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‘Exploding’ immaterial substances: Margaret Cavendish’s vitalist-materialist critique of spirits
Abstract
In this paper, I explore Margaret Cavendish’s engagement with mid-seventeenth-century debates on spirits and spiritual activity in the world, especially the problems of incorporeal substance and magnetism. I argue that between 1664 and 1668, Cavendish developed an increasingly robust form of materialism in response to the deficiencies which she identified in alternative philosophical systems – principally mechanical philosophy and vitalism. This was an intriguing direction of travel, given the intensification in attacks on the supposedly atheistic materialism of Hobbes (whom she knew personally and to whom she was intellectually indebted). While some scholars claim that Cavendish’s views were not formed out of extensive engagement with contemporary thinkers, I suggest that, on the contrary, Cavendish engaged very closely with the views of More, Hobbes and others – including the vitalist thinker Johannes Baptista van Helmont and the mechanical philosopher Henry Power – on the subject of spirits and...
Throughout her philosophical writing, Margaret Cavendish is clear in stating that colours are real; they are not mere mind-dependent qualities that exist only in the mind of perceivers. This puts her at odds with other seventeenth-century thinkers such as Galileo and Descartes who endorsed what would come to be known as the ‘primary-secondary quality distinction’. Cavendish’s argument for this view is premised on two claims. First, that colourless objects are inconceivable. Second, that if an object is inconceivable then it could not possibly exist in nature. My aim in this paper is to explain why Cavendish accepts both premises of this argument. However, the repercussions of this paper go much further than just explaining why she thinks colourless objects cannot exist in nature and the upshots are twofold. First, it provides new insights into the fundamental role that perception plays in Cavendish’s metaphysics. While Cavendish’s view that all of nature perceives is well-established, I show that Cavendish is also committed to the view that all of nature is perceivable. Second, it provides the first in-depth discussion of Cavendish’s modal epistemology and her reasons for thinking that inconceivability entails impossibility (in nature).
This paper discusses the intellectual relationship between Margaret Cavendish (c.1623–1673) and Robert Boyle (1627–1691), arguing that they have more in common than is often thought. At first sight, their opinions in natural philosophy appear somewhat divergent: while he championed mechanical philosophy and pioneered the experimental method, her views are considered both anti-mechanical and anti-experimental. In much of the historiography, Boyle is seen as a cool-headed ‘modern’ whose views paved the way for scientific advance while Cavendish is often presented as a more disorganized thinker who resisted innovations in science. This comparative study of Cavendish and Boyle reveals a more complex relationship, including some intriguing similarities in their approach to scientific writing and publication. While many scholars emphasize Cavendish’s hostility to the Royal Society, this analysis suggests that there was a surprising degree of common ground between her views and those of Boyle, especially in relation to the purpose of natural philosophy and the ways in which reliable scientific knowledge might be established.
This paper discusses how early modern materialism can be defined and delineated, before turning to a brief survey of the main philosophical resources early modern materialist theories draw on. Subsequently, I discuss competing overall narratives concerning early modern materialism, and conclude with a defence of the controversial view that material soul theories belong to materialism proper.
This Companion makes a new departure in Hobbes scholarship, addressing a philosopher whose impact was as great on Continental European theories of state and legal systems as it was at home. This volume is a systematic attempt to incorporate work from both the Anglophone and Continental traditions, bringing together newly commissioned work by scholars from ten different countries in a topic-by-topic sequence of essays that follows the structure of Leviathan, re-examining the relationship among Hobbes's physics, metaphysics, politics, psychology, and religion. Collectively they showcase important revisionist scholarship that re-examines both the context for Leviathan and its reception, demonstrating the degree to which Hobbes was indebted to the long tradition of European humanist thought. This Cambridge Companion shows that Hobbes's legacy was never lost and that he belongs to a tradition of reflection on political theory and governance that is still alive, both in Europe and in the diaspora.
