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Recovering the Philosophy of Anne Conway: 17th Century Rationalist

Abstract: The recent wide-ranging project of focusing on the role of women in the history of

philosophy has led to a resurgence of interest in Anne Conway, a 17 th century rationalist

whose philosophical system is a beguiling mix of Christianity, Judaism and Renaissance

philosophy. This paper introduces some of the most striking aspects of her remarkable life

and thought.

When we teach history, we must, of necessity, be selective. In attempting to convey how

things progressed, be it in the realms of events or ideas, some value-judgements must come

into play. After all, there is a large amount of history to choose from. Thus the specialist, in

whatever area they may be, must pick out certain themes, emphasise particular details, and

leave out the inessential in order to give an impressionistic image of what has happened.

Such difficulties face the historian of philosophy, as much as the historian who deals with

more concrete matters, and in response we have made our selection of key philosophers

and ideas that form the part of any ‘decent’ philosophical education. Traditionally, this

selection, leading up to the dawn of the 20th century, has encompassed a few ancient

Greeks (for example, Plato and Aristotle), some scholastics from the development of

Christian philosophical theology (Augustine and Aquinas), and a number of scholars drawn

from Western Europe through the 17th-19th centuries (including Descartes, Locke, Hume,

Kant, and Nietzsche). This selection is based on the presumption that confining one’s

attention to such key thinkers will give enough information for a good general grasp of the
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history of philosophy, enabling one to focus on contemporary issues with the widest

requisite historical context in mind.

However, this orthodoxy has recently been challenged. The challenge begins with a

simple observation; namely, that all of the philosophers named in the previous paragraph

are white males drawn from European traditions. This fact raises a number of questions,

such as whether the orthodox view of what is significant in the history of philosophy is

biased, and as such, whether we are presenting our students with an ultimately inaccurate

impression of the progress of thought in previous centuries. A number of initiatives have

recently been launched in order to address such bias in the teaching of the history of

philosophy (and other disciplines); amongst them, Project Vox, which offers teaching

resources on women philosophers from the early modern period, the recent ‘Why Is My

Curriculum White?’ campaign, and attempts to offer modules in non-Western philosophy.

One result of this is a resurgence of interest in women philosophers from the early modern

period who, despite the barriers placed in their way, were able to make a philosophical

contribution, be it through anonymous publication or through informal contact with other

philosophers. One such figure is Anne Conway (1631-1679), whose little-studied yet

remarkable philosophy is to be found in The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern

Philosophy. In what follows, I will briefly examine her life and thought.

Our story does not begin with Anne Conway, though, but with a meeting between

two men at Christ’s College, Cambridge, on 12th October 1670. These two men were Francis

Mercury van Helmont and Henry More, the latter a Fellow of the college. Both, though

perhaps little-known now, had considerable reputations at that time. More was a prominent
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intellectual figure who published widely in philosophy and theology, while van Helmont

according to Coudert,

“was an indefatigable planner and talker[,] a reformer who… insistently sought

to foster the best in human and society[, who] tended the sick and tried to

reform the medical profession[,] wove his own clothes and developed weaving

projects to employ the poor[,] advocated the building of pawn shops for the

benefit of the poor[, and] invented a method of teaching the deaf and dumb to

speak and a chair to straighten crooked backs”.1

In addition to these wide-ranging activities, he also found time to write books on subjects as

varied as “alchemy, medicine, philosophy, religion, law, and language”.2 By all accounts, the

meeting went well, with More and van Helmont getting along famously (More later wrote

approvingly of van Helmont’s “very good plaine and expert humour”3).

It appears that at some point during this meeting More, knowing van Helmont’s

medical expertise, mentioned a correspondent of his who had suffered from severe

headaches for a number of years and had so far failed to find any way of alleviating them.

