Since I have the honour of writing to a Lady, I would not dare to discuss these matters at such an advanced level if I did not know how intelligent English Ladies are. I have seen an example in the work of the late Countess of Connaway, without mentioning others.
Letter from Gottfried Leibniz to Damaris Masham,
25 December 1703
Even male-genius versions of history can be rewritten – unsuspected heroes are discovered, and others lose their glory. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the philosopher Bertrand Russell was amazed to find that recent theories of mathematical logic had already been formulated 200 years ago and lain neglected. Russell’s forgotten genius was Gottfried Leibniz, now world-famous as one of Germany’s major mathematicians and philosophers, but previously edged to the historical margins. Leibniz served the Hanoverian court for more than forty years, yet none of his titled colleagues attended his funeral, and he was buried in an unmarked grave. During his lifetime, only a fraction of his myriad writings appeared in print. But the latest comprehensive edition of his papers currently takes up almost two yards of shelf space, and new volumes are still being added.
British scholars in particular used to be uninterested in Leibniz because he was one of Newton’s most hostile rivals. But now, philosophers hail him as a neglected genius whose arguments about space, time and monads foreshadowed the new science of relativity. Historical fashions have also changed, and modern writers no longer ridicule his interest in alchemy and other activities that used to be dismissed as non-scientific. A modern summary of his life runs like this . . .
Leibniz was one of the last great polymaths, a man so well-read that he was known as a walking encyclopaedia. As well as making major innovations in mathematics, he dispensed advice on Chinese hexagrams, silver mining, fossils, legal education and religious reform. Although he was Germany’s greatest philosopher, he profoundly disagreed with the two other intellectual giants of his age, Descartes (who died in 1650, when Leibniz was a toddler) and Newton, his English contemporary and rival. Newton and Leibniz both claimed to have invented calculus first, and they became engaged in a vitriolic correspondence debate. Their violent arguments were to do with international politics as much as mathematics, and they made a mockery of the ideal of scientific unity. Unfortunately for British mathematics, Newton’s method was cumbersome, but continental mathematicians started to adapt Leibniz’s ideas. It was only in the nineteenth century that Cambridge scientists successfully campaigned for the updated version of Leibniz’s calculus, which lies at the basis of modern science.
Unlike Newton, Leibniz was not a university scholar, but worked in Hanover for the direct ancestors of the British royal family. He visited London twice, when he demonstrated a model of his new calculating machine that could multiply and divide, even find square roots, and he was unanimously elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. After his final employer – the Elector who became George I – acquired the British throne in 1714, Leibniz tried desperately to emigrate to England with him. But he was thwarted, partly because of Newton’s machinations to curry favour with the new Hanoverian court in London. Leibniz was ordered to stay behind in Germany, where he spent the last two years of his life immersed in researching royal dynasties (sadly, he never got further than 1005 in his history of the Guelph family).
Leibniz’s cosmological theories seem counter-intuitive. He argued that Descartes, Newton and the other atomists were wrong to believe that the universe is composed of individual, inert particles of matter. Instead, he insisted that the fundamental elements of nature are special entities called monads. Monads are hard to describe in ordinary words. Unlike tiny atoms, they do not take up space. A better analogy would be to say that they resemble infinitesimal points of energy. Monads are important, Leibniz explained, because they are active, although some of them are far more energetic than others. It is only because some monads are relatively inactive that the world appears to contain inert matter. Living beings – their minds and souls, as well as their bodies – are colonies of monads that exist together in harmony, but never interact with one other.
Even philosophers find Leibniz’s monads hard to understand. Imagine two clocks that seem to be linked together because they always tell the same time, but in fact are working perfectly, yet separately. Similarly, Leibniz’s monads are in a sense preordained to give the appearance of collaborating harmoniously, even though they are operating independently. Leibniz used these concepts to prove the existence of God. In his time, theological, scientific and philosophical discussions were closely tied together, not split into separate academic disciplines as they were later. God, argued Leibniz, is the unique and perfect Creator of the universe, who has organised an infinite number of monads to make up the best possible world, one that approaches perfection. His was an optimistic, reassuring philosophy.