In this rich and detailed study of early modern women's thought, Jacqueline Broad explores the complexity of women's responses to Cartesian philosophy and its intellectual legacy in England and Europe. She examines the work of thinkers such as Mary Astell, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway and Damaris Masham, who were active participants in the intellectual life of their time and were also the respected colleagues of philosophers such as Descartes, Leibniz and Locke. She also illuminates the continuities between early modern women's thought and the anti-dualism of more recent feminist thinkers. The result is a more gender-balanced account of early modern thought than has hitherto been available. Broad's clear and accessible exploration of this still-unfamiliar area will have a strong appeal to both students and scholars in the history of philosophy, women's studies and the history of ideas.
It is well documented that Margaret Cavendish came into close contact with many of the great thinkers of mid-seventeenth-century Europe. When read in the context of the work of Thomas Hobbes, in particular his De Corpore of 1655, Cavendish's own natural philosophy may be better understood not merely as a product of, but also as a valid contribution to, this wider intellectual context. Understanding her Philosophical Letters (1664), her Blazing World (1666), and her Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668) in such a light may go some way towards redeeming her philosophical reputation from those contemporary, and modern, critics, who have sought to demean it.
Many scholars point to the close association between early modern science and the rise of rational arguments in favour of the existence of witches. For some commentators, it is a poor reflection on science that its methods so easily lent themselves to the unjust persecution of innocent men and women. In this paper, I examine a debate about witches between a woman philosopher, Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), and a fellow of the Royal Society, Joseph Glanvill (1636–1680). I argue that Cavendish is the voice of reason in this exchange—not because she supports the modern-day view that witches do not exist, but because she shows that Glanvill’s arguments about witches betray his own scientific principles. Cavendish’s responses to Glanvill suggest that, when applied consistently, the principles of early modern science could in fact promote a healthy scepticism toward the existence of witches.
Thomas Hobbes is widely acknowledged as the most important political philosopher to have written in English. Originally published in 2007, Taming the Leviathan is a wide-ranging study of the English reception of Hobbes's ideas. In the first book-length treatment of the topic for over forty years, Jon Parkin follows the fate of Hobbes's texts (particularly Leviathan) and the development of his controversial reputation during the seventeenth century, revealing the stakes in the critical discussion of the philosopher and his ideas. Revising the traditional view that Hobbes was simply rejected by his contemporaries, Parkin demonstrates that Hobbes's work was too useful for them to ignore, but too radical to leave unchallenged. His texts therefore had to be controlled, their lessons absorbed and their author discredited. In other words the Leviathan had to be tamed. Taming the Leviathan significantly revised our understanding of the role of Hobbes and Hobbism in seventeenth-century England.
In this book, published in 1686, the scientist Robert Boyle (1627–91) attacked prevailing notions of the natural world which depicted 'Nature' as a wise, benevolent and purposeful being. Boyle, one of the leading mechanical philosophers of his day, believed that the world was best understood as a vast, impersonal machine, fashioned by an infinite, personal God. In this cogent treatise, he drew on his scientific findings, his knowledge of contemporary medicine and his deep reflection on theological and philosophical issues, arguing that it was inappropriate both theologically and scientifically to speak of Nature as if it had a mind of its own: instead, the only true efficient causes of things were the properties and powers given to matter by God. As such, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature represents one of the subtlest statements concerning the philosophical issues raised by the mechanical philosophy to emerge from the period of the scientific revolution.
Book synopsis: Although much has been written on the intellectual achievements of the age of Newton, Boyle and Hooke, this book provided the first systematic assessment of the social relations of Restoration science when it was published in 1981. On the basis of a detailed analysis of the early history of the Royal Society, Professor Hunter examines the key issues concerning the role of science in late seventeenth-century England. The nature of the scientific community, the links between science and technology and science's political affiliations are all explored, while much light is cast on contemporary priorities in religion and learning through a reconsideration of attacks on science. At once wide-ranging and authoritative, this remains a work that no one concerned with science and its social integration in this formative period can afford to ignore.
