The interior is the set of motions within it that make it the kind of creature it is. Much of her case against the microscope turns on this pair: even a truthful lens enlarges surfaces only, and the motions that produce a bee or a grain of corn are not on the surface.

Why does she say there are no atoms?

Because for her matter is one continuous body with no smallest piece and no empty space. An atom would have to be a single part existing by itself, and no part of nature can leave the whole, since there is nowhere to go. Even a particle as small as an atom is supposed to be would hold the same mixture of matter and could be divided again.

What are animate and inanimate matter?

Animate matter moves itself and has life and knowledge; inanimate matter does not move itself and is carried along. The distinction does not sort creatures into living and dead. The two are mixed so closely that every creature has its share of both, so no part of nature can be called soulless. 'Inanimate' names an ingredient of nature and never a class of things.

Themes of the book

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

What a lens cannot show

Does a microscope bring us closer to nature, or does it put a manufactured picture between nature and the eye? On that depends whether experiment or reasoning should lead the study of nature.

Glasses, Cavendish argues, alter more than they inform. A cracked or faceted glass multiplies one object into many pictures, and under changing lights the edge of a knife looks flat and the point of a needle like a globe, though neither could cut or pierce if it were so. What the lens shows is a mixed figure, part nature and part art, and only of the outside; the inner motions that make a creature stay hidden. She concludes that the experimenter is servant to the student, since reason must judge what any instrument reports.

scientific instruments
experimental philosophy
appearance and reality
vision
sense perception
reason
imitation
representation
epistemology

Enter a dialogue

Matter that knows what it does

What must nature be like if no instrument can reach its workings and reason has to supply them? Her answer is one infinite body, alive and knowing in every part, with no empty space and no atoms.

Having turned the microscope away, she sets out what reason finds. Nature is a single body mixing animate and inanimate matter so closely that no particle lacks its share of life and knowledge. Parts can join and divide but never leave, because there is no vacuum to flee to, and the division has no end, so nothing is an atom. She tests this on herself in an opening dispute, where her later thoughts attack her former ones until other thoughts step in to prevent a civil war of the mind. A last section sets the ancient philosophers against it.

matter
self-motion
self-knowledge
atomism
parts and wholes
infinity
vacuum
color
natural philosophy

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 465
distinct concepts: 427
by passages held, corpus-wide: #161

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 28 pairings. 75 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
matter	motion	45
matter	perception	43
matter	natural philosophy	34
matter	self-motion	33
causation	natural philosophy	31
causation	matter	29
matter	nature	27
motion	perception	26
nature	perception	25
motion	nature	22
perception	self-motion	22
motion	natural philosophy	18
nature	self-motion	17
perception	reason	17
causation	motion	16
natural philosophy	perception	15
motion	self-motion	14
causation	self-motion	13
natural philosophy	self-motion	13
causation	perception	12
nature	reason	10
causation	nature	9
matter	reason	7
natural philosophy	reason	7
natural philosophy	nature	6
causation	reason	4
motion	reason	4
reason	self-motion	2

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 you are here 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
Her last statement of her system, published in 1668, five years before her death. It replaces Philosophical and Physical Opinions, leaves behind the polemics of the two books before it, and adds an appendix of speculations about other worlds.
EN

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