ABSTRACT
Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway are monists – they believe that there is one type of substance in the created world, such that individual creatures are all made up out of the same essential stuff; there is no ontological marker that makes a human different from any other created being. According to Cavendish, all created substance is essentially rational, and so rocks, horses and humans alike are composed of matter that includes rationality. And according to Conway, all created substance is essentially thinking and wise, and so rocks, horses, and humans alike are composed of a substance that thinks. Cavendish claims that all parts of the natural world are perceptive, having both sense and reason. Conway presents a number of arguments against Cartesian and Hobbesian theories of matter and replaces them with what some might call a vitalist ontology.