Margaret Cavendish (1623 - 1673) was a philosopher, poet, scientist, novelist, and playwright of the seventeenth century. Her work is important for a number of reasons. It presents an early and compelling version of the naturalism that is found in current-day philosophy; it offers important insights that bear on recent discussions of the nature and characteristics of intelligence and the question of whether or not the bodies that surround us are intelligent or have an intelligent cause; it anticipates some of the central views and arguments that are more commonly associated with figures like Thomas Hobbes and David Hume. This is the first full account of Cavendish's philosophy and covers the whole span of her work. David Cunning begins with an overview of Cavendish's life and work before assessing her contribution to a wide range of philosophical subjects, including her arguments concerning materialism, experimentation, the existence of God, social and political philosophy and free will and compatibilism. Setting Cavendish in both historical and philosophical context, he argues that like Spinoza she builds on central tenets of Descartes' philosophy and develops them in a direction that Descartes himself would avoid. She defends a plenum metaphysics according to which all individuals are causally interdependent, and according to which the physical universe is a larger individual that constitutes all of reality. Cavendish is essential reading for students of seventeenth-century philosophy, early modern philosophy and seventeenth-century literature.
INTRODUCTION: PLACING THE 1668 APPENDIX IN CONTEXT The possibility of a translation into Latin or French of Leviathan, his masterpiece of political philosophy, had engaged the attention of Thomas Hobbes not long after its appearance in English in 1651. Du Verdus gave various, and not necessarily consistent, reports of such an undertaking. Writing in 1654 to say he was making an interlinear translation and again in 1655 to express his hope of translating Leviathan into French, in 1656 and again in 1657 Du Verdus wrote with a promise of an exact translation. In 1657 De Martel wrote seeking a translation, followed by du Bosc in 1659, the latter noting, ‘All ye learned men I know desire that Leviathan were in French or Latine’. Similar requests followed. This expression of interest from non-Anglophone admirers might suggest that the eventual volume of 1668 would be aimed at a readership significantly different from that addressed in 1651, and to an extent this is true, as Hobbes himself indicated in later noting that he had omitted from the 1668 volume ‘some such passages as strangers are not concerned in’.
Hobbes represented himself in various places in Leviathan as a good English Protestant. There are numerous sentences in Leviathan about Christianity, which, if uttered by almost anyone else in seventeenth- century England, would be understood as expressions consonant with Calvinism or Lutheranism. All scholars would agree about that. What scholars disagree about is whether Hobbes's representation was serious or not, honest or not, sarcastic or not, intentionally subversive or not. Most scholars think that he was not being honest, and many of these think that he intended his perceptive readers to see that, in context, he intended to subvert Christianity in particular and revealed religion in general. The minority view, one that I have defended, is that he was serious and honest. This is not to say that he was not also ill-disposed towards various brands of Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism and Presbyterianism, and prone to sarcasm. He was. His views, in my opinion, were intended to justify a narrow space in the broad band of seventeenth-century English Christianity. Leaving aside his views about the Bible, his basic positions would have been perfectly respectable forty years earlier, during the reign of James I and VI: orthodox in doctrine, Calvinist in theology, episcopal in ecclesiology, non-puritan in liturgy, and monarchical in politics. By 'orthodox', I simply mean that he professed belief in the doctrines of the major early creeds and the Thirty-nine Articles.
Book synopsis: Only recently have scholars begun to note Margaret Cavendish’s references to 'God,' 'spirits,' and the 'rational soul,' and little has been published in this regard. This volume addresses that scarcity by taking up the theological threads woven into Cavendish’s ideas about nature, matter, magic, governance, and social relations, with special attention given to Cavendish’s literary and philosophical works.
Reflecting the lively state of Cavendish studies, God and Nature in the Thought of Margaret Cavendish allows for disagreements among the contributing authors, whose readings of Cavendish sometimes vary in significant ways; and it encourages further exploration of the theological elements evident in her literary and philosophical works. Despite the diversity of thought developed here, several significant points of convergence establish a foundation for future work on Cavendish’s vision of nature, philosophy, and God. The chapters collected here enhance our understanding of the intriguing-and sometimes brilliant-contributions Cavendish made to debates about God’s place in the scientific cosmos.
Thomas Hobbes exerted one of the most significant contemporary influences on the thought of Margaret Cavendish. Hobbes's influence was both positive and negative. Cavendish shares many important doctrines with him, some of which put them in a very small minority in the seventeenth century. Both are materialists with respect to the natural world.
