Cavendish’s Atomism

Making sense of Cavendish’s natural philosophy is complicated by the fact that her earliest work in natural philosophy presents an atomistic theory, which she very quickly seemed to repudiate in favor of her later vitalist materialism. This chapter examines Cavendish’s atomism, situating it in the context of seventeenth-century atomism and mechanism. Focusing on the question of how she thinks order and regularities arise within an atomistic framework, the chapter argues that Cavendish’s atomistic poems do not describe her atoms as working together as an organized system; each atom possesses its own inherent principle of motion, and sometimes they work together, but sometimes they do not. The chapter ends with a discussion of whether Cavendish actually endorsed atomism as a scientific theory (arguing that she did not) and why she had good reason to explicitly repudiate it in her subsequent works.