Cavendish argued that mechanism could not be an accurate account of the natural world, because it could not properly explain the world that we observe. She claimed that two notable features of the natural world are variety and orderliness. The world around us is full of a vast array of different sorts of creatures and things, each performing distinctive activities or bearing distinct properties. If we understand the nature of a particular creature or substance, we could predict successfully how it might behave or react to certain stimuli.
Cavendish reasoned that if the world was ultimately constituted by uniform matter, passively receiving and transferring motion, according to mathematical laws of collision, then the universe should be either entirely homogenous or entirely chaotic. In other words, if passive, uniform matter communicating motion was really all we had to explain nature, we would not be able to account for its variety and orderliness—it would lack one or the other.
Instead, she claimed, different parts of the infinite material substance bear different degrees of motion by nature. They cannot directly transfer motion from one body to another, since motion is a property of the body that possesses it and not as something that can exist apart from its body. Thus individual bodies cannot give or receive their motions. Hence, the phenomena we observe are not to be explained by reference to uniform pieces of matter exchanging motion via collision.
Rather, she explains, what we see is like a dance, in which each body moves according to its own, distinctive, internal principle, such that a pattern might be created by the dancers on the dance floor.
She explicitly offers this dance metaphor in her first work of and again in For example, when she explains perception, she claims that the rational spirits flow in and out of the body through the eyes and touch upon the object being perceived, intermixing with the rational spirits found therein. The object, possessing its own distinctive spirits and motions, dances a pattern before the rational spirits, which flow back into the eyes. Note that, throughout this account of perception, motion is never transferred from one body to another.
The matter moves itself according to its own nature and initiates changes in its own motion via natural sympathy. Even so, the account is largely the same. Her argument from the Observations could be reconstructed as follows:. This is what might be called the argument from the variability and regularity of nature for self-moving matter. Premise 5 implies the argument that if the world was ultimately constituted by uniform matter, passively receiving and transferring motion, according to mathematical laws of collision, then the universe should be either entirely homogenous or entirely chaotic.
Another significant feature of her natural philosophy, and one that appears especially clearly when she critiques mechanism, is her refusal to take mathematical physics as an exemplar. Whereas Cartesian and Hobbesian natural philosophy could be described as attempts to understand nature with metaphors and modes of explanation taken from the new, mathematical physics, Cavendish instead draws from other sources, especially her personal experiences with country life and, less directly, the life sciences.
When explaining natural phenomena, she often makes reference to the behaviors of animals and humans, as well as her awareness of botanical phenomena. By the s, at least, we know that she had read and engaged the work of other vitalist and anti-mechanists, such as the alchemist Johannes Baptista Van Helmont. However, even before that time, her preference for biological metaphors over those of mathematical physics was evident. Not only does she deny atomism, but she also argues that the parts of bodies in part possess their distinctive motions and natures in virtue of the larger, organic systems, in which they are located.
This is not an argument for organicism; instead, she means it as an analogy to illustrate her views on individuals more generally. Despite the similarities of her vitalism to that of Van Helmont or perhaps Henry More, Cavendish also departs from them in her commitment to materialism. Human beings are alive, she says, because they are material beings composed of matter with varying degrees of motion moving in a distinctive pattern.
For Cavendish that is all that is needed for something to be alive. Note, though, that all things in nature, from humans and animals and plants down to minerals and artifacts, are the things they are, because they are composed of matter with distinctive patterns and degrees of motion. In this regard, she resembles Hobbes, even though she will ultimately reject his mechanistic view of matter, especially with her view that all matter is self-moving.
But we must remember that her view departs from the Cambridge Platonists and Van Helmont in denying that the principles of life are to be explained by reference to incorporeal powers, entities or properties. All matter is to some extent alive and all of nature is infused with a principle of life, but this principle of life is simply motion.
Thus Cavendish provides a fairly deflationary account of life as motion and in this regard her natural philosophy may resemble Hobbes or Descartes.
Despite this similarity, Cavendish again rejects their mechanism in her denial of determinism, even with regards to bodily interaction.
Though she often appeals to the orderliness and regularity of nature in defending her theory of self-moving matter, she also recognizes the presence of disorder in nature, such as in disease.
