ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a particular difficulty with body-body causation that Henry More offers in his correspondence with Descartes. This difficulty concerns the purported unintelligibility of a mechanistic account of causation that requires the transfer of motion in collision. In his correspondence, More proposes a vitalistic solution to this difficulty, though he subsequently rejected a vitalistic account of the material world. Nevertheless, we find monistic versions of such an account in the work of Anne Conway and Margaret Cavendish, both of whom were associated with More. Conway and Cavendish also explicitly address More’s difficulty concerning motion transfer. Whereas Conway’s response emphasizes that creatures can be only “instruments” of God in causing motion, Cavendish’s solution invokes a more explicitly vitalistic alternative to a mechanist conception of body-body interaction.