Only recently have scholars begun to note Margaret Cavendishs references to 'God,' 'spirits,' and the 'rational soul,' and little has been published in this regard. This volume addresses that scarcity by taking up the theological threads woven into Cavendishs ideas about nature, matter, magic, governance, and social relations, with special attention given to Cavendishs literary and philosophical works. Reflecting the lively state of Cavendish studies, God and Nature in the Thought of Margaret Cavendish allows for disagreements among the contributing authors, whose readings of Cavendish sometimes vary in significant ways; and it encourages further exploration of the theological elements evident in her literary and philosophical works. Despite the diversity of thought developed here, several significant points of convergence establish a foundation for future work on Cavendishs vision of nature, philosophy, and God. The chapters collected here enhance our understanding of the intriguing-and sometimes brilliant-contributions Cavendish made to debates about Gods place in the scientific cosmos. © Brandie R. Siegfried, Lisa T. Sarasohn, and contributors 2014. All rights reserved.
My title refers to the limitations of the mechanical philosophy as a source of explanations of natural phenomena, and to More’s serious reservations about the mechanical philosophy on those grounds. He was certainly not alone in finding explanatory weaknesses, and corresponding ontological deficiences, in a natural philosophy that 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. The mechanical philosophy, of whatever variety, was seen by many in the seventeenth century to be ill-equipped to account for everything within the domain of phenomena over which its protagonists claimed exclusive rights of explanation. As its development showed, the effectiveness of mechanical explanations was to lie not in comprehensiveness, but in a selective delimitation of the problem domain, and in following through the implications of an awareness that plausible and appealing explanatory structures on their own were insufficient, but required in addition an ontological content that would permit mathematical description or effective experimental investigation and control,1 without compromising theological or philosophical commitments, where these were thought to be at issue.
Robert Boyle always protested his reluctance to engage in dispute about the validity of his experimental philosophy and its conclusions. Even so, of four significant attacks on his interpretation of various hydrostatical experiments he felt it necessary to respond publicly to three of them. These attacks came from the pens of Thomas Hobbes, Franciscus Linus and Henry More.¹ It is fairly easy to see why Boyle should be so disturbed by the writings of both Hobbes and Linus. Hobbes had an international reputation as a philosopher and a national reputation as an atheist. On either count Boyle could not let it be seen that Hobbes’s interpretation of the physical world was more cogent than his own. Franciscus Linus, on the other hand, was a Jesuit priest and, perhaps more to the point in this context, he was a vigorous defender of scholastic Aristotelianism. Boyle and his confederates in English natural philosophy — the leading lights of the Oxford Experimental Club and later of the Royal Society — had not singled out anyone for more criticism than the contemporary Aristotelian, and it was as a representative of that breed that Linus had to be dismissed.
Preface 1. Hobbes' life 2. Hobbes' system in retrospect 3. The contemporary setting 4. Materialism: general reactions 5. Materialism: More, Cudworth and Glanvill 6. The fre-will controversy: Bramhall and Cudworth 7. Hobbes and libertinism 8. Conclusion Appendix Bibliography Index.
It is often claimed that Margaret Cavendish was an anti-experimentalist who was deeply hostile to the activities of the early Royal Society--particularly in relation to Robert Hooke's experiments with microscopes. Some scholars have argued that her views were odd or even childish, while others have claimed that they were shaped by her gender-based status as a scientific 'outsider'. In this paper I examine Cavendish's views in contemporary context, arguing that her relationship with the Royal Society was more nuanced than previous accounts have suggested. This contextualized approach reveals two points: first, that Cavendish's views were not isolated or odd when compared with those of her contemporaries, and second, that the early Royal Society was less intellectually homogeneous than is sometimes thought. I also show that, although hostile to some aspects of experimentalism, Cavendish nevertheless shared many of the Royal Society's ambitions for natural philosophy, especially in relation to its usefulness and the importance of plain language as a means to disseminate new ideas.