This correspondent was also noteworthy as a philosophical enthusiast, having evolved from

a pupil to something of an equal over numerous years of letters. She was the sister of one of

his former students at Cambridge, John Finch, and had sought to become as philosophically

adept as possible despite the lack of educational opportunities available to her given her

gender. This was Anne Conway, who as the wife of the third Viscount Conway resided at

1
Allison Coudert, “A Cambridge Platonist’s Kabbalist Nightmare”, Journal of the History of Ideas 36.4 (1975):
634.
2
Coudert, “A Cambridge Platonist’s Kabbalist Nightmare”, 633.
3
Nicholson and Hutton, eds. The Conway Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 323.
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Ragley Hall, Warwickshire. More implored van Helmont to forestall his return to Continental

Europe and instead visit Lady Conway to see what he could do for her.

Although the Lady Conway he found at Ragley Hall suffered a great deal on a day-by-

day basis (indeed, she would be dead by the end of the decade despite all medical efforts),

van Helmont was very impressed by her intellectual achievements, and they spent a number

of years studying and discussing philosophy together. Anne Conway had received no formal

education, but was a voracious reader, proficient in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and had

learned much of the state of philosophy and science at the time, with help through her

correspondence with Henry More. In particular, More and Conway had discussed at great

length the prominent Cartesian philosophy of the time, derived from the work of René

Descartes (1596-1650), and its connection to the increasingly popular mechanistic world-

view, stemming in part from Newtonianism. Conway and van Helmont would spend much of

the rest of the following decade mutually influencing each other on questions of religion

and philosophy, the fruits of which can be seen in the Principles.

The mechanistic approach to nature had revolutionised natural science and involved

far-reaching implications for philosophy and theology. Descartes argued that all interactions

in the physical world could be explained through natural laws that pertained solely to the

nature of matter. It was quickly seen that this could have disastrous consequences for the

notion of the free will of human beings, a key presupposition of any divine scheme of

reward and punishment, because if all things take place according to unchangeable laws,

then what occurs must occur of necessity, which seems to conflict with the idea of our being

able to undertake free actions that could have been otherwise. Descartes attempted to

answer this difficulty by placing part of the human being beyond the physical realm through
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a strict metaphysical distinction between spirit/mind and matter/body. In the Meditations,

he argues that mind and body are completely distinct substances with their own unique

principle attribute, respectively thought and extension.4

Anne Conway disagreed strongly with the mechanistic view of nature, as well as the

connected strict Cartesian divide between spirit and body. Such a view went against her

own experience of the world and against her religious views.5 Conway saw the world around

her as fundamentally alive, encompassing not just human beings and other animals, but also

inanimate objects. Not only is there no dead matter in Conway’s universe, the whole of

creation is teeming with life. Conway seems to take as an implication of the Christian

doctrine of creation that God continues to create and will create as much as possible. As a

consequence, God is taken to be creating at any given moment an infinite number of new

things. This, of course, invites the question of why the universe is not more crowded.

Conway believes that in fact the universe is crowded, it’s just that we cannot see it, because

in fact

“in every creature, whether spirit or body, there is an infinity of creatures, each

of which contains an infinity in itself, and so on to infinity”.6

Through stressing the interconnections between all things in nature, Conway extended the

life of humans and other animals to all things. As part of this, Conway subscribed to a now

discredited scientific theory which claims that decaying matter spontaneously generates

4
René Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968),
150-169.
5
The strict separation of spirit and matter also causes Descartes problems with regards to the doctrine of
creation. Duran notes how Conway’s system addresses such issues in Duran, “Anne Viscountess Conway: A
Seventeenth Century Rationalist”, Hypatia 4.1 (1989): 69-77.
6
Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, eds. Coudert & Corse (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17.
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living creatures.7 Though much of the scientific evidence that Conway draws upon in her

work is now discredited, it is only ever used for additional confirmation of her metaphysical

system, and not as key parts of her argument.

Her claims in this matter also have a religious tinge to them, in that she saw

something of a paradox in the notion of God creating ‘dead matter’. Instead of a strict divide

between spirit and matter, Conway places them on a continuum such that they are not

distinct substances. In her view, spirit can even turn into matter, and vice versa. Spirit and

matter are to be understood as a single kind of substance (‘creature’), alongside two others

– God and Christ. The three kinds of substance are distinct due to the kind of change they

can go through; whilst God is unchangeable, Christ can change but only towards perfection,

and creatures can change both towards and away from perfection. For creatures, change

towards perfection (as is usual in monotheistic traditions) means becoming more like God.

