Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 1 Issue 1 | Page 32

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take place according to unchangeable laws, then what occurs must occur of
necessity, which seems to conflict with the idea of our being able to undertake free
actions that could have been otherwise. Descartes attempted to answer this difficulty
by placing part of the human being beyond the physical realm through a strict
metaphysical distinction between spirit/mind and matter/body. In the Meditations, he
argues that mind and body are completely distinct substances with their own unique
principle attribute, respectively thought and extension.4
Anne Conway disagreed strongly with the mechanistic view of nature, as well
as the connected strict Cartesian divide between spirit and body. Such a view went
against her own experiences of the world and against her religious views.5 Conway
saw the world around her as fundamentally alive, encompassing not just human
beings and other animals, but also inanimate objects. Not only is there no dead
matter in Conway’s universe, the whole of creation is teeming with life. Conway
seems to take as an implication of the Christian doctrine of creation that God
continues to create and will create as much as possible. As a consequence, God is
taken to be creating at any given moment an infinite number of new things. This, of
course, invites the question of why the universe is not more crowded. Conway
believes that in fact the universe is crowded, it’s just that we cannot see it, because
in fact: “in every creature, whether spirit or body, there is an infinity of creatures,
each of which contains an infinity in itself, and so on to infinity”.6 Through stressing
the interconnections between all things in nature, Conway extended the life of
humans and other animals to all things. As part of this, Conway subscribed to a now
discredited scientific theo