In fact, she explains illness or disease as the rebellion of a part of the body against the whole, explaining that some bits of matter have freely chosen alternative motions and thus disrupted the harmonious all. We might say, then, that she draws from experiences of the biological and botanical world to explain her metaphysics, but she also incorporates a Hobbesian sense of the body politic into her metaphysics and in so doing reinforces her rejection of the mechanistic worldview. However, Cavendish does not stop at explaining the principle of life by reference to degrees of motion in matter, because she also claims to explain mental representation and ultimately knowledge in this way.
When a particular pattern of motion occurs in the brain, say, via perception, the person perceives the object; for the person to have an idea of the object is just for her brain to contain its distinctive motion. More generally, she takes the presence of such patterned motions in matter to mean that said matter has knowledge , at least in some sense. Yet she also argues that such motions can be found throughout all of nature, every body possessing its own distinctive motions.
For these reasons, her vitalist materialism fits nicely with her panpsychism. In saying that all motion is life and that all things in nature are composed of matter with a degree of motion, Cavendish affirms that life permeates all of the natural world, including what we might call inanimate objects. For Cavendish, inanimate objects are alive, because they possess motion, though they might have a lesser degree of motion, and thus a lesser degree of life, than an animal or human being.
Indeed, she also believes that knowledge is similarly diffused across all of nature to greater and lesser degrees. For these reasons, we might call Cavendish an incremental naturalist with regard to knowledge and life. That is, she takes distinctively human traits such as knowledge and life to be natural properties that are present to varying degrees throughout all of nature. Throughout her work, Cavendish argues that whatever has motion has knowledge and that knowledge is innate or internally directed motion.
In her Philosophical Fancies of , she explains that. So sense is a weak knowledge, and knowledge a strong sense, made by the degrees of the spirits Chapter In the next chapter she continues to argue that all matter exhibits regular motion, which occurs because all matter is infused with sensitive spirits; but to have sensitive spirits is to be able to sense; thus all matter senses things.
Later, for example in her Observations, she argues that the regularity of nature can best—or perhaps only—be explained by admitting that all material bodies possess knowledge. Furhtermore, she argues that each part of the body and each object in nature exhibits a distinctive activity. The brain thinks; the stomach digests; the loins produce offspring—and they do so in regular and consistent ways.
Indeed, each of these organs or parts of the body are themselves also composite, made up of an infinite number of smaller bodies. What unites them, however, is their distinctive motions, producing their distinctive behaviors. And Cavendish takes each of these distinctive motions to be a kind of knowledge. She argues that we ought to think of these distinctive motions as knowledge, because that is the best, or perhaps only, way to explain the regularity and stability of these composites.
If these parts are to do these things, they must know what they do, especially given the regular and consistent ways in which they do them. Indeed, without matter knowing its own distinctive motions, she argues, perception would be impossible.
In short, all material entities, which is to say all things in nature, possess knowledge. The view that all things in nature possess mind or mental properties is panpsychism, to which Cavendish is committed here. Even so, she uses the concept of knowledge in an unusual way. When she ascribes knowledge to a rock, or to my liver for example, but she neither necessarily means that the rock or my liver have mental states like ours nor that they can perceive their environments in the same way we do.
For Cavendish, the knowledge of a thing like a mirror is, indeed, conditioned by the sort of motions that constitute the mirror, the motions that make it the thing it is; as such, mirror-knowledge and mirror-perception are very different from their human analogues.
Despite this similarity between a mirror and a human, the human being is composed of matter capable of many different kinds of perception and knowledge, whereas the mirror has a very limited ability to pattern out or reflect its environment.
And the human has sufficient amounts of rational spirits uniting its parts to be able to conduct rational inquiry, whereas the rational matter of a mirror is very limited indeed. This might sound as though she is walking back her commitment to panpsychism, but in fact she is not. For these parts or degrees of matter that possess varying levels of awareness are in fact entirely intermixed together in all things.
However in her second volume, Philosophical Fancies, published later in the same year, Cavendish already had disavowed her own atomic theory. By , when she published Philosophical and Physical Opinions, she had decided that if atoms were "Animated Matter," then they would have "Free-will and Liberty" and thus would always be at war with one another and unable to cooperate in the creation of complex organisms and minerals.