Perspectives on Science 9.3 (2001) 341-365
Lady Cavendish's scientific exploits fare little better at the hands of later historians. If her scientific methodology is not suspect or considered severely hampered by circumstance, it is written off as outside her interest. Samuuel Mintz (1952) comments that Cavendish, unlike many of her more famous contemporaries, could not rise above the stature of a virtuoso and that she "would never submit to the discipline of scientific procedure, because she saw no value in it" (p. 168). Worse still, he claims that she had no interest in scientific methodology at all. Yet given her explicit critique of Hooke's microscopic work and her critical emphasis on observation and technology as employed by the Royal Society, we could instead read Mintz as saying that her methods were not those of science. Perhaps slightly more sympathetic to Cavendish's philosophical exploits, Douglas Grant (1957) could not help but conclude: "her fancy was irrepressible." Consequently, in her most explicitly scholastic work in natural philosophy (Grounds of Natural Philosophy, 1668), her fancy "revolted as irresponsibly against the discipline she had tried to impose upon it as it had done in the Blazing World" (p. 211). This earlier work is a utopian fantasy novel published jointly with her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy in 1666. But Grant is willing to contribute at least some of Cavendish's fanciful ways to circumstance. He muses: "as she was unable to check her conjectures by experiment, she could never proceed to firmer conclusions" (p. 195). Given the radically anti-empirical nature of Observations and Blazing World, Grant seems to miss the point: Cavendish would not have checked her results using the methods she so resolutely rejected.
Not until Robert Kargon's discussion of Cavendish's atomism is her natural philosophy treated in its own right without prefaces or apologies. Unfortunately, Kargon portrays the Duchess as controversial because of the atheistic implications of her atomism. Cavendish's commitment to atomistic matter theory, however, is here overplayed. Despite verses apparently sympathetic to such matter theory in Poems and Fancies (1653) and Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (1656), the Duchess later rejects the theory that bodies are composed of irreducible atoms "of the selfe same matter; as Fire, Earth, and Water" to which all motion and change can be attributed (1653, p. 10). Kargon's commentary on Cavendish's participation in the English venture into atomic matter theory is itself too narrowly confined to make headway into her later philosophical exploits. Nevertheless, the absence of critical commentary about Cavendish's role as natural philosopher marks a distinct break from her earlier biographers who seemed more interested in extolling the tribulations of her thought.
Lately, historical interest in Margaret Cavendish has begun to focus on her unique role as a woman critic of the new mechanistic philosophies and emerging Royal Society. By linking her rationalist methodology, vitalistic metaphysics and lamentations about women's plight in society, a portrait of an early pioneer in feminism and critic of modern science emerges. Hilda Smith, for instance, considers Cavendish one of the first feminists and a member of...
Boyle argued for a new epistemology, of the "matter of fact" that could be shown by experiment. The experiment would be witnessed, or virtually witnessed, by credible persons. Causes would not be sought beyond certain boundaries, but matters of fact could be attained. This new natural philosophy was opposed by Hobbes who has historically been eliminated from the story as the loser. But he attacked Boyle on attackable points - the imperfections of instruments (the air pump), and the lack of public space surrounding an experiment.
In the aftermath of the English Civil War, as people were groping for new forms of political order, Robert Boyle built an air-pump to do experiments. Does the story of Roundheads and Restoration have something to do with the origins of experimental science? Schaffer and Shapin believed it does.
Focusing on the debates between Boyle and his archcritic Thomas Hobbes over the air-pump, the authors proposed that "solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order." Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild.
The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said. [Megan, STS 901-Fall 2006]
This study considers the contribution of Francesco Patrizi da Cherso (1529–1597) to the development of the concepts of void space and an infinite universe. Patrizi plays a greater role in the development of these concepts than any other single figure in the sixteenth century, and yet his work has been almost totally overlooked. I have outlined his views on space in terms of two major aspects of his philosophical attitude: on the one hand, he was a devoted Platonist and sought always to establish Platonism, albeit his own version of it, as the only currect philosophy; and on the other hand, he was more determinedly anti-Aristotelian than any other philosopher at that time. Patrizi's concept of space has its beginnings in Platonic notions, but is extended and refined in the light of a vigorous critique of Aristotle's position. Finally, I consider the influence of Patrizi's ideas in the seventeenth century, when various thinkers are seeking to overthrow the Aristotelian concept of place and the equivalence of dimensionality with corporeality. Pierre Gassendi (1592–1652), for example, needed a coherent concept of void space in which his atoms could move, while Henry More (1614–1687) sought to demonstrate the reality of incorporeal entities by reference to an incorporeal space. Both men could find the arguments they needed in Patrizi's comprehensive treatment of the subject.
