ambix, Vol. 58 No.

1, March, 2011, 1–12

Margaret Cavendish’s Materialist

Critique of Van Helmontian Chymistry
Stephen Clucas
Birkbeck, University of London

A striking omission in the scholarship on the reception of the chymical phi-

losophy of Jan Baptista van Helmont in England in the seventeenth century
is the work of the mid-seventeenth-century natural philosopher Margaret
Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. In her Philosophical Letters (1664), Caven-
dish offers an extended critique of Van Helmont’s work (whose Ortus
Medicinæ had recently been translated into English by John Sadler). In this
paper, I compare Cavendish’s criticisms with those of Robert Boyle in his
Sceptical Chymist (1661). Both Boyle and Cavendish attacked Van Helmont
for the obscurity of his chymical vocabulary and concepts, and attacked his
seminalism. Although their critiques had much in common, they diverged
in their attitudes to Van Helmont’s experiments. As an opponent of the
experimental philosophy, Cavendish had little interest in the quality of Van
Helmont’s experimental claims, whereas Boyle was critical of their unrepli-
cability. I also try to show that the two writers had very different polemical
agendas, with Boyle defending his vision of chymistry based on a corpuscu-
larian natural philosophy, and Cavendish being as much concerned with
establishing her religious orthodoxy as with defending the truth claims of
her own materialist vitalism. For Cavendish, Van Helmont was an example
of the dangers of mingling theology and natural philosophy.

A striking omission in the scholarship on the reception of the chymical philosophy

of Jan Baptista van Helmont in England in the seventeenth century is the work of
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673). While recent scholarship
on Cavendish, such as Lisa Sarasohn’s book The Natural Philosophy of Margaret
Cavendish, and the PhD thesis of Leni Robinson,1 has begun to take note of her
critical engagement with Van Helmont in her Philosophical Letters of 1664,2 little
1
Lisa T. Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific
Revolution (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Leni Robinson, “A Figurative Matter:
Continuities between Margaret Cavendish’s Theory of Discourse and Her Natural Philosophy” (PhD Thesis,
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 2009).
2
Margaret Cavendish, Philosophical Letters; or, Modest Reflections upon some opinions in natural philosophy
maintained by several learned authors of this age expressed by way of letters (London, 1664).

© Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry 2011 DOI 10.1179/174582311X12947034675596
2 STEPHEN CLUCAS

attention has been paid to it by historians of seventeenth-century medicine and

chymistry. Major studies of Van Helmont and Van Helmontianism in England by
Pagel, Debus, Clericuzio, Giglioni, Newman and Principe make no mention of her.3
In this paper, I will examine the nature of Cavendish’s refutation of Van Helmont’s
works, and the place of this critique within the Philosophical Letters as a whole.
I will also consider her criticisms alongside those of Robert Boyle in his Sceptical
Chymist, published three years before Cavendish’s work, in 1661.4
Cavendish was a prolific author, publishing a stream of poems, plays, orations,
letters and other fictional writings (including her famous utopian fiction The Descrip-
tion of a New Blazing World) throughout the 1650s and 1660s. She also published a
series of works on natural philosophy — Philosophicall Fancies (1653), Philosophical
and Physical Opinions (1655, second edition 1663), Philosophical Letters (1664),
Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666, second edition 1668), and Grounds
of Natural Philosophy, 1668).5 Cavendish’s works tend to revolve around a set of
favoured themes. Nature is infinite and infinitely fecund, and has existed “from
Eternity”6 — although she is not “coequal with God”7 (who is her “Author” and
Creator).8 Cavendish’s nature, like that of Thomas Hobbes, is “altogether Material,”9
having no place for incorporeal or insubstantial principles. This infinite matter is in
constant motion, for there is “no such thing as rest in Nature,”10 and it moves “not
by force, but freely.”11 This “free power of moving” is a “gift from God,”12 and —
like man’s free will — is not absolute, but subject to God’s will and pleasure.13 Like
the human imagination, nature “delights in variety” and eschews “repetitions,”14 yet
her motions “are not extravagant, nor by force or violence, but orderly, temperate,

