The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution by Lisa Sarasohn (review)

Explaining Cavendish’s theory of nature as it evolved through her career is not easy. At a time when figurative language was eschewed by members of the Royal Society, her natural philosophy swells with correspondences and analogical resemblances. Her frequent political metaphors make it unclear whether she is presenting a theory of matter, satirizing political or social thought, or posing epistemological questions that undermine the new science’s quest for certainty. And her generic experimentation further complicates the task of identifying her natural philosophy: she introduced her theory of atoms in verse, and she satirized the activity of the Royal Society in a beast fable. Much scholarly work on Cavendish either evades direct discussion of her theory of matter or fails to account for her literary play. Ms. Sarasohn reconciles what seem to be irreconcilable aspects of Cavendish’s thought: “reason and imagination function as dual expositors of her philosophy.”

We can see Cavendish performing at a meeting of the Royal Society in 1667. She selfconsciously presented herself as a spectacle, playing up the ludic nature of her visit. For Ms. Sarasohn, this visit “was a reenactment . . . of her other self” in the already performed Blazing World. By appearing as “reified fancy,” she insisted that her “visit must be read like her books, a fusion of the rational and the fantastic.” As the show she staged that day ridiculed the deferential and baffled experimental philosophers, a child ran up and down the room. Ms. Sarasohn suggests that the child “knew that he was attending a show, even if the Royal Society did not.”

A second chapter focuses on Cavendish’s early atomism, reminding us that atomism was theologically suspect in the 1650s because it seemed to posit a materialistic and self-moving universe independent of God, with chance, not divine providence, governing matter. Earlier expositors of Cavendish’s atomism, such as Robert Kargon and Ms. Sarasohn herself, argued that Cavendish embraced Epicurean atomism early in her career, but she now qualifies that claim by stating that by 1653, Cavendish’s atomism was blurring into an idiosyncratic, vitalist theory of matter. Ms. Sarasohn also traces her deployment of both philosophy and fancy, even at this early stage. The early result of this dual exposition was the production of a mythologized vitalistic atomism with dancing atoms and fairies. Unlike Hobbes, who banished immaterial spirits, including fairies, from the realm of possibility, Cavendish posits their existence to register the effects of her theory of matter. A third chapter explores Cavendish’s clear break with atomism to posit a vitalistic materialism first expounded in Philosophical Fancies and Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655). The hierarchic order within her vitalist system proved less heterodox than atomism; it also provided a more ordered metaphor for the body politic than atomism did.

Chapter four examines Cavendish’s ongoing concern to find a place for God in her natural philosophy in Nature’s Pictures (1656), a collection of stories that reflect Hobbes’s influence. Ms. Sarasohn focuses on the “She-Anchoret,” a story in which “a fictionalized other self” “describes the functions of rational and sensitive matter and develops a theory of self-motion that explains the possibility of free will in a fixed universe, as well as examining the source of disorder and sin.” Cavendish’s cosmogony depicts a male divine principle that together with a material nature produces motion and figure.

With the Restoration, Cavendish’s world changed, inducing a politicization of her theory of matter discussed in chapter five. As Ms. Sarasohn puts it, “her aim was to explain how matter—or people—can be arranged in order to avoid disorder and achieve a harmonious state of nature or society.” As she revised earlier works and added new texts, she presented a holistic concept of matter, in which “no perfect Division can be made . . . for though there may be Infinite parts of infinite matter, yet there are not...