Nevertheless, Cavendish continued to view all matter as composed of one material, animate and intelligent, in contrast to the Cartesian view of a mechanistic universe. Cavendish and her husband returned to England with the restoration of the monarchy in and, for the first time, she began to study the works of other scientists.
Finding herself in disagreement with most of them, she wrote Philosophical Letters: or, Modest Reflections upon some Opinions in Natural Philosophy, maintained by several Famous and Learned Authors of this Age, Expressed by way of Letters in Cavendish sent copies of this work, along with Philosophical and Physical Opinions, by special messenger to the most famous scientists and celebrities of the day.
In and again in , she published Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, a response to Robert Hooke's Micrographia, in which she attacked the use of recently-developed microscopes and telescopes as leading to false observations and interpretations of the natural world.
Included in the same volume with Observations was The Blazing World was a semi-scientific utopian romance, in which Cavendish declared herself "Margaret the First. More than anything else, Cavendish yearned for the recognition of the scientific community. She presented the universities of Oxford and Cambridge with each of her publications and she ordered a Latin index to accompany the writings she presented to the University of Leyden, hoping thereby that her work would be utilized by European scholars.
Many of her stands were pretty traditional. She didn't like the new experimental science. Human sense is flawed, she said, and human instruments are even worse. Then we find that her husband collected the new telescopes, which were so radically altering human vision. He owned seven of them.
If she was at odds with her husband on this matter, you can't tell it from her writings. She called him her "wit's patron," and she took a traditional view of women's domestic role. First she wrote that women's minds are too soft for hard thought. Then, as though to give herself place at the table, she added that "some women are wiser than men. She found ways to be dramatic and outspoken enough to be noticed. If she is not contradicting her view that we do not have ideas of immaterials, or her view that God is outside the province of natural reason, she might just be attempting to speak in the language of her opponents to show that their own putative commitments entail that her view is to be accepted instead.
In the case of some of the arguments that she offers, she might just be assuming that the only way that she can get a response from her opponents is to speak in terms with which they identify. If so, she would have to discount the arguments in question, as they could not be considered a part of natural philosophy. The overall defensibility of her views would not be affected so long as she had plenty of other arguments to offer — arguments of the sort that can be thought and expressed.
For all of its apparent problems, one of the reasons that it is important to remark upon Cavendish's view on our inability to conceive of God is to highlight that even though she thinks that the organized behavior of bodies is due to intelligence, she does not subscribe to any version of a theory of intelligent design. There is a difference between the thesis that the orderly behavior of bodies is due to the intelligence and perceptual capacities of the bodies themselves and the thesis that it is due to the intelligence of a designer.
Cavendish might add that either thesis has to posit the existence of intelligent and perceptive matter. If God had created matter that was not equipped with the resources to detect the matter around it and act in ways that are coordinated, chaos would ensue almost immediately.
Cavendish is forced to admit that if matter is intelligent and perceptive, there is no further explanation as to why it is intelligent and perceptive, or at least not one that can be known by natural reason. Intelligence and perceptive matter just is. It is something that has always existed Cavendish , 14, and that has the resources within itself to bring about all the things that we observe it to bring about on a daily basis.
She would side with Hume on the question of whether or not it is more likely that the only beings that exist with such resources are immaterial:. For Cavendish, matter has a tremendous number of resources built into it. If it is eternal, then we can offer no account of its origin, but in this respect the competing thesis that God is the source of the order in the universe is on a par. The latter thesis has additional problems, however: if God is wholly immaterial, then it is not clear how He could produce matter, or how He would be able to interact with it once it was made Cavendish a, —; Cavendish b, ; Detlefsen , ; and if God's supremacy is inversely proportional to our finite ability to conceive of Him, it is difficult to see how our confidence about His nature and operations could be anything more than arrogance.
Cavendish thinks that the view that matter has always existed and is the source of its own order is not only a contender, but is really the only option. An issue of interpretation that arises in the attempt to reconstruct Cavendish's social and political philosophy is that for the most part the texts in which she addresses social and political questions are not formal philosophical treatises but works of fiction.