3
Walter Pagel, Joan Baptista van Helmont: Reformer of Science and Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1981); Antonio Clericuzio, Elements, Principles and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry
in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000); Allen Debus, Chemistry and Medical Debate: van
Helmont to Boerhaave (Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2001); Guido Giglioni, Immaginazione e
Malattia: Saggio su Jan Baptiste van Helmont (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2000); Willam R. Newman and Lawrence
M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago, Ill.:
Chicago University Press, 2002). Although Clericuzio makes three brief mentions of Cavendish’s natural
philosophy, he does not mention her views on Van Helmont.
4
Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-physical Doubts & Paradoxes, touching the spagyrist’s
principles commonly call’d Hypostatical, as they are wont to be Propos’d and Defended by the Generality of
Alchymists (London, 1661).
5
On Cavendish’s natural philosophy, see: Sarasohn, Natural Philosophy; Jacqueline Broad, Women Philosophers
of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 35–64; Anna Battigelli, Margaret
Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1998); and essays: Stephen
Clucas, “Variation, Irregularity and Probabilism: Margaret Cavendish and Natural Philophy as Rhetoric”, in
A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, ed. Stephen Clucas
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 199–209; Sarah Hutton, “Margaret Cavendish and Henry More”, in A Princely
Brave Woman, 185–198.
6
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, I.3, 16.
7
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, I.2, 8.
8
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, I.3, 16.
9
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, I.2, 11–12.
10
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, I.5, 25.
11
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, I.5, 23.
12
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, II.11, 164.
13
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, I.28, 96.
14
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, I.8, 34.
 MARGARET CAVENDISH’S MATERIALIST CRITIQUE OF VAN HELMONTIAN CHYMISTRY 3

free, and easie.”15 Nature orders all things “with great wisdom and Prudence” and
makes an “amiable combination” between her various parts.16 The infinite corporeal
motions by which nature produces her infinite variety of forms for all eternity are not
dull and senseless but perceptive and rational, possessing an “Infinite life and knowl-
edg.”17 Cavendish, who (as Susan James has observed) frequently saw the material
world and the political world as analogous,18 portrayed nature as a “Monarchess”
who rules “over all her Creatures,” and yet, in the polity of nature, “every particular
Creature is a Republick . . . for no part of any Creature has a sole supreme Power
over the rest.”19 It was this wise, free and amiable polity of nature that Cavendish
sought to defend from what she saw as the misconceptions and even assaults of her
philosophical contemporaries, whose theories, in her view, did violence to her unen-
cumbered freedom and her simplicity. “Most men,” Cavendish complained, “make
such cross, narrow and intricate ways in Nature, with their over-nice distinctions,
that Nature appears like a Labyrinth, whenas she is as plain as an un-plowed, ditched
or hedged champion: Nay, some make Nature so full, that she can neither move nor
stir; and other again will have her so empty, as they leave not anything within her;
and some with their penetrations, pressings, squeezing, and the like, make such holes
in her, they do almost wound, press and squeeze her to death.”20
Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters is a controversial work, and although her
primary aim seems to have been to make the philosophy that she expounded in
her Philosophical and Physical Opinions of 1655 and 1663, “more perspicuous and
intelligible by the opposition of other Opinions,”21 she also had ulterior motives,
which related to fears about the heterodoxy of her own philosophy, and she uses
her attacks on her contemporary philosophers as an occasion to insist both on
philosophical “modesty” (as opposed to the “presumption” of other philosophers)
and her religious orthodoxy. The perceived closeness of her own philosophy (despite
its vitalistic elements) to that of Descartes and Hobbes clearly cast a shadow over her
own reputation. Religious and philosophical antagonism to the materialism and
perceived atheism of Hobbes, in particular, had been gathering force in the late 1650s
(particularly after the attacks of Seth Ward and Henry More),22 and the Restoration
was a time in which orthodoxy was at a premium. Oddly, though, Cavendish chose
not to retreat from her own materialist position — if anything, she sparred with the
competing philosophies of Hobbes and Descartes only to refine and sharpen her own
views on the materiality of nature — and she even launched attacks on Hobbes’s

15
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, I.33, 107.
16
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, I.45, 135.
17
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, II.4, 144.
18
Susan James, “The Philosophical Innovations of Margaret Cavendish,” British Journal for the History of
Philosophy 7, no. 2 (1999): 219–44, on 222.
19
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.24, 336.
20
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, IV.18, 489.
21
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, I.1, 2. See III.1, 235: “I did undertake this work more out of desire to clear
my own opinions, then a quarrelsome humor to contradict others.”
22
See Samuel Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral
Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962, repr. Bristol: Thoemmes Press,
1996), 39–109.
4 STEPHEN CLUCAS

opponent More, attacking his resort to spirits and other kinds of “immaterial being,”
in terms very reminiscent of Hobbes himself.
The critique that she presents of Van Helmont is strategically a very useful one for
the achievement of her polemical aims. While, in Cavendish’s eyes, he possessed all
the Platonic vices of More, he was no defender of Hobbes, and what is more — as
Charles Webster, Antonio Clericuzio and J. Andrew Mendelsohn have all pointed
out — Van Helmont was also strongly associated, during the Interregnum, with the
Puritan movement.23 Van Helmont therefore serves a double purpose at the very least:
by attacking him, she attacks not only those who oppose her own materialist views,
but also what the Restoration ascendancy saw as the religious excesses of the
Parliamentary period.

