Margaret Cavendish On “Rational” Matter & Inventing Your Own World

Margaret Cavendish (1623 – 1673), nicknamed “the Mad Madge” for the novelty of her worldviews and for her brazen pursuit of fame, was a natural philosopher, a writer, a poet, a loyal lady in waiting to the English Queen in Exile, and allegedly a paralyzingly shy bookworm.
Throughout her life, Cavendish was surrounded by bright scientific minds. Thomas Hobbes, for instance, served as a personal tutor to William Cavendish, Margaret’s husband. She later challenged both Hobbes’s materialism and Descartes’s dualism by propounding a very novel conception of matter. Cavendish distinguished three “degrees” of matter: inanimate, or “dull,” matter, which “doth of itself lie still,” and the two animate degrees: sensitive and rational. Rational matter, according to Cavendish, is like “the architect,” sensitive matter is “the workman… always busily employed,” and the inanimate matter is the material used by the workman. In another allegory, she compares rational matter to the captain of the ship, sensitive matter to the sailors, and inanimate matter to the ship itself.

The novelty of this view lies in the equality of all matter – all things contain all three degrees: rational, sensitive, and inanimate. Cavendish uses this framework in her explanation of motion. In contrast to Descartes, she posits that motion is not transferred from one body to another but each objects moves rationally, in accordance with the “harmony of nature.” To demonstrate, Cavendish uses the image of the hand throwing a ball – “the motion by which, for example, the ball is moved is the ball’s own motion and not the hand’s that threw it, for the hand cannot transfer its own motion, which has a material being, out of itself and into the ball, or any other thing it handles, touches or moves, or else if it did, the hand would in a short time become weak and useless by losing so much substance.” The ball perceives the hand and responds to it rationally. Cavendish posits that the ball “sees” the hand moving and knows, in accordance with the kind of harmony of nature, that what it ought to do now is move in a particular way. The hand here triggers the ball to alter its own motion and serves as the occasion for the ball’s action. Thus, Margaret paints a curious picture of the world where all bodies perceive each other and respond in a kind of rational way in accordance with the harmony of nature.

How similar is Cavendish’s view of the world to panpsychism, where matter is self-conscious, consciousness is ubiquitous, primitive and omni-present? How close does she come to the Daoist vision of the world? Could a “thing” have a capacity to determine the direction of its own motion and chart its own path in the world or is Cavendish imagining a world of her fancy? In her fictional work, “The Blazing World,” she does pain a world inhabited by very polite sentient animals. She invites her readers to master fanciful worlds of their own: “By this Poetical Description, you may perceive, that my ambition is not onely to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole World; and that the Worlds I have made, both the Blazing- and the other Philosophical World, … are framed and composed of the most pure, that is, the Rational parts of Matter, which are the parts of my Mind…. I, esteeming Peace before Warr, Wit before Policy, Honesty before Beauty; instead of the figures of Alexander, Cesar, Hector, Achilles, Nestor, Ulysses, Hellen, &c. chose rather the figure of Honest Margaret Newcastle, which now I would not change for all this Terrestrial World; and if any should like the World I have made, and be willing to be my Subjects, they may imagine themselves such, …I mean in their Minds, Fancies or Imaginations; but if they cannot endure to be Subjects, they may create Worlds of their own, and Govern themselves as they please.”

Readings
We will read selections from Observations upon Experimental Philosophy and Further Observations upon Experimental Philosophy available in a Hackett edition. A free version is available at Archive. A Cambridge edition (PDF) is also available. We'll read the chapters referenced in the Hackett:

• Observations upon Experimental Philosophy: 1-3, 5, 15-17, 19-21, 25-26, 31, 35-37
• Further Observations upon Experimental Philosophy: 2-3, 5-8, 10-11, 13-15

Our second reading is The Blazing World, which is available in a Penguin edition and at Gutenberg.

Optional and Highly Recommended Readings

• Poems, and Fancies (1653)
• Philosophical Letters: or Modest Reflections Upon some Opinions in Natural Philosophy (1664)