What is regarded as her central work on political philosophy, Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World , is a novel, and in another central text, Orations of Divers Sorts , Cavendish presents a multiplicity of opposing perspectives on social and political topics: gender roles, virtue, war, and the proper form of government, among others. Cavendish is indeed the author of Blazing World , and she also makes an appearance as a character, but it is difficult to be certain that all of the conclusions and insights of the narrator are ones that Cavendish would identify as her own.
The interpretive problem is even worse in the case of Orations , as there are as many as three or four speeches that are offered on any given subject, and the speeches are in some cases contradictory. Still, there are a few texts in which Cavendish puts forward claims about social and political matters and in which she is clearly speaking in her own voice — in particular, World's Olio.
We can use these claims to determine which of the perspectives she is endorsing in her more fictional work and to get a concrete sense of how she might follow up on these Boyle , — Cavendish disagrees with Hobbes on a number of questions of natural philosophy.
For Hobbes, thoughts and sensations are motions in the brain Hobbes , 27— For Cavendish thinking and intelligence are basic features of bodies — they are basic features that are ubiquitous in nature and that admit of no further explanation.
Nor would Hobbes agree with Cavendish that when bodies interact their rational elements communicate with each other and co-ordinate their behavior. But on questions of social and political philosophy Cavendish and Hobbes to a significant degree align. Like Hobbes, Cavendish holds that human beings are primarily motivated by self-interest:. Also like Hobbes, Cavendish thinks that life outside of civil society is so dangerous and chaotic that it does not allow us to pursue our self-interest in a stable and consistent way.
Outside of civil society, we cannot secure food or shelter without threat that they will be taken; we do not have, and we cannot create and sustain, the infrastructure that enables commerce; we cannot make plans; and the bulk of our energy is expended on security and safety in the moment. Orations offers multiple perspectives on social and political issues, but the emphasis on social stability is a constant Boyle , and — :.
As for Hobbes, for Cavendish the stability of civil society is not an end in itself; it is instead a necessary condition for us to pursue our self-interested projects and goals. If we remained in a state of nature, we would be in perpetual fear.
We would not be likely to live very long, and we would not live well. We would not be healthy. We would not be able develop our latent skills and abilities, and we would not be able to engage in the activities of which those skills and abilities are an expression.
Cavendish also agrees with Hobbes that civil society is most stable and secure when it is ruled by a single individual who has absolute power and sovereignty Lewis , ; Boyle , If a sovereign is to have absolute power, there is some risk of course that they might use that power unwisely and in a way that does not optimally promote peace and stability. Cavendish is worried however about all of the alternatives.
For example, democracy is not a sustainable option:. If the security and order of civil society is left in the hands of the majority, or in the hands of a person who is selected by the majority, there is too high a risk that society will return to chaos.
The members of such a body might be in perpetual conflict as a result of honest disagreement or as a result of their ambition to have more power for themselves. Cavendish concludes that the best prospect for security and stability though to be sure this is not a guarantee — is to have all power in the hands of a single individual. Cavendish does not get into a lot of detail about how the sovereign should best bring about peace and security, but she does offer a number of suggestions.
In Blazing World , she depicts a scene in which the Empress returns to her home world from the Blazing World and saves her people from an enemy attack. The Empress is depicted as possessing super-human abilities, as having the all-encompassing breadth and reach and power of a god:. While still on Blazing World, the Empress had received intelligence that her people were under attack and that their kingdom was likely to be destroyed The clear suggestion is that peace and security are best secured and maintained if a country is governed by a sovereign who is and is believed to be capable of the extraordinary.
The sovereign should not be selected by democracy, and ideally the sovereign will be one of the few who is naturally born with the talents that are requisite to do the job:. It is difficult to resist the thought that Cavendish is writing in part with an eye to Hobbes and the problem of the fool Hobbes , To the subject who thinks that it is rational to break the covenants of civil society, and who thinks that he can get away with it, Cavendish is suggesting that a capable sovereign would make sure that subjects have reason to believe that the eyes and ears of the sovereign are ubiquitous and that situations in which a subject concludes that is he under the radar are likely to be situations that the sovereign has had skillfully and majestically staged.
Cavendish also does not speak in a lot of detail about how a sovereign is established or about the formation of a commonwealth. She appears to assume that a sovereign will emerge from the among the most powerful and talented and that the majority of people will come to see subjugation as in their overall interest.