Obscurity of chymical language and concepts

Cavendish may have first become aware of the ideas of Van Helmont via her friend
and correspondent (and quondam physician) Walter Charleton, who had published a
translation and paraphrase of some of Van Helmont’s medical works in 1650.24
A more immediate occasion, however, was presented in the shape of John Sadler’s
formidable 1100-page translation of Van Helmont’s Ortus Medicinae, the Oriatrike,
or physick refined, which was published in 1662.25
Three years before the publication of Philosophical Letters, in 1661, Van Helmont
had been the subject of qualified criticism by Robert Boyle, in his Sceptical Chymist;
Cavendish had read and admired Boyle’s work for its “Gentleman’s style.”26 Cavend-
ish praised the clarity of Boyle’s writings, because they did not “darken truth with
hard words and compounded languages,”27 and one thing that both Boyle and
Cavendish agreed on was the unnecessarily obscure language in which Van Helmont
and his followers wrote. At the beginning of her critique of Van Helmont, in the third
section of her Philosophical Letters, she confesses her bafflement at Van Helmontian
language (as well as her lack of chymical expertise): “I find him more difficult to
be understood then any of the forementioned, not onely by reason of the Art of

23
Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth,
1975); Antonio Clericuzio, “From Van Helmont to Boyle: a Study of the Transmission of Helmontian Chemi-
cal and Medical Theories in Seventeenth-century England,” British Journal for the History of Science 26 (1993):
303–34, on 313; J. Andrew Mendelsohn, “Alchemy and Politics in England, 1649–1665,” Past and Present 135
(1992): 30–78.
24
Jan Baptista van Helmont, A Ternary of Paradoxes of the Magnetic Cure of wounds, [the] nativity of tartar
in wine [and the] image of God in Man . . . Translated, illustrated and ampliated by W. Charleton (London,
1650). On Charleton as translator of Van Helmont, see: Lindsay Sharp, “Walter Charleton’s Early Life 1620–
1659, and Relationship to Natural Philosophy in Mid-Seventeenth Century England,” Annals of Science 30,
no. 3 (1973): 311–40, on 320–321; and Clericuzio, “From van Helmont to Boyle,” 306.
25
Jan Baptista van Helmont, Ortus Medicinae. Id est, Initia Physicae inaudita. Progressus medicinae novus, in
morborum ultionem, ad vitam longam . . . Edente authoris filio, F. M. van Helmont, cum ejus praefatione ex
Belgico translata (Amsterdam, 1648); Jan Baptista van Helmont, Oriatrike, or physick refined. The common
errors therein refuted, and the whole art reformed and rectified: being a new rise and progress of phylosophy
and medicine, for the destruction of diseases and prolongation of life, trans. John Sadler (London, 1662).
26
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, IV.22, 495. She does not name Boyle explicitly, but refers to him as “that
Learned and Ingenious Writer B.”
27
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, IV.22, 496.
 MARGARET CAVENDISH’S MATERIALIST CRITIQUE OF VAN HELMONTIAN CHYMISTRY 5

Chymistry, which I confess my self not versed in, but especially, that he has such
strange terms and unusual expressions as may puzle any body to apprehend the sense
and meaning of them.”28
Just as Boyle argued that chymists should express clear and distinct ideas in clear
language,29 so Cavendish (at least in her later natural philosophy) argued for the
clarity and intelligibility of philosophical language and the avoidance of obfuscating
terminology.30 In her view, the natural philosopher ought to “avoid Metaphorical,
similizing, and improper expressions” which “rather obscure than explain the truth
of Nature.”31
Although Boyle was not totally averse to using Van Helmontian expressions
himself,32 like Cavendish he does attack the “intollerable Ambiguity” and the “hard
Words and Equivocal Expressions” used in Paracelsian and Van Helmontian chym-
istry.33 These authors, he argued, wrote “Darkly, and Aenigmatically” where they
should make their concepts intelligible to their readers.34 The “Mystical Termes, and
Ambiguous Phrases” of the vulgar chymist, however, “darkens what he should clear
up; and makes me add the Trouble of guessing at the sence of what he Equivocally
expresses, to that of examining the Truth of what he seems to deliver.”35 Although
Boyle does not share Cavendish’s absolute disdain for Van Helmont’s work — he
thought him “more considerable in his Experiments than many Learned Men are
pleased to think him”36 and “better vers’d” in “Chymical Anatomizing of Bodies”
than Daniel Sennert,37 for example — he did share Cavendish’s frustration at his
unclear expressions, which made some of his experiments “Difficult either to be try’d
or to be understood.”38
Cavendish, unlike Boyle, was not really interested in replicating Van Helmont’s
experiments, but shared Boyle’s discomfort with the philosophical claims that he
was making.39 Where Boyle is essentially defending the philosophical claims of the
corpuscular hypothesis, Cavendish is defending her own vitalist materialism for much
the same reasons. This leads both Boyle and Cavendish to dispraise Van Helmont’s
chymical concepts, and especially his appeal to gas, blas and archeus as active prin-
ciples in natural and chymical processes. “Who is able to conceive,” Cavendish wrote,

