ABSTRACT
MARGARET CAVENDISH has not had a very good press as a lady of learning. In the seventeenth, as in the twentieth, century her excursions into philosophy and science were often dismissed: “her books aiming at science, difficulties, high notions, [terminate] commonly in nonsense, oaths and obscenity”, wrote Mary Evelyn. Some 300 years later “The Fantastic Duchess of Newcastle” was pronounced “too extravagant to be epitomized as the first scientific Lady” and “her books were written from an erroneous point of view”.[l] In an otherwise sympathetic article, Lisa Sarasohn comments, “The Duchess’s writings are a curious combination of scientific speculation and fantasy, largely uncritical and hopelessly repetitive”.[2] Carolyn Merchant describes her as a “feminist who between 1653 and 1671 wrote some fourteen scientific books about atoms, matter and motion, butterflies, fleas, magnifying glasses, distant worlds, and infinity. Her ideas and theories are often inconsistent, contradictory, and eclectic”.[3] Nonetheless, Cavendish’s admirers tend to make a virtue of necessity: while acknowledging that her science and philosophy do not fit with the mainstream as defined by twentieth-century history of science and philosophy, they have claimed for her pride of place in a separate, female tradition. Her philosophy is commended by Sarasohn as “significant in what it reveals about the female, or at least one female, attitude to nature and cosmology”.[4] The primary female trait identified is what Sarasohn calls the “organic and vitalistic quality of Margaret Cavendish’s natural philosophy”.[5]
Accordingly it has become almost commonplace to underline the unlikeness of Cavendish’s thought to the philosophy of her male contemporaries, especially to the so-called mechanical philosophy whose chief proponents were Descartes and Hobbes. This counter-positioning of Cavendish to Hobbes and Descartes is endorsed by Cavendish herself who published critiques of both philosophers and specifically denies contact with either of them. Her Philosophical Letters (1664) contain point-by-point refutations of both Hobbes and Descartes, as well as others.[6] In the Preface to that work she claims that she never had more than 20 words with Hobbes in her life, and could not converse with Descartes when he dined with her husband, because she did not understand French. [7]
Nonetheless, I think we should accept such disclaimers with caution. This is particularly true of Hobbes, who was, after all, a member of the Newcastle household. Indeed, on close inspection, Cavendish’s writings betray a closer acquaintance with the writings of Hobbes than is commonly supposed. It is certainly true that many of her references to him are critical of his philosophy, but this itself shows she was sufficiently well-acquainted with his ideas to be able to write a refutation. Her criticisms notwithstanding, it must be recognised that Cavendish’s vitalism is at root materialistic. In consequence it aligns more closely with Hobbes than, for instance, with that other female vitalist, Anne Conway. [8] In what follows I shall take a first step towards exploring Margaret Cavendish’s intellectual relationship with Hobbes, by examining her natural philosophy in relation to his. I shall confine my comments to the work in which Hobbes sets out his natural philosophy most fully, namely in his De Corpore, published in Latin in 1655 and in English a year later.[9] It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss Cavendish’s political views, but, if we reposition Cavendish more closely to Hobbes, there is perhaps some mileage to be had from a political reading of Cavendish on Hobbist lines. It is worth noting that her husband’s political thinking appears to have been indebted to Hobbes. [10]
Hobbes is an obvious starting point for trying to set Cavendish into contemporary context. His patrons were the Cavendish family, both the Devonshire branch of the family and their cousins Sir Charles Cavendish and Margaret’s husband, William, Duke of Newcastle. Hobbes acted as agent and adviser to the Cavendish brothers and had, in the 1630s, been closely involved with them in their study of optics. The Duchess acknowledges his presence in their household, and he is one of the three main named figures discussed in her Philosophical Letters (alongside Descartes, the elder Van Helmont and Henry More). Acquaintance does not, of course, necessarily mean indebtedness. Even echoes in terminology and ideas do not necessarily bespeak acceptance of the points concerned - The Blazing World, after all, cites many opinions in order to ridicule them, and there are important points of disagreement (to which I shall return).[11] Nonetheless, Margaret Cavendish’s particular closeness to the circle of Thomas Hobbes raises the question of whether there was any link between her philosophy and that of Hobbes, in spite of the fact that on a number of occasions, she denied any connection with him. We should also not forget that when Margaret Cavendish married William, Duke of Newcastle, in Paris in 1645, she married into a family at the centre of developments in seventeenth-century intellectual life. Sir Charles Cavendish, her brother-in-law,
was closely connected with figures at the forefront of new developments in science and philosophy: Marin Mersenne, Rene Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Roberval. Hobbes was a member of the same circle. [12]
Cavendish’s Natural Philosophy in Contemporary Context
To her twentieth-century readers, Cavendish’s writings on science and philosophy can appear confusing, self-contradictory, even crack-brained. In the context of their time, and with allowances made for developments, and therefore changes, in her ideas, they appear less so. If one attempts to describe Cavendishs philosophy in terms of contemporary seventeenth-century philosophy, it is apparent that it combined elements from traditional Aristotelian natural philosophy (e.g. the doctrine of the four elements: air, fire, earth and water), with elements of the new type of mechanical philosophy which attempted to account for all phenomena in terms of the impact of moving bodies on one another. As Alan Gabbey has defined it, the mechanical philosophy:
purported to account for the natural world in terms of the motion, rest, and position of corporeal particles in various structural combinations, the essential natures of such particles being extension and/or impenetrability. [13]
To this definition we should add the generally held view that the source of motion was external to the particles in question. These are set in motion by impact from outside the particle, rather as a billiard ball is set moving when struck by a cue. Margaret Cavendish’s natural philosophy displays many of the features of the so-called mechanical philosophy in so far as she often accounts for phenomena in terms of the size, shape and position of matter in motion. The mixture of old and new doctrines which is to be found in her writings on natural philosophy recalls that of her acquaintance, Sir Kenelm Digby, who was also a member of the Cavendish circle in Paris. [14]
Seventeenth-century philosophical mechanism was not a homogeneous theory. Although Hobbes and Descartes both subscribed to the “mechanical” account of corporeal motion, there were important differences between them. A major one was that Descartes argued for the existence of soul (and therefore mind) as a separate immaterial entity from body. Hobbes, on the other hand, denied the existence of all immaterial substances, and was much criticised for his materialism. [15] He was widely believed to be an atheist on account of it. Cavendish, too, denied the existence of incorporeal substance, and hence of immaterial souls and minds, and like Hobbes, she believed that cogitation was to be explained in terms of the matter of which the mind was constituted. But, unlike both Descartes and Hobbes, she believed the source of movement, as of thinking, to be internal to matter, not external to it. This is an important respect in which Cavendish’s philosophy differs from the new physics of the seventeenth century.
