Anne Conway (1631–1679): key ideas and works

Anne Finch was born in London in 1631 and grew up in what is now Kensington Palace, then a Finch family house. As a woman she could not attend university, but through her half-brother, his pupil at Cambridge, the Platonist Henry More agreed to teach her philosophy by letter, beginning with Descartes, and the two stayed friends until she died. She married Edward, Viscount Conway, in 1651; their only child died in infancy. From her teens she suffered bouts of illness that grew worse with age, and in search of relief came to know the physician and philosopher Francis Mercury van Helmont, who lived in her household during the last decade of her life.

Through van Helmont she encountered the Kabbalah, which helped her break with the Cartesianism of her education, and Quakerism, to which she converted shortly before she died in 1679. Her one treatise was published anonymously in Latin in Amsterdam in 1690, and in English in 1692. Leibniz, who owned a copy, received it warmly and saw affinities with his own philosophy, but its anonymity long kept her from being recognised.

Key ideas

Everything is alive

Since God is life itself, everything God creates must be living, capable of motion and perception. Dead, inert matter cannot exist, so body and spirit are not two substances but degrees of one, differing only in density, as darkness differs from light.

Argues against René Descartes’s Mind and body

Argues against Baruch Spinoza’s God, or Nature

Argues against Thomas Hobbes’s Materialism

Three kinds of being

There are only three “species” of being. God, the source of all; Christ, or “Middle Nature”, who shares in both God and creation and links them; and created nature, mutable and many, made of infinitely divisible particles of spirit.

Creatures can change their kind

Creatures are constantly changing, and over successive lifetimes a horse, for example, may become a human being, moving up or down the scale of nature as it becomes better or worse. Its identity is kept by a ruling “captain spirit”, but no individual can become another, or Peter would be rewarded for Paul’s virtue.

Pain that heals

All creatures can grow in goodness without limit, though never become God. Sin makes a creature coarser and more bodily, and the pain this brings is not mere retribution but purgative, setting it on the way back to godlikeness. Hell cannot be eternal, and all will finally be saved.

Influences

Where these links come from

Anne Conway argued against Thomas Hobbes. Source: Sarah Hutton, Lady Anne Conway, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Anne Conway drew on and argued against René Descartes. Source: Sarah Hutton, Lady Anne Conway, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Anne Conway argued against Baruch Spinoza. Source: Sarah Hutton, Lady Anne Conway, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Anne Conway

Key ideas

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