28
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.1, 234.
29
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 203.
30
On Cavendish’s insistence on clear expression in natural philosophy, see Richard Nate, “‘Plain and Vulgarly
Express’d’: Margaret Cavendish and the Discourse of the New Science,” Rhetorica 19, no. 4 (2001): 403–17.
On Boyle’s critique of obscure chymical language, see Stephen Clucas, “Alchemy and Certainty in the
Seventeenth Century,” in Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern
Chemistry, ed. Lawrence Principe (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Chemical Heritage Foundation and Science
History Publications, 2007), 39–51, esp. 41–2.
31
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.12, 279.
32
See, for example, Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 49: “Heterogeneities (to use the Helmontian expression).”
33
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 200–201.
34
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 202–3.
35
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 203–4.
36
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 112.
37
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 178.
38
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 117.
39
For Boyle’s specific objections to the philosophical pretentions of modern chymistry, see Boyle, Sceptical
Chymist, 305.
6 STEPHEN CLUCAS

“All those Chymaeras and Fancies of the Archeus, Ferment, various Ideas, Blas, Gas,
and many more, which are neither something, nor no-thing in Nature, but betwixt
both except a man have the same Fancies, Visions and Dreams your Author had?”40
These “strange names,” which are “harsh and terrifying,” refer to things that have
no substance, Cavendish argues, and “being no corporeal substances,” she cannot
“imagine wherein their power should consist; for Nothing can do nothing.”41 For
Cavendish, there is no need to multiply these immaterial principles, as “there is but
one onely . . . prime cause” of all natural effects, and this is “corporeal nature, or
natural self-moving Matter.”42 For Cavendish, the productions of nature are “made
easily” by freely acting matter and do not require the “constrained ways” suggested
by Van Helmont’s principles.43 Cavendish objects to what she sees as the indetermi-
nate ontological status of Van Helmont’s principles, criticising his claim that
“Ferment” is a “neutral being,” which is “nether a substance, nor an accident,” for
example, as “a strange Monster” that can only produce “monstrous effects.”44 Her
rejection of Van Helmont’s principles, then, is similar to her rejection of Henry
More’s spirits in nature. As a materialist, she sees his immaterial substances as an
absurdity that does not conform to her own material understanding of causation, and
while she sees all the parts of nature as being “enlivened and soulified,”45 this life and
soul is animate matter and not immaterial.
Boyle, too, has little patience with Van Helmont’s proliferating concepts. Van
Helmontians, he says, have called “anything their Analysis presents them with,
either Sulphur, or Mercury, or Gas, or Blas, or what they pleas’d.”46 It is “play[ing]
with words,” he says, to say that a substance such as gold is compounded of “Incom-
bustible sulphur,” and to claim that it is a “Primogeneal and simple Body.”47 Like
Cavendish, Boyle has his own candidate for the simple bodies of nature — in his case,
corpuscular parts.
Both Boyle and Cavendish express similar doubts over Van Helmont’s seminalism:
“Tis true,” Cavendish says, “some talk of the seeds of Metals, but who with all his
diligent observations could find it out as yet? Wherefore it is, in my opinion, not
probable, that Minerals are produced by way of seeds.”48 She declares herself unable
to conceive that elements have seeds (except fire, which, she concedes, “seems, to my
sense and reason, to encrease numerously by its seed”).49 In Cavendish’s view, rather
than being the primary agents of nature, seeds simply constitute one of the many
effects (or “Creatures”) of infinitely self-moving matter.50
Boyle too simply dismisses Van Helmont’s seminal powers in nature. He considers
it an “inconsiderate Assertion” on the part of Van Helmontians, he says, “That

