Margaret Cavendish’s thinking matter: a forgotten alternative to laws imposed from outside
Reading about Sor Juana and women claiming the right to think in the seventeenth century, I keep meeting her English contemporary Margaret Cavendish. I want to make a case that Cavendish's natural philosophy deserves attention not just as a curiosity but as a serious rival picture.
The dominant picture of her century, the mechanical philosophy, said matter is passive. It moves only when pushed, and its motions follow laws that God imposes from outside. Cavendish rejected this completely. In works like Philosophical Letters (1664), Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666) and Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668), she argued that all matter is self-moving and perceptive in some degree. She distinguished rational, sensitive and inanimate parts of matter, all blended together. Nature's order comes from within it, not from a lawgiver.
She also criticised the new microscopes, arguing that magnified images distort what they show and that observation without reason misleads. People have mocked that, but her point was about interpretation, not a refusal to look.
What I find striking, for the old question of what a law of nature is, is that she offers a picture in which regularity comes from the things themselves. It anticipates what philosophers now call dispositional essentialism in some ways, and, more loosely, the Daoist idea that things are "so of themselves".
Was she right about anything? Or is she important only because she was a woman doing natural philosophy at all?