Observations upon Experimental Philosophy

A critique of the new experimental science of the Royal Society, published in 1666 together with Cavendish's prose fiction The Blazing World. Her main target is the use of microscopes and telescopes, especially in Robert Hooke's Micrographia of 1665. Lenses, she argues, distort what they show, and artificial devices reveal only the outward figures of things, never the inner motions that make nature what it is. Experiment cannot replace reason, which must judge what the senses report. Against this background she sets out her own natural philosophy. Nature is wholly material, but matter is self-moving and perceptive throughout. It is made of three degrees blended together: rational matter, sensitive matter and inanimate matter. Perception is not limited to animals with organs but runs through all of nature, and every part of matter has its own knowledge. She also rejects atomism and the mechanical picture of matter as passive stuff moved only from outside.

It offers a sharp contemporary challenge to the authority of scientific instruments and a full alternative to mechanism, written by a woman excluded from the institutions she criticised.