ABSTRACT
Between 1653 and 1668, Margaret Cavendish published a series of volumes of natural philosophy in which she developed a systematic account of the principles governing material things, human beings included. These works bear the marks of her autodidacticism, intellectual confidence, powerful imagination and drive to overall consistency, features which in some ways make her work hard to place in the exotic and crowded landscape of late seventeenth-century explanations of nature. My aim here is to contribute to the task of characterizing and situating Cavendish’s philosophy by isolating its main explanatory principles and showing how these are a response to some limitations of mechanism which troubled her and many of her con temporaries.1
