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WorkMargaret Cavendish

Philosophical and Physical Opinions

A woman with no Latin and no degree sends England's two universities her own system of nature, in which matter moves and thinks without outside help.

by Margaret Cavendish315 passages held

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First published
(aged 32)
Original language
English

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Overview

No English university admitted women in 1655. That year a woman tutored at home sent Oxford and Cambridge a book arguing that nature runs itself: everything is matter, and matter moves, senses and thinks without help from outside. Margaret Cavendish, then Marchioness of Newcastle, was living in exile at Antwerp, married to a royalist commander who could not come home while Parliament governed England. She read no Latin. Her treatise was printed in London for Martin and Allestrye, the booksellers who later published for the Royal Society, and it carried an epistle addressed to the two universities, asking them to receive it. The system inside starts from matter that has no beginning and needs no mover. Part of that matter is dull and part is lively, and the lively part comes in a sensitive kind and a rational kind, which together carry sense and thought through every body there is. From this she works outwards, over 210 chapters, to life and death, growth, the passions, light, the elements and disease. Souls, spirits and a first push from outside have no work left to do in such a world. The book also takes something back. Two years earlier she had printed poems that built the world out of atoms, and a short piece at the front of this volume condemns that theory. Readers doubted that a woman without schooling could have written any of it, and several of her epistles are there to insist that she had. The replies she received from learned men over the following years praised her and left her arguments alone. She went on revising the book instead of defending it: in the second edition of 1663 it grew from 174 pages to 510.

Key concepts

What does Cavendish mean by innated matter?

Innated matter is her name for the part of matter that moves by its own nature. The rest she calls dull: it moves only when the innated part carries it, as stone and timber go where the builders take them. Innated matter comes in a sensitive kind, which gives bodies life and sensation, and a finer rational kind, which makes thought. Nothing outside matter is needed to start it.

What is a 'figure' in this book?

A figure is any shape matter takes when it moves: a stone, a flame, a horse, a thought. Cavendish treats every particular thing as a figure made and held together by motion, and every change as one figure giving way to another. Dying is the figure coming apart while its matter goes on to make others. The kinds, such as mankind or beast, persist like moulds.

How does the book explain disease?

Disease is motion gone out of order. Health, for Cavendish, is an equal distribution of parts and an agreement among the lively matter that runs the body; when those motions turn irregular, the body sickens. Each illness has its own motion and temper, which is why she doubts that one plant remedy will cure every case that goes by the same name.

Is the mind separate from the body here?

No. In this book the mind is matter too, only the finest and quickest kind, which she calls rational spirits. Thinking is these spirits moving in figures, and a calm, clear mind is their motion kept in order. Because mind and body are degrees of one matter, they run in parallel: pleasure in the body is the same kind of motion as joy in the mind.

Does she claim her system is certain?

No. She calls her views opinions and claims only that they are probable, as rational and as probable as any written before. Nature's causes are mostly hidden, she says, and nothing in philosophy is so ordinary as mistaking them. What she insists on is that the opinions are her own, and she compares them to chemistry, which extracts an essence from gross material.

Themes of the book

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

Matter that moves itself

Can matter build a world of plants, animals and thinking people with nothing outside it to set it going? If it can, the first mover and the soul lose their work.

Cavendish divides matter into a dull part, which moves only when moved, and a lively part she calls innated matter, which moves by its own nature and carries the dull part with it as it builds. Every body is a figure made by that motion, and death destroys the print while the mould remains. Against her own atomist poems she now argues that loose atoms blown about like dust could never yield such order, such constant kinds, such life and knowledge. Matter is infinite and eternal, so it needs no first push.

  • matter
  • motion
  • form
  • causation
  • change
  • transformation
  • infinity
  • nature

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Thought, passion and sickness as motions

What are a calm mind, a fit of grief and a fever, if there is nothing in a person but matter in motion? One account has to cover the thinker and the patient alike.

Thought, for Cavendish, is the finest matter moving in figures: the rational spirits dance, and when their measures are kept there is harmony, which is a quiet mind, a clear understanding and a ready memory. When they move disorderly, false reasons and extravagant fancies arise. The body follows the same rule one degree lower, so that a fever among the sensitive spirits is what madness is among the rational, and pain answers to grief. A large share of the treatise is therefore medicine, with disease treated as motion gone out of order.

  • mind-body relation
  • mind
  • thought
  • imagination
  • memory
  • passions
  • emotion
  • disease
  • health
  • medicine

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Philosophy without a school

Who may write about nature: only those bred at a university, or anyone whose reason reaches that far? The epistles at the front of the book argue the case before the system begins.

Readers who doubted that she had written the book get their answer in her epistles. She has no Latin, has read half of one book by Descartes and a single small one by Hobbes, and learned the terms of art from her husband and her family. Women, she writes, are kept like birds in cages, shut out from the experience that makes understanding, and men take that want for incapacity. She asks the two universities to receive the book, and if they cannot praise it, to bury it in silence.

  • education
  • knowledge
  • reason
  • natural philosophy

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Within this work

passages held
315
distinct concepts
342
by passages held, corpus-wide
#236

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 20 pairings. 90 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
mattermotion66
motionnatural philosophy26
matternatural philosophy17
formmotion16
formmatter11
motionperception11
motionsensation10
knowledgemotion8
knowledgematter6
perceptionsensation5
bodily motionsensation3
knowledgeperception3
knowledgesensation3
matterperception3
bodily motionperception2
formnatural philosophy2
formperception2
knowledgenatural philosophy2
mattersensation2
natural philosophyperception1

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. 1655 Philosophical and Physical Opinions you are here EN
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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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