The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and Their Friends, 1642-1684 (review)

308 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:2 APRIL 199 4 can make the afterlife enjoyable for all, no matter how varied their tastes (Essay 2.21.65). I have insufficient space to discuss Schoul's remarkable claims about Locke's view of human liberty as involving Chisholmian agent-causation (t47n.). Schouls complains that others who connected Locke to the Enlightenment failed to reveal "exactly what this relationship might be" (5). He himself gives almost no specifics about the reliance of later thinkers on l.x~ke. His own insinuation that the entire Enlightenment is infected with Locke's incoherence hardly lives up to the standard he sets for his predecessors. J. B. SCHNEEWIND Johns Hopkins University Marjorie Hope Nicolson and Sarah Hutton, editors. The ConwayLetters: The Correspondence of Anne, ViscountessConway,HenryMore, and Their Friends, I64~-z684. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp xxix + 59~. Cloth, $98.o0. The reissue of Marjorie Hope Nicolson's classic ConwayLettersis an event worth celebrating . Anne Conway was a remarkable figure in a remarkable age. Born into one distinguished family, she married into another. As a girl, she received no formal education, but her earliest letters reveal her broad intellectual interests and wide reading . It was this aspect of her character that attracted the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, who became her mentor and friend. Their correspondence, the centerpiece of this collection, began before Anne's marriage and lasted until her death. While Edward Conway (who became Secretary of State) shared his wife's philosophical interests, he was hardly prepared for the intellectual and spiritual odyssey which took her from Cartesian philosophy into the folds of Quakerism via the Lurianic Kabbalah. Aristocratic women simply did not study Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, convert to Quakerism, or write philosophical treatises. That Lady Conway did all these while suffering from increasingly debilitating headaches makes her story as poignant as it is fascinating. A vivid picture emerges of this unusual woman wrestling with problems engendered by the new scientific philosophy. Henry More acted as her guide until another figure usurped his place--the mysterious, intriguing and, by all accounts, charming Francis Mercury van Helmont. Lady Conway ironically met van Helmont through More. Knowing of his reputation in medicine, More entreated van Helmont to visit Lady Conway. He did, initiating a friendship and collaboration lasting until Lady Conway's death. Under van Helmont's aegis, Lady Conway began to study the Lurianic Kabbalah. They collaborated on several books which set forth a monist philosophy based on the Kabbalistic doctrine of tikkun, the restoration of the world to its prelapsarian perfection. Their radical ideas shocked More, but they were defended by Lady Conway and van Helmont as the only way to reconcile divine justice with sin and suffering. As I have argued elsewhere, the philosophy of these two Christian Kabbalists influenced Leibniz's monadology and theodicy. Lady Conway's one acknowledged BOOK REVIEWS 309 work, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, is therefore an important work in its own right and not simply as the work of a woman. As Lady Conway and van Helmont moved closer to Quakerism, More was increasingly excluded from their company. His biographer, Richard Ward, described the tears of anguish he shed at Lady Conway's conversion to a sect he believed personified enthusiasm--an anathema to More. But even More was affected by Lady Conway's confession that the persecuted Quakers were the only people who could offer her comfort in her suffering (42 l). Lady Conway died at the age of forty-nine. Van Helmont performed his last service to her as a chemist. He preserved her body in spirits of wine so that her husband could have a final look before her burial. She went to her grave with the simple words "Quaker Lady" her only epitaph. In terms of sheer intellectual interest the Conway Letters have few equals, but when one adds the drama and pathos of the lives of these extraordinary correspondents , they are without peer. The reader cannot help but become absorbed by a story in which even the minor characters include such luminaries as George Fox, Robert Barclay, William Penn, Valentine Geatrakes, Boyle, Newton...