Anne Conway

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Anne Conway (1631–1679) was an English philosopher whose only book, written in the last years of an illness-ridden life and printed after her death, set out a single sustained argument: that the whole of created reality is one living substance, graded by degrees rather than divided in kind. She wrote it for herself, in notebooks, while bedridden by the migraines that defined much of her adult life.

She came to philosophy through correspondence. The Cambridge Platonist Henry More became her tutor and lifelong friend, and through him she absorbed the Platonic tradition that runs from Plotinus through the Florentine Renaissance. Later she fell under the influence of Francis Mercury van Helmont, a wandering physician and Christian Kabbalist who brought into her circle the Lurianic Kabbalah then being translated into Latin in the Kabbala Denudata. Her late conversion to Quakerism, unusual for a woman of her rank, belongs to the same turn toward an unmediated and inward religion.

The treatise argues against the two dominant systems of its day at once. Against Descartes, who split the world into thinking mind and dead extended matter, and against Hobbes, who made everything matter, Conway held that there is no dead matter anywhere: every created thing is alive, made of countless living particles, and capable of rising or sinking on a continuous scale between body and spirit. Created substance is therefore one kind of thing throughout, distinct only from God above and from Christ as the mediating “middle nature” between God and creatures. Pain and suffering, in this scheme, are corrective — the means by which fallen creatures are gradually refined and restored.

The book reached print in 1690 in a Latin translation, and in the anonymous English translation of 1692 the library holds. Its afterlife rests largely on one reader: Leibniz, who knew van Helmont, owned the work, and credited Conway by name. Scholars have long debated how far her living, indivisible, perceiving units stand behind his monads; the resemblance is real and the historical link documented, though the extent of the debt remains contested. The term monad itself she shares with him, drawn from the same Platonic and Kabbalistic sources.

For most of three centuries she was read, when read at all, as a footnote to More and Leibniz. Recovery has been recent: her treatise is now studied as one of the few fully articulated metaphysical systems by a woman of the early modern period, and as a rare point where Kabbalah, Cambridge Platonism, and the new mechanical philosophy meet in a single argument. The book carries no author’s name on its title page. The name was reattached later.

→ In the library: Conway — Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (1692 English translation)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Emanation