40
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.1, 238.
41
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.1, 238–39.
42
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.1, 238.
43
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.10, 272.
44
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.1, 237.
45
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.1, 237.
46
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 208.
47
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 208–9.
48
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.10, 272.
49
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.10, 272.
50
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.10, 271.
 MARGARET CAVENDISH’S MATERIALIST CRITIQUE OF VAN HELMONTIAN CHYMISTRY 7

every sort of Body of a Peculiar Denomination must be produced by some seminal

power.”51 He is equally sceptical about Van Helmont’s claims for water being “the
Materiall cause of Mixt Bodies.”52 Not only does he argue that Van Helmont’s
watery principle is not as original as he had claimed (pointing to its existence in the
pre-Socratic natural philosophy of Thales and others),53 but he also felt that it “may
not groundlessly be doubted” that water was “Elementary” on the grounds that it
was “insipid.”54 He also contests Van Helmont’s interpretation of the waters of
Genesis as referring to “universal matter,” arguing that this was simply a reference
to the naturally occurring substance rather than an elaborate allegory of natural
principles.55
Cavendish is also sceptical about Van Helmont’s watery principle, although, once
again, it is in defence of her own first principle. “[Helmont] believes that all bodies
are composed out of the Element of Water, and that Water is the first Principle of all
things,” Cavendish observes. But for her, water, like the other elements, is simply an
effect of nature and “cannot be a cause or principle of them.”56 “Natural Matter” is
the sole principle of natural effects, she argues, “and this Principle, I am confident
your Author can no more prove to be Water, then he can prove that Heat, Light, Life,
Motion, and Blas, are not material.”57 In another letter, Cavendish pillories Van
Helmont’s claim that fish are made of, and subsist by, water alone, and denies that,
even possessed of the “subtlest Art,” he could “turn or convert all Creatures into pure
and simple water,” and although he might claim that gold is made of water, too, she
says, “I do not believe he could convert it into Water by the help of Fire.”58

Philosophy by fire? Art vs. nature in Cavendish and Boyle

This brings us to a crucial issue, and one that finds Boyle the chymist and Cavendish
the anti-experimental natural philosopher on different sides of the fence. Boyle and
Cavendish have very different views of the grandiose claims that Van Helmont makes
for the chymical art. The Van Helmontians, as Boyle has it, “cry up their own Sect
for the Invention of a New Philosophy . . . styling themselves Philosophers by the
Fire.”59 While both Cavendish and Boyle are sceptical of Van Helmont’s exaggerated
claims for the art of fire, Boyle (unlike Cavendish) is willing to accept the idea that
the chymist’s fire can produce new substances. Boyle is critical of those “Vulgar
chymists” who “believe . . . that the Fire is not only an universal, but an adequate and
sufficient Instrument to analyze mixt Bodies with.”60 In response to Van Helmont’s
claim in the History of Tartar, that “Specifical being cannot be altered but by Fire”

51
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 224–25.
52
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 116–17.
53
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 118–19.
54
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 127–28.
55
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 128.
56
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.3, 247.
57
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.3, 247.
58
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.5, 253.
59
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 299–300.
60
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 80–81.
8 STEPHEN CLUCAS

and that “Alchymy . . . stirs up a new being,” Cavendish is very critical. Not only
does she object to Van Helmont’s claim that fire is a “no substantial body,” but she
rejects outright his suggestion that new beings can be made in nature,61 which, she
says, “is an action which onely belongs to God.”62 For Cavendish, the productions of
art are radically inferior to the productions of living nature: “For Art is the insnarled
motions of Nature: But your Author, being a Chymist, is much for the Art of Fire,
although it is impossible for Art to work as Nature doth; for Art makes of natural
Creatures artificial Monsters, and doth oftener obscure and disturb Natures ordinary
actions, then prove any Truth in Nature.”63 The use of art in natural philosophy is
doomed to fail, on the grounds that nature and artificial production do not share the
same nature. “An artificial trial” Cavendish says, “cannot be an infallible natural
demonstration, the Actions of Art, and the Actions of Nature being for the most part
very different, especially in production and transmutations of natural things.”64 Thus,
“Pure natural Philosophers,” that is, those who follow her own philosophy of nature,
“shall by natural sense and reason, trace Natures ways . . . more readily then Chymists
can do by Fire and Furnaces; for Fire and Furnaces do often delude the Reason; blind
the Understanding and make the Judgement stagger.”65 Echoing her arguments against
the uses of optical instruments (which are also seen as deluders of the reason) in her
Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, Cavendish sees art and experiment as
the natural enemies of unaided reason.
Boyle, naturally, has a very different viewpoint. While he may see Van Helmont’s
claims for the analytical power of fire as exaggerated, he does not, like Cavendish,
deny the fact that the art of fire may produce new beings. While some philosophers
had argued that fire could not generate anything but fire, “You will, I doubt not,”
Boyle writes, “be of another mind, If you consider how many new sorts of mixt
Bodies chymists . . . have produc’d by means of Fire.”66 As examples of this, Boyle
cites the instance of the “Alcalizate salt,” produced from “incinerated Bodies” (i.e.
potash), which cannot, he says, be produced in any other way,67 and soap made from
the “oyle or sulphur of vegetables and animals.” “Helmont’s tryals,” he writes, “give
us cause to think, That it may be a production of the Fire, which by transporting and
otherwise altering the particles of the matter does bring it to a saline nature.”68