She does however sketch some parameters that she thinks a wise sovereign will keep in mind, and these parameters tend to be in keeping with her occasionalist view that things or persons have power not as a function of what they force onto their objects but as a function of whether or not these objects respond to the person or thing as requested.
For example, Cavendish says that a wise sovereign will be fair and consistent in the application and enforcement of laws Cavendish , The sovereign will also be a model of virtue, and in a way that allows his or her subjects to register that the highest forms of happiness and pleasure do not in fact accompany the life of vice.
Cavendish b, A wise sovereign will also make sure that subjects have access to letters and to education more generally — to poetry that softens our animalistic and reactive side Cavendish , 64 ; to plays and other representations that not only articulate and defend but also exhibit the virtues and joys that come with enacting them; and also philosophy and history Cavendish , 6.
One of the benefits of an education is that our minds become more filled with information that helps us to navigate the world — not only to achieve our local aims but to work toward the more global result of peace and security Boyle , — Cavendish does not think that we can achieve these aims blindly and by a brute act of will.
We need knowledge and familiarity with the ways of the world, and we cannot come up with these by a brute act of will either. Here it appears that Cavendish's view on occasional causation is making a systematic appearance yet again. Ecosystems and other collections of bodies are able to sustain themselves in existence, in large part because of the skillful communication that takes place between their members.
A commonwealth will have a better chance of surviving for the long haul if its members are prepared to listen to each other and if they are in synchrony with respect to a larger aim and if they have the wherewithal to respond to each other intelligently and without resistance. Cavendish would also recommend that a sovereign hold constant the extent to which human beings are driven by the pursuit of public recognition and fame. Cavendish herself thinks that our material minds do not live on after we die and that, if we have immaterial souls that continue to exist, we have absolutely no notion of these or how or why we would identify with them.
She thinks that deep down the rest of us are suspicious as well:. Cavendish is very astute to point out the extent to which human beings are motivated by a desire for public recognition.
She saw the evidence in her own day, and we can clearly see it in our own. These would include inventions, infrastructure, and the construction of schools and libraries Boyle , A wise sovereign will make sure that such behavior is encouraged and that it is also acknowledged.
Not everybody is noble and exalted and impressive by birth, and not everybody has all of the same talents Cavendish , 69; Cavendish a, 27, 37—38 , but there are still a number of ways that any human being can contribute to peace and stability. Society can be structured so that people can work to their own talents and be acknowledged for what they do well — whether they be scientists, philosophers, laborers, members of the military, writers, or something else — and a wise sovereign would recognize all of these achievements so that a person would not be motivated to secure fame in ways that are more unseemly.
We are remembered well if we do our part to promote peace and social stability. And it is only if society lives on, and is stable and orderly and civilized, that there will be people who might remember us. Another issue that comes up in interpreting Cavendish's social and political philosophy is whether or not she is a feminist.
It is tempting again to look to her view on occasional causation to shed light on her view of the proper roles for females and males. Cavendish herself wanted to be a practicing scientist and philosopher, but whether or not she could be so was a function not only of her decisions but also of the receptivity of the surrounding world.
She could decide to be a scientist, but whether or not she would be a scientist is up to a lot of additional factors — whether her results are disseminated and discussed, whether they are published, whether she is taken seriously and seen as authoritative, and whether she is part of a larger scientific community. Alternately, she or a Cavendish in a nearby possible world might decide to open a business, or be a constable or barrister, but whether or not she is successful would depend only in part on what she decides to do.
To be a businessperson she would need to have a customer base, and to be an attorney she would need to be authoritative and believable in front of those who deliver a verdict. Cavendish was not a prominent scientist in her time; nor was she a prominent philosopher. She attempted to correspond with Hobbes and others, but unlike the bodies that interact in constituting the ecosystems of nature and other organic units, these philosophers were not cooperative. Some of the texts suggest very strongly that her social and political philosophy is informed by her view of the normal operations of nature.
In Blazing World , the Empress is transported from her home planet and is pleased to find that the beings on the Blazing World will interact with her and respect her authority. In real life, the human males on earth would not engage with Cavendish, but the worm-men and bear-men and bird-men and fish-men and ape-men have extensive conservations with the Empress about the cosmos, the nature of matter and mind, chemistry, and mathematics 29— More, etc.