According to Margaret Cavendish the entire natural world is essentially rational such that everything thinks in some way or another. In this paper, I examine why Cavendish would believe that the natural world is ubiquitously rational, arguing against the usual account, which holds that she does so in order to account for the orderly production of very complex phenomena (e.g. living beings) given the limits of the mechanical philosophy. Rather, I argue, she attributes ubiquitous rationality to the natural world in order to ground a theory of the ubiquitous freedom of nature, which in turn accounts for both the world's orderly and disorderly behavior.
L'A. analyse la theorie de la matiere des critiques anglais de Descartes (More, Boyle, Mayow, Newton), et leurs theories des forces occultes et " principes actifs ". Il soutient que ces qualites occultes ne sont pas les restes d'une pensee " hermetique " mais des elaborations theoriques de la pensee mecaniste et des elements originaux de la pensee experimentale anglaise
A striking omission in the scholarship on the reception of the chymical philosophy of Jan Baptista van Helmont in England in the seventeenth century is the work of the mid-seventeenth-century natural philosopher Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. In her Philosophical Letters (1664), Cavendish offers an extended critique of Van Helmont's work (whose Ortus Medicince had recently been translated into English by John Sadler). In this paper, I compare Cavendish's criticisms with those of Robert Boyle in his Sceptical Chymist (1661). Both Boyle and Cavendish attacked Van Helmont for the obscurity of his chymical vocabulary and concepts, and attacked his seminalism. Although their critiques had much in common, they diverged in their attitudes to Van Helmont's experiments. As an opponent of the experimental philosophy, Cavendish had little interest in the quality of Van Helmont's experimental claims, whereas Boyle was critical of their unreplicability. I also try to show that the two writers had very different polemical agendas, with Boyle defending his vision of chymistry based on a corpuscularian natural philosophy, and Cavendish being as much concerned with establishing her religious orthodoxy as with defending the truth claims of her own materialist vitalism. For Cavendish, Van Helmont was an example of the dangers of mingling theology and natural philosophy.
Obra fundamental del empirista inglés John Locke (1632-1704) que influenció el pensamiento filosófico del siglo XVIII. El autor explica lo que sucede en el hombre cuando este verifica lo que se llama conocer; esto es, cuando el entendimiento se pone en relación con cosas externas. Afirma reiteradamente que todo conocimiento procede de la sensación y de la reflexión sobre ella (ideas), y que es absurdo pensar que existan pricipios innatos en la mente.
Book synopsis: A maverick in her own time, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673) was dismissed for three centuries as an eccentric crank. Yet the past few decades have witnessed a true renaissance in Cavendish studies, as scholars from diverse academic disciplines produce books, articles and theses on every aspect of her oeuvre. Cavendish's literary creations hold a wide appeal for modern readers because of her talent for thinking outside the rigid box that delimited the hierarchies of class, race and gender in seventeenth-century Europe. In so doing, she challenged the ultimate building blocks of early modern society, whether the tenets of Christianity, the social and political imperatives of patriarchy, or the arrogant claims of the new Baconian science. At the same time, Cavendish offers keen insights into current social issues. Her works have become a springboard for critical discourse on such topics as the nature of gender difference and the role of science in human life. Sara Mendelson's aim in compiling this volume is to convey to readers some idea of the scope and variety of scholarship on Cavendish, not only in terms of dominant themes, but of critical controversies and intriguing new pathways for investigation.
Of the Nature of Spirits; Especially Mans Soul
- Richard Baxter
Principles of Philosophy The Netherlands: D. Reidel
- René V R Descartes
- R P Miller
- Miller
- Dordrecht
Monism, and Causation in the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish
- Karen Detlefsen
- Atomism
Philosophical Letters: Or, Modest Reflections upon Some Opinions in Natural Philosophy. London, s.n. 1664
- Margaret Cavendish
The Incongruous Mechanist
- John Henry
- Robert Hooke