Van Helmontian medicines

Neither Cavendish nor Boyle are totally criticial of Van Helmontian medicines, and
while Boyle (like Cavendish) inveighed against the “Extravagancies and Untruths” to

61
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.12, 280.
62
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.13, 283.
63
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.12, 281.
64
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.6, 256.
65
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.6, 281.
66
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 224.
67
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 231–32.
68
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 387. On the manufacture of soap in this period by boiling potash and animal or
vegetable fats, see F. W. Gibb, “The History of the Manufacture of Soap,” Annals of Science 4, no. 2 (1939):
169–90.
 MARGARET CAVENDISH’S MATERIALIST CRITIQUE OF VAN HELMONTIAN CHYMISTRY 9

be found in Van Helmont’s treatise on the magnetic cure of wounds,69 he praises

some of Van Helmont’s medical preparations (one of which he had taken himself),
even though the method for preparing one of them was “obscurely intimated.”70
Cavendish took a strong interest in practical medicine, and made many observations
in her CCXI Sociable Letters (published in the same year as Philosophical Letters),
relating to the ailments of her fictional interlocutors.71
While Cavendish concedes that “some excellent Medicines” had been “found out”
by chymists, she sees them as expensive to prepare and neither “sure and certain” nor
“in all diseases safe.”72 Cavendish had been treated by Walter Charleton in the 1650s,
when he was promoting Van Helmontian medicine, and it is possible that she may
have been treated with chymical preparations.73 On balance, she prefers the tradi-
tional Galenic medicines and treatments, declaring herself to be “So much for the old
way of Practice, that if I should be sick, I would desire rather such Physicians, which
follow the same way, then those, that by their new Inventions, perchance, cure one,
and kill a hundred.”74 Cavendish criticises Van Helmont’s “too great presumption”
in criticising the medical profession, both Paracelsians and those practicing Galenic
and Hippocratic medicine, and praises the state of contemporary medicine in
England, which, she says, “has never flourished better then now.”75 Modern physi-
cians, she says, are to be esteemed for their “various Knowledg, industrious Studies,
carefuil Practice [and] great Experiences,”76 as are surgeons, who are better equipped
to cure wounds than Van Helmont and his magnetic cures, “for if those Persons that
have been wounded, had been left to be cured onely by the Magnetick Medicine,
I believe, numbers that are alive would have been dead.”77 In the two years following
the publication of Philosophical Letters, triggered by the plague epidemic of 1665,
these same issues were to become fiercely debated, as Van Helmontians and
traditional physicians publicly contested the efficacy of their cures.78
Both Cavendish and Boyle are sceptical of Van Helmont’s universal solvent, the
alkahest or ignis gehennae.79 Cavendish saw Van Helmont’s “Universal Medicine,”
like the Philosophers’ Stone, as consisting “rather in hope and expectation, then

69
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 113.
70
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 227–28, 355.
71
Margaret Cavendish, italicise as it is part of title: CCXI Sociable Letters (London, 1664). On Cavendish and
medical advice, see Susan Fitzmaurice, “Margaret Cavendish, the Doctors of Physick and Advice to the Sick,”
in A Princely Brave Woman, 199–241.
72
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.13, 284.
73
On Cavendish’s treatment by Charleton, see Sarasohn, Natural Philosophy, 46–7.
74
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.28, 352. See III.35, 383 (misnumbered 183): “I am absolutely of opinion,
that the Practice of the Schools is the best and wisest Practice.”
75
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.28, 351–52.
76
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.28, 354.
77
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.28, 354–55.
78
See Ole Peter Grell, “Plague, Prayer and Physic: Helmontian Medicine in Restoration England,” in Religio
Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham
(Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 204–27.
79
On Helmont’s alkahest, see Ladislao Reti, “Van Helmont, Boyle and the Alkahest,” in William C. Gibson and
Ladislao Reti, Some Aspects of Seventeenth-Century Medicine and Science (Berkeley, Calif.: University of
California Press, 1969), 1–19.
10 STEPHEN CLUCAS

