The Vitalism of Anne Conway: Its Impact on Leibniz's Concept of the Monad

The Vitalism of Anne Conway: Its Impact on Leibniz's Concept of the Monad CAROLYN MERCHANT Introduction By the late seventeenth century, several reactions to the mechanical philosophies of Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, and Boyle had appeared in Western Europe. Among these were philosophies that reasserted the fundamental organic unity of nature, such as Cambridge Platonism and vitalism. The Cambridge Platonists Henry More and Ralph Cudworth retained the dualistic structure of mind and matter assumed by Descartes and attempted to bridge the gap by the reassertion of plastic natures and the spirit of nature as organic links. The vitalists, on the other hand, affirmed the life of all things through a reduction of Cartesian dualism to the monistic unity of matter and spirit. Among its proponents were Francis Glisson, Francis Mercury van Helmont, Lady Anne Conway, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In this paper I shall discuss the major tenets of vitalism as they appeared in the thought of the philosopher Anne Conway, a woman whose ideas, praised and respected in her own day, have been almost forgotten in ours. In so doing, I shall also try to assess their influence on and convergence with the vitalistic strand of Leibniz's thought as it appeared in papers of his later life, for example, the "Monadology" and "The Principles of Nature and of Grace." Anne Conway, F. M. van Helmont, and Leibniz In his important work Leibniz und Spinoza (1890), Ludwig Stein pointed out that the first use of the term "monad" to characterize the concept of individual substance in Leibniz's thought occurred in a letter to Fardella of September, 1696.' The word "monad" had been utilized in the writing of Francis Mercury van Helmont and Lady Anne Conway and had appeared in the Kabbala denudata, published by Knorr von Rosenroth in 1677-78, to which van Helmont had contributed. 2 Significantly it was during the period of van The research for this paper was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California, the National Science Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. I am grateful to Dr. Walter Pagel for his encouragement and many valuable references and to anonymous referees for their suggestions. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Herbert Evans History of Science Club, Berkeley, California, September 1977, and to the annual meeting of the History of Science Society, Madison, Wisconsin, October, 1978. For a more extended discussion see my book The Death of Nature (New York: Harper and Row, 1979). Ludwig Stein, Leibniz und Spinoza (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1890), p. 209. 23 vols. (Sulzbach, 1677-78); see I:310 and 3:28. Francis Mercury van Helmont, A Cabbalistical Dialogue in answer to the Opinion of a learned doctor in Philosophy and Theology that the world was made [2551 256 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Helmont's visit to Leibniz at Hannover in 1696 that Leibniz appropriated the word.3 Six years earlier van Helmont had carried Anne Conway's only manuscript, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, to Holland where it had been translated into Latin and two years later published again in an English retranslation .' It is also known that Leibniz was familiar with the Kabbala denudata and had visited Knorr von Rosenroth at Sulzbach early in 1688. 5Leibniz therefore knew the writings of the younger van Helmont and, through him, the book by Anne Conway , and he found many of their ideas compatible with his own. A number of scholars have provided background studies essential to elaborating the historical and philosophical connections among these three thinkers. Marjorie Nicholson has traced the fascinating relationship between Henry More, Lady Conway , and van Helmont, while dissertations and articles by Alison Coudert and Joseph Politella have delved more deeply into their response to Quakerism and cabalism. 6 The philosophies of nature, however, of both the younger van Helmont and Anne Conway have been almost totally neglected. 7 It is startling to note that Heinrich Ritter's discussion of van Helmont's philosophy in his Geschichte der Philosophic was based almost entirely upon Anne...