Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 1 Issue 1 | Page 31

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famously (More later wrote approvingly of van Helmont’s “very good plaine and
expert humour”)3.
It appears that at some point during this meeting More, knowing van
Helmont’s medical expertise, mentioned a correspondent of his who had suffered
from severe headaches for a number of years and had so far failed to find any way
of alleviating them. This correspondent was also noteworthy as a philosophical
enthusiast, having evolved from a pupil to something of an equal over numerous
years of letters. She was the sister of one of his former students at Cambridge, John
Finch, and had sought to become as philosophically adept as possible despite the
lack of educational opportunities available to her given her gender. This was Anne
Conway, who as the wife of the third Viscount Conway resided at Ragley Hall,
Warwickshire. More implored van Helmont to forestall his return to Continental
Europe and instead visit Lady Conway to see what he could do for her.
Although the Lady Conway he found at Ragley Hall suffered a great deal on a
day-by-day basis (indeed, she would be dead by the end of the decade despite all
medical efforts), van Helmont was very impressed by her intellectual achievements,
and they spent a number of years studying and discussing philosophy together.
Anne Conway had received no formal education, but was a voracious reader,
proficient in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and had learned much of the state of
philosophy and science at the time, with help through her correspondence with
Henry More. In particular, More and Conway had discussed at great length the
prominent Cartesian philosophy of the time, derived from the work of René
Descartes (1596-1650), and its connection to the increasingly popular mechanistic
world-view, stemming in part from Newtonianism. Conway and van Helmont would
spend much of the rest of the following decade mutually influencing each other on
questions of religion and philosophy, the fruits of which can be seen in the Principles.
The mechanistic approach to nature had revolutionised natural science and
involved far-reaching implications for philosophy and theology. Descartes argued
that all interactions in the physical world could be explained through natural laws that
pertained solely to the nature of matter. It was quickly seen that this could have
disastrous consequences for the notion of the free will of human beings, a key
presupposition of any divine scheme of reward and punishment, because if all things
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3

Marjorie Hope Nicholson and Sarah Hutton, ed. The Conway Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992), 323.