The atmosphere of the Blazing World is quite different from the atmosphere on earth, and whether or not a person is a scientist or philosopher or other authority is only in part dependent on what is happening on her end.
Cavendish presents women as accomplished and successful in other texts as well. The women submit to a powerful generalless, and together they defeat the enemy and save the male army at the same time. The events in Bell in Campo are fairly straightforward, but there might remain a question about Cavendish's own attitude toward those events, and in particular about her attitude toward the achievements of the female army.
In addition, the members of the female army are rewarded for their achievements — rewarded by the men in power — with the right to control their family finances, and the freedom to wear whatever they choose. On the other hand, Cavendish depicts the female army as being capable of doing what a male army is normally commissioned to do, and as capable of doing even more. Furthermore, she is depicting how males in power would in fact respond or how the males in her own world have responded to a circumstance in which a female army sweeps in to save the day.
On one reading, Cavendish herself is suggesting that men and women are not equal in terms of the roles that they should perform and that men are in important ways superior. On another reading, Cavendish is reflecting that men are not superior to women but that the achievements of women have always occurred in an atmosphere in which men are heavily advantaged. Some commentators have suggested that Cavendish leaves open the question of whether or not women are inferior by training and education or if they are inferior by nature for example Boyle , — It seems unlikely that Cavendish thinks that women are inferior by nature if she depicts women as capable of the highest levels of achievement in alternative possible worlds.
Women are still women in these alternative worlds; what is different is the structure of the surrounding audiences with which men and women have to contend. Cavendish herself was a remarkable person, as was the Empress and the generalless of Bell in Campo. It is true that women are depicted as exceptional only in Cavendish's fictional work McGuire , ; Boyle , , and that might indicate that she takes the idea of a skilled and capable woman to be fictional, but as per her view on occasional causation she might just be reflecting in these alternative worlds that what it is for an agent to be successful is in part due to what the agent signals and in part to how its larger environment is responsive.
Cavendish might have thought with Spinoza that an individual is not an island and that what it can do and cannot do is to some degree a part of its physical and psychological constitution and to a large degree a part of the lay of the land on which the individual would act.
Cavendish does however encourage a very conservative set of behaviors for women to perform, and again the question arises of whether she is basing her view on some assumptions about the nature of women more generally or if she has an eye to the environment in which women have happened to find themselves.
In World's Olio she emphasizes the importance of the virtue of chastity, and also patience, humility and being fashionable and constant The list is expanded by one of the speakers of Orations :. Here Cavendish might be reflecting how women ought to behave in any possible world irrespective of the power and responses of the beings that surround them.
If she thinks that the nature of women is such that women should be chaste and humble and quiet, then to the extent that she thinks that other characteristics are higher and more exalted she takes women to be an inferior part of the species. If she is instead reading off of her own world what behaviors are regarded as legitimate for women, then she is just describing the behavior that is adaptive to that environment.
But perhaps Cavendish thinks that the generalless is operating counter to her own nature. Alternately, if Cavendish is reading off of her culture how women would be most wise to behave, then she might just be offering conservative advice about how women can best flourish in the short material life that has been allotted to them.
A final interpretive issue that arises for Cavendish is exactly how the sovereign is supposed to have so much power and authority if power and achievement are in large part a function of the responsiveness of the surrounding world. A sufficiently powerful sovereign would have to have full control of the military and other underlings, and these in turn would need to be able to control the larger populace James , xxv-xxvi.
The sovereign would have to have enough power to force all of these people to act in accord with his or her will, but in the light of her view on occasional causation Cavendish is committed to the view that all that a sovereign would be able to do is send a signal or message to these beings in the hope that they would obey. The sovereign might try to take steps to increase the odds that underlings will abide by his message, but that would be a matter of sending another message still.
