The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy

Overview

About ninety pages, a short but densely argued metaphysical treatise written in English by Anne Conway, Viscountess Conway, during the 1670s at Ragley Hall, her family’s estate, where she had become the center of a genuine philosophical circle that included the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, her friend and philosophical correspondent, and the alchemist and physician Francis Mercury van Helmont, who attended her during her long struggle with severe, chronic headaches that no seventeenth-century medicine could diagnose or treat. Conway’s original English manuscript does not survive; the treatise reached print only in a Latin translation, published anonymously in Amsterdam in 1690, three years after her death, and was then translated back into English in 1692, the route through which the work has come down to modern readers.

The treatise engages directly and by name with the three dominant philosophical systems of Conway’s own time, Descartes’s dualism of thinking mind and dead, mechanical matter, Hobbes’s reduction of all reality to matter in motion, and Spinoza’s account of a single, indifferent substance underlying all things, rejecting each in turn and proposing instead an original system in which all created being forms a single, graduated spectrum of living substance, a position that would go on to influence Leibniz directly, who owned and closely annotated a copy of the work and later acknowledged its bearing on his own mature philosophy.

The argument

Three kinds of being. Conway’s system begins by distinguishing three fundamental categories of being: God, infinite, unchanging and entirely good; Christ, functioning as a necessary mediating principle between God’s infinite, unchanging nature and the finite, changeable created world; and creatures, everything else that exists. This three-part structure lets Conway explain how an infinite, unchanging deity can meaningfully relate to and act within a finite, constantly changing creation without either compromising God’s perfection or leaving creation entirely cut off from divine influence.

The unity of created substance. Conway’s central and most original claim is that all created things, from what appears to be the most inert, lifeless matter up through plants, animals and the highest angelic spirits, are actually one and the same fundamental kind of substance, differing from one another only in their current degree of vitality, activity and perfection rather than in any deeper kind. Nothing in creation, on this account, is ever truly and completely dead or wholly without some capacity for feeling and life, and every created thing retains the capacity to rise, over time, toward a greater degree of spiritual perfection, or, through wrongdoing, to sink toward a lesser one.

Against Descartes. Conway argues at length against Cartesian dualism’s sharp division between thinking, immaterial mind and dead, mechanical, entirely passive matter, contending that genuinely dead matter, wholly without any capacity for life, perception or internal activity, could not actually move, act or interact with anything else at all, and therefore cannot be an accurate description of what the physical world is actually composed of. Her alternative treats what looks like inert matter as simply spirit operating at an extremely low degree of vitality rather than as a fundamentally different kind of stuff altogether.

Against Hobbes and Spinoza. Conway rejects Hobbesian materialism, which reduces mind itself to nothing but matter in motion, as failing to account adequately for genuine thought, feeling and moral responsibility. She rejects Spinoza’s monism, the claim that there exists only a single substance of which everything else is merely a mode or attribute, as collapsing the meaningful distinctions between God and creation, and between different creatures, that her own graduated system is specifically designed to preserve.

Suffering as purgative. In one of the treatise’s most personally resonant sections, Conway argues that suffering, rather than being simply meaningless evil to be endured without purpose, serves a genuinely purgative and restorative function within her larger system, gradually purifying a creature and helping move it toward greater goodness and perfection over time, even when the suffering itself feels, in the moment, entirely without evident cause or benefit. Scholars have long connected this argument directly to Conway’s own decades-long experience of severe, undiagnosable and untreatable headaches, which shaped both her philosophical concerns and her eventual turn toward Quakerism late in her life.

How to read it

Read Conway’s direct engagements with Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza as genuine philosophical argument rather than mere background context; she names and refutes specific claims from each system in real detail, and her own positive position develops largely through this sustained critical engagement rather than emerging fully formed on its own.

Notice how unusual Conway’s graduated, continuous account of substance is relative to the sharp dualisms and strict materialisms dominant in her period, and consider how this vitalist alternative, in which nothing in creation is ever wholly dead, anticipates certain later philosophical positions, including aspects of Leibniz’s mature metaphysics, considerably more directly than most other seventeenth-century philosophy.

Read the treatise’s argument about suffering’s purgative function with Conway’s own documented biography in view, decades of severe, medically inexplicable pain, without treating the philosophy as merely autobiography; the argument stands as a genuine metaphysical and theological claim about the structure of creation, even as its personal resonance for its author is hard to miss.

Pay attention to the treatise’s complicated transmission history, an English original that does not survive, reaching modern readers only through a Latin translation and then a re-translation back into English, and consider what, if anything, might have been altered or lost across these successive translations of a text whose precise philosophical vocabulary matters considerably.

Read this work alongside Leibniz’s Monadology to see, directly, how closely certain of Leibniz’s mature ideas, particularly his account of a graduated hierarchy of living substances, parallel and likely draw on Conway’s earlier system, a historical connection largely overlooked for centuries before modern scholarship recovered it.

Questions it raises

• Does Conway’s claim that all created substance forms a single continuous spectrum, from apparently dead matter to pure spirit, successfully avoid the problems she identifies in Cartesian dualism and Hobbesian materialism, or does it introduce new difficulties of its own?
• How should a reader weigh Conway’s argument that suffering is purgative and ultimately restorative against her own long, undiagnosable and apparently unrelieved physical suffering? Does her lived experience support or complicate the philosophical claim?
• What does Conway’s system’s need for Christ as a mediating principle between infinite God and finite creation suggest about the limits of purely philosophical, as opposed to theological, argument in her overall project?
• Given how directly Leibniz drew on Conway’s work, why did her own treatise remain comparatively obscure for centuries while Leibniz’s related ideas became central to the philosophical canon? What does this asymmetry suggest about how philosophical influence and credit have historically been tracked and assigned?
• Conway’s treatise survives only through a Latin translation and a subsequent re-translation into English, with the original English manuscript lost. How much confidence can a reader reasonably have in the precision of specific philosophical claims that have passed through this transmission history?
• Does Conway’s vitalist alternative to Cartesian dualism and Hobbesian materialism offer a genuinely viable third option for understanding the relationship between mind and matter, or does it depend too heavily on theological commitments, particularly about the ultimate benevolence and purposiveness of creation, that a purely secular metaphysics would need to abandon?