in assurance.”80 But while Boyle was doubtful whether Van Helmont had ever
succeeded in producing it, and complained of the “Improbable Experiments” that Van
Helmont adduced in support of his claims,81 he was altogether less sceptical about
the possibility of discovering it. He declares himself to be one who supposes the
“truth of what Helmont relates of the Alkahest’s wonderful effects,” although he
expressed misgivings about Van Helmont’s claims to have used it to “transmute all
reputedly mixt bodies into insipid and meer water.”82 Boyle even goes so far as to
suggest that he had discovered a peculiarly effective “menstruum” himself, which did
“odly dissociate the parts of Minerals fixt in the Fire,” and so he declares the idea of
a universal solvent “not incredible.”83

Van Helmont’s religious unorthodoxy

Unlike Boyle, who seems to have been a qualified admirer of Van Helmont’s
chymistry, Cavendish condemned Van Helmont on religious grounds (something that
Boyle studiously omits to discuss, even though he contested his exegesis of Genesis).
Although Cavendish’s own natural philosophy was far from theological orthodoxy
in its materialism, belief in the eternity of matter, and hylozoistic principles,84 she
attacked Van Helmont’s chymical philosophy on precisely these grounds. Although
her own infinitely self-moving matter was not above suspicion in this respect, she
criticised Van Helmont’s active principles for their disregard of the Christian under-
standing of the Creation. In making his watery principle the “chief producer” of
natural effects, Van Helmont, Cavendish argued, made it “rather a Creator then a
Creature.”85 In contesting Van Helmont’s belief in the vacuum, and specifically his
theory of “holes and pores in the air,” which is seen as a “middle thing between a
body and an Incorporeal Spirit,” not only does Cavendish question this intermediate
ontological state (the vacuum, she says, “is a pure Nothing” and thus “cannot be any
thing whatsoever”), but she objects to his claim that these voids “came from nothing”
and may “easily be reduced to nothing.” This “perpetual Creation and annihilation”
of vacuums, she says, is a blasphemous affront to God’s creation ex nihilo, for “It
would be a more laborious work, then to make a new World, or then it was to make
this present World; for God made this World in six days, and rested the seventh;
but this is a perpetual remaking of something out of nothing.”86 She also senses
a blasphemous intent in Van Helmont’s use of the word “overshadowing” when
describing the generative capacity of the archeus: “For concerning Generation, I know
of none that is performed by overshadowing, except it be the miraculous conception

80
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.13, 284.
81
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 76–78.
82
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 390.
83
Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 402.
84
Cavendish’s hylozoism was later criticised (without her name being mentioned) by Ralph Cudworth in his True
Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678). See Stephen Clucas, “The Duchess and the Viscountess:
Negotiations between Mechanism and Vitalism in the Natural Philosophies of Margaret Cavendish and Anne
Conway,” In Between 9, no. 1 (2000): 125–36, on 125–26.
85
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.6, 257.
86
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.8, 262.
 MARGARET CAVENDISH’S MATERIALIST CRITIQUE OF VAN HELMONTIAN CHYMISTRY 11