Conway sees this as creatures becoming more ‘spirit’ and less ‘matter’ (hence why it is

important for her that spirit and matter lie on a continuum). Although creatures can become

less perfect, ultimately all things tend towards perfection and thus all eventually become

more spiritual over the course of eternity. Such an overall movement towards the good is

due to the imperfections of creation, which bring about pain and suffering, understood as

both divine punishment and a palliative for evil;

“Just as all the punishments inflicted by God on his creatures are in proportion

to their sins, so they tend, even the worst, to their good and to their restoration

7
Conway, Principles, 34.
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and they are so medicinal as to cure these sickly creatures and restore them to a

better condition than they previously enjoyed”.8

One striking aspect of this view is that all animals are given precisely the same status

both in substantial and moral terms – all beings can achieve salvation, which is completely

at odds with the traditional Christian reservation of salvation for human beings alone. Just

as controversial is that Conway does not seem to have a traditional Christian view of the

afterlife, but instead believes in the ‘transmigration’ of souls (a doctrine akin to

reincarnation particularly found in Indian religions). One cannot be damned to eternity

because, Conway argues, there is a limit to the degree to which one can be corporeal

(remember that Conway puts corporeality and spirituality on a moral continuum), whilst

one can continue to become more spiritual to infinity, because a creature can never arrive

at the perfect spirituality of God. When a human being or one of the other animals dies,

their constituent parts (of the same kind of substance as all other creatures) can become

part of another type of creature entirely,9 an unthinkable idea within the bounds of

Christian orthodoxy.

The affinity between von Helmont and Conway encompassed wider political issues,

in addition to similarities in their philosophical approaches. In particular, they both had a

great interest in the universalist project of bringing all people, including pagans and Jews,

into the fold of Christianity. Such a desire was not unusual for the time, but what were more

unusual were the steps van Helmont and Conway were willing to take to bring about mass

conversion, jettisoning some of the more controversial aspects of Christianity and adopt a

more liberal interpretation of others in order to make the Christian faith as palatable as

8
Conway, Principles, 38.
9
Conway, Principles, 65.
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possible to people of other faiths. As inspiration for this project, they turned to Jewish

Kabbala texts, which at the time were thought to be ancient and containing wisdom

stemming from the time of Moses.10 On the principle that older texts contain deeper truths

(a principle which would be applied in the following century to religious and philosophical

texts coming out of Asia), some Christian thinkers hoped that the Kabbala could be used to

confirm the truth of the essentials of Christianity and bring about the conversion of pagan

and Jewish believers. More had shared such hopes, but came to realise the threats to

orthodoxy inherent in these texts.

Conway and van Helmont, though, do not seem to have been as worried about

orthodoxy. One of the ways in which Conway seeks to show an affinity between the Kabbala

and Christian doctrine is through her account of the creative role of Christ, an intermediate

substance between God and creatures. Conway equates Christ with the Kabbalistic notion of

the Adam Kadmon, “the great priest, the husband or betrothed of the church… the first-

born son of God”,11 which the “most learned Jews”12 subscribe to. The reason why even

Jews have a Christ-like figure as part of the content of their religious beliefs is that the

necessity of the existence of such a mediating figure is as certain as the necessity of God’s

existence. Once one reflects upon the nature of God, and how different he must be from his

creation, the need for a mediator between the two (one that is divine but nevertheless

forms part of creation in some sense) becomes self-evident. However, Conway remains

silent on the question of the historical manifestation of Christ in Jesus of Nazareth, a

question which someone who wishes to cling to Christian orthodoxy will be interested in.