A sovereign cannot simply decree that certain things happen: whether or not they happen is a function of the responsiveness of the members of the commonwealth. For Cavendish, an ecosystem holds together, but not because a single member imposes its will on the others. Instead, the members work together as a group, and if human beings are a part of nature, they would function under the same constraints. If Cavendish is right, a sovereign has to be extremely powerful to secure peace and stability, but what it is for a sovereign to have power is to be wise enough to figure out which are the messages that his subjects would accommodate also Walters , Like many of her seventeenth-century contemporaries, Cavendish subscribes to the view that the universe is a plenum of contiguous bodies and that there is no empty space.
We might wonder how individual bodies would have any freedom or wiggle room to behave as they please if they are so surrounded and tightly packed in. Cavendish does defend the view that the bodies of nature are generally speaking free; indeed the view is a pillar of her system. She writes for example that. Bodies are free, Cavendish supposes, but she has not yet taken a stand on whether the freedom of bodies is of a libertarian or a compatibilist variety.
She does not use these contemporary terms herself, of course, and so the question is whether or not she cashes out freedom in terms of a contra-causal power by which bodies possess the ability to do otherwise than they do — again, even if she does not use that language — or if she takes freedom to be a matter of the wherewithal that a body has to act by the motions that are internal to it and to keep those motions from being squelched or redirected by an obstacle or hindrance.
She nowhere speaks in these exact terms either, but she does make some comments that are very revealing. For example, she defines voluntary motion as self-motion, and she describes the freest bodies at those that are able to make their way through the plenum with agility and without constraint.
We might want to be more skeptical of this last passage, because Cavendish is making a claim that makes reference to the nature and activity of being of which she thinks we have no idea, but the claim is still suggestive. Bracketing a miracle, nothing can happen in nature other than it in fact happens, she is saying, but she also supposes that bodies are still generally speaking free.
They are free, she indicates in the other two passages, when their activity and behavior is not obstructed or constrained. There are numerous passages throughout the corpus in which Cavendish describes bodies as free, but there are just a few in which she fleshes out what it is to which the freedom of a body amounts.
In these, her view is squarely compatibilist. There are also passages in which address the issue of free will from a theological perspective -- where she considers whether or not an omniscient God would have preordained all things from eternity or whether God would have left the behavior of creatures more open for example in Cavendish a, , "Further Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy" — but in these she is careful to suspend judgment.
Her view appears to be that bodies are free in the sense that for the most part the bodies that surround them are cooperative and do not prevent them from moving as they please, and that bodies are not free when other bodies dominate them or otherwise force a redirection of their motions.
Other passages suggest a compatibilist reading of the free behavior of creatures as well:. In a plenum of contiguous bodies, a body will sometimes redirect the motions of a second body in way that that body resists, and in such cases the behavior of the second body is not free.
In other cases the behavior of the second body is amenable to the redirection of motion, and in yet other cases still, a body moves by way of motions that of course are internal to it, and without any outside interference or obstruction.
In these cases the bodies are in effect cooperating with each other, and the behavior of the second body is free — even though it would not appear to have a contra-causal ability to do otherwise.
It has the motions that it has; it will not be the spontaneous source of any new motion, nor will it acquire any new motion from other bodies.
It has the motions that it has, and it acts accordingly. One potential objection to a compatibilist reading of Cavendish on freedom is that there are numerous passages in her corpus in which she says that bodies behave in a manner that is irregular.
If bodies exhibit irregularity and disorder, they would appear to be in possession of a faculty of spontaneity, and Cavendish would appear to hold that in at least some instances they exercise freedom of the libertarian variety.
Cavendish certainly speaks of irregularities and disorder, but there are also passages in which she steps back and says that what she has in mind when she speaks of an irregularity is just an entity or event that appears irregular to us against the background of our expectations and conceptions.
She says for example that. There are a couple of different ways to read the passages in which Cavendish speaks of irregularities in nature. One is to count them up and argue that because they outnumber the competing passages — and they do — Cavendish holds that irregularities are real. Another is to argue that she holds that there exist no irregularities at all.
On this approach, we would emphasize the passages in which she says that we identify something as an irregularity when it runs counter to our expectations. Any such passage would be treated as a kind of meta-text that is instructing us how to read the passages in which irregularities are introduced. In that case, Cavendish could speak of irregularities in a million passages or even more, but if she also tells us that all that she means by the term "irregularity" is something that runs counter to our expectations, then there is no need to count up the passages pro and con.
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