of the blessed Virgin, as Holy Writ informs us; and I hope your Author will not
compare his Archeus to the Holy Spirit.”87 Cavendish also declares herself to be
scandalised by Van Helmont’s unorthodox interpretations of scripture. Men should
be “careful in making Interpretations of the Scripture, and expressing more then
Scripture informs” because “what is beyond the Scripture, is Man’s own fancy, and
to regulate the Word of God after Mans fancy . . . is irreligious.”88 Cavendish sees
Van Helmont as guilty of “vain Presumption” in his claims to be able to fully com-
prehend divine mysteries such as the immaculate conception,89 and even the nature
of God. Van Helmont confidently asserts that good and evil spirits, being immaterial
and spiritual, are similar in nature to God. Despite the fact that Cavendish herself
casts doubt on the immateriality of spiritual beings (“for there may be material
Spirits as well as immaterial”),90 she still uses Van Helmont as a foil whereby she can
assert her own unswerving orthodoxy on religious matters. Whereas Van Helmont is
confident that he knows God’s nature, she indicates that the Athanasian Creed insists
upon his incomprehensibility. To say otherwise, she argues, is to make yourself “more
then the Church”: “But I shall never say or believe so, but rather confess my igno-
rance, then betray my folly; and leave things Divine to the Church; to which I submit,
as I ought, in all Duty: and . . . I do not meddle with any Divine Mysteries.”91 Like
Hobbes, who also insisted on the incomprehensibility of God in his De corpore, as
an excuse for excluding God from philosophical considerations, Cavendish similarly
hopes that the church will grant her “liberty concerning the Contemplation of Nature
and natural things,” so that she can be both “a good Christian, and a good Natural
Philosopher.”92 The attack on Van Helmont, then, is more a way of engineering her
own philosophical freedom than it is a religiously motivated proscription of natural
philosophy. “Philosophical Liberty, and a Supernatural Faith,” she argued, “are two
different things, and suffer no co-mixture.”93 In pursuing her own purely natural
philosophy, she believed that she was avoiding the contamination of theology that
philosophers such as More and Van Helmont were guilty of. Van Helmont, she says,
“makes such a mixture of Divinity, and natural Philosophy, that all his Philosophy is
nothing but a meer Hotch-potch, spoiling the one with the other.”94 In criticising Van
Helmont’s “Dreams” and “Visions,” his exegetical presumption, and his theologi-
cally suspect active principles, Cavendish was playing on vivid Restoration memories
of the self-proclaimed prophets and visionaries among the Civil War radicals, with
their taste for personal interpretations of the Bible, and their interest in alchemy,
pansophia, and occult philosophy.95

87
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.11, 275–76.
88
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.15, 315 (misnumbered 153).
89
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.15, 314.
90
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.21, 320.
91
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.21, 322–23.
92
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.21, 323.
93
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.19, 316.
94
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.3, 248.
95
On Puritan interest in alchemy and occult philosophy, see John T. Young, Faith, Medical Alchemy and
Natural Philosophy: Johann Moriaen, Reformed Intelligence and the Hartlib Circle (Aldershot: Ashgate,
1998).
12 STEPHEN CLUCAS

Ultimately, Cavendish’s critique of Van Helmont is part of a complex polemical

project. She is quite open about her lack of chymical expertise, although she half-
seriously suggests that her own natural philosophy might serve as a more appropriate
foundation for chymistry than that provided by Van Helmont.96 But although she
lacks Boyle’s interest in chymical practice, she shares his abhorrence of the system-
building pretentions of Van Helmontianism. Just as Boyle believed that chymistry
would be better served by understanding the corpuscular constitution of matter, so
Cavendish believed that it would be improved by reference to her own ideas concern-
ing “the corporeal motions of actions of Natures substantial body.”97 Significantly,
the only critical remark she makes of Boyle’s work in the Philosophical Letters con-
cerns their different views about the constitution of matter. “Give me leave to tell
you,” she writes, “that I observe, he studies the different parts and alterations, more
then the motions, which cause the alterations in those parts; whereas did he study
and observe the several and different motions of these parts . . . he might arrive to a
vast knowledg by the means of his experiments.”98 If Boyle would only reject (as she
had done) the corpuscularian hypothesis, and attend to her own holistic vision
of corporeal figurative motions, then he would be a better natural philosopher, the
argument seems to run.
Cavendish’s agenda in the Philosophical Letters is complex. It is partly emulative
(she seeks to refute competing natural philosophies in order to insist upon her own),
it is partly political (in her rejection of the “divine meddling” that she associates with
the Puritan revolution), but most importantly of all, I think, it is a means by which
she can insist upon her orthodoxy at a time when such orthodoxy was at a premium.
Van Helmont’s sudden public prominence in the early 1660s, due to the publication
of Sadler’s translation, was something of a gift. Not only did Cavendish use Van
Helmont’s immaterial principles to force home the reasonableness of her own mate-
rialism, but she also used him to shore up her own religious and political orthodoxy
at a time when natural philosophy was coming under intense scrutiny.

Notes on contributor
Stephen Clucas is Reader in Early Modern Intellectual History at Birkbeck, University
of London. He is Editor (along with Stephen Gaukroger) of the journal Intellectual
History Review. He is currently working with Timothy J. Raylor on an edition of
Hobbes’s De corpore for the Clarendon Edition of Hobbes. Address: English and
Humanities,School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, London
WC1E 7HX, UK. Email: s.clucas@bbk.ac.uk.

96
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.13, 286.
97
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, III.13, 286.
98
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, IV.22, 496.