There seems little reason, in the context of Conway’s system, for the historical figure of

10
See Coudert, “A Cambridge Platonist’s Kabbalist Nightmare”, 636.
11
Conway, Principles, 23.
12
Conway, Principles, 24.
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Jesus (and his role in the salvation of humankind) at all, and this perhaps shows why any

sort of reconciliation between Judaism and Christianity that van Helmont and Conway

dreamed of is something of an impossibility.

In addition, and just as potentially scandalous, was Conway’s increasing affiliation

with Quakerism throughout the final decade of her life, to the extent that her friendship

with More (as well as her wider social standing) was put in some considerable danger.

Ragley Hall became a centre for Quaker activity, with visits from important Quakers such as

George Fox and William Penn,13 and offering employment for Quakers as servants. In a

letter to More, Conway defended her association with the Quakers as offering a palliative

for her great suffering,

“They have been and are a suffering people and are taught from the consolation

[that] has been experimentally felt by them under their great tryals to

administer comfort upon occasion to others in great distresse… The weight of

my affliction lies so very heavy upon me, that it is incredible how very seldom I

can endure anyone in my chamber, but I find them so still, and very serious, that

the company of such of them as I have hitherto seene, will be acceptable to

me”.14

There is little evidence of much substantial intellectual impact from the Quakers on the

philosophy found in the Principles, so Conway is perhaps being truthful in this letter

regarding the primary medical importance of her Quaker companions. Nevertheless, it

appears that by the end of her life, she very much saw herself as a Quaker.

13
Conway, Principles, xxiv.
14
Nicholson and Hutton, eds. The Conway Letters, 421-22.
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Having suffered greatly through so much of her life, Conway died at the age of forty-

seven. Her husband away in Ireland, Conway’s body was preserved in wine by van Helmont

for a number of months before burial. Her epitaph was simply, “Quaker Lady”. She left

behind a notebook, dated to her final years, from which van Helmont drew the text of the

Principles. The text eventually appeared anonymously in a Latin translation in Amsterdam in

1690. The original English manuscript seems to have been lost at some point, and so an

English translation of the Latin translation appeared a few years later. It appears that van

Helmont edited the work, with Henry More writing at least part of an unpublished Preface.

The Principles stands as a testament to a great philosophical talent who, due to unfortunate

historical circumstance, was not allowed to be celebrated in her own lifetime.15 It is

certainly a text which has more than curiosity value as an intriguing response to the

intellectual currents of the 17th century and as offering a philosophical system which brings

together the old and the new in a remarkably productive synthesis. From the point of view

of biography also, Anne Conway is highly noteworthy as a figure who was not afraid to go

against the grain, both socially and intellectually, at the same time as courageously battling

serious ill-health. As such, it is laudable that philosophers and historians are considering her

life and work in a much more detailed way than ever before.16

Bibliography

Conway, Anne. The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. Edited by

Coudert & Corse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

15
It is possible, however, that Conway had some considerable impact, in the decade following her death, upon
the philosophy of Leibniz, a prominent rationalist around the turn of the 18 th century and friend of van
Helmont. See Merchant, “The Vitalism of Anne Conway: Its Impact on Leibniz’s Concept of the Monad”,
Journal of the History of Philosophy 17.3 (1979): passim.
16
For those who wish to explore Conway’s philosophy further, a summary and systematic commentary of the
Principles can be found in Loptson, Introduction to The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy,
by Anne Conway (The Hague; Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 24-59.
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Coudert, Allison, “A Cambridge Platonist’s Kabbalist Nightmare”, Journal of the History of

Ideas 36.4 (1975): 633-52.

Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and the Meditations. Translated by Sutcliffe.

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

Duran, Jane, “Anne Viscountess Conway: A Seventeenth Century Rationalist”, Hypatia 4.1

(1989): 64-79.

Loptson, Peter. Introduction to The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy,

by Anne Conway, 1-59. The Hague; Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982.

Merchant, Carolyn, “The Vitalism of Anne Conway: Its Impact on Leibniz’s Concept of the

Monad”, Journal of the History of Philosophy 17.3 (1979): 255-269.

Nicolson, Marjorie Hope and Sarah Hutton, eds. The Conway Letters. Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1992.