Leibniz’s reputation has been resurrected, yet there are still other ways of rewriting his life. Historians have restored Leibniz to a more prominent position in the international one-sex philosophical fraternity, but some of his intellectual circles also included women. Through letters as well as in face-to-face meetings, Leibniz discussed science and philosophy with women throughout Europe. He also relied on female patrons for financial support, and paid tribute to women’s insights. Like all relationships, these friendships were not symmetrical. They differed from one another, but were always conducted for the mutual benefit of both partners.
These women were indispensable to Leibniz’s life. Although their intellectual significance is scarcely mentioned in standard accounts, they did affect the pattern of Western philosophy and how people think today. One of the philosophical women he most admired – Anne Conway – does not even appear in the index of Leibniz’s standard English biography.1
* * *
One of Leibniz’s correspondents was Elisabeth of Bohemia, who had engaged in an intensive philosophical debate with Descartes. But his closest and longest friendship was with Elisabeth’s younger sister, Sophie, whose husband became the Elector of Hanover. Worried about his insecure position at the Hanoverian court, Leibniz diplomatically sought Sophie’s allegiance. But their bond was far stronger and more complex than a straightforward bid for patronage. They exchanged more than 300 letters, which reveal not only her concern for his well-being, but also how he welcomed her opinions on his own ideas as well as on those of other philosophers.
As part of his job as the Elector’s Librarian, Leibniz often travelled abroad to garner information for his history of the royal family – his stone of Sisyphus, he groaned, as the project started to take over his life. He wrote frequently to Sophie, keeping her informed about the latest gossip as well as new ideas in religion, medicine and philosophy, and she repeatedly questioned him on his monads. How could there be so many? How could they explain the differences between perishable bodies and immortal souls? Sensible questions – and he sent back long answers. It would be wrong to exaggerate Sophie’s intellectual impact: clever as she was, she lacked the intellectual commitment of her sister Elisabeth. She made relatively brief philosophical comments, and her opinions neither pushed Leibniz in new directions nor persuaded him to change his mind. However, her constant probing did force him to focus on difficult points and explain his views more clearly.
Just as importantly, her backing consolidated Leibniz’s position at court, and she fostered his international reputation by recommending him to her influential relatives. Leibniz diligently searched for evidence supporting Sophie’s claims to the English throne. Eventually he was successful, but she died without ever realising that her son would become George I of England.2
Sophie’s daughter, Sophie Charlotte, was another woman who played a key role in Leibniz’s life. Prussia’s first queen, she became internationally renowned as a learned woman who also enjoyed partying into the small hours. Sophie Charlotte was a hardier debater than her mother. Leibniz acknowledged how she sharpened his own thoughts. ‘This great Princess,’ he wrote, ‘liked to be kept informed about my speculations, and she even deepened them.’ Leibniz’s failure to explain his ideas infuriated her, and she insisted that he write out long explanations. Her interest lay mainly in the religious aspects of Leibniz’s work. How, she demanded to know, did his monads help to resolve the clash between a perfect God and the existence of evil?3
Taking advantage of her position as queen, Sophie Charlotte convinced her husband that a Prussian Academy, one to rival those of France and England, would enhance his international reputation. She ensured that Leibniz became its first President. It is, he wrote to her gratefully, ‘the role of women of elevated mind more properly than men to cultivate knowledge’. Self-serving flattery, of course, but Leibniz did also genuinely support women who wanted to study. In his draft for the regulations, he declared that this new scientific Academy should encourage learning not only amongst the nobility, ‘but among other people of high standing (including women)’. But although he seems to have recognised women’s intellectual abilities, little changed in practice. The new Academy followed the London and Paris precedents, and women were effectively excluded until the twentieth century.4
Leibniz often stayed at Sophie Charlotte’s palace, and they also exchanged many philosophical letters. Leibniz was devoted to this young woman who was his intellectual companion as well as his patron. But suddenly – pneumonia struck. Sophie Charlotte was only thirty-six when she died in 1705, long before her mother Sophie, Leibniz’s other royal philosopher. A weeping attendant reported that her last words were of Leibniz. ‘Do not feel sorry for me,’ she whispered, ‘for now I am going to satisfy my curiosity about the principles of things that Leibniz has never been able to explain to me: about space, the infinite, being, and nothingness’.
When she herself slipped into nothingness, Leibniz was grief-stricken. After weeks of despair, he gathered together the records of their long conversations. This may have started out as a project of self-therapy, but their talks became converted into his Theodicy, a set of essays that grappled with Sophie Charlotte’s perpetual problem – how can a merciful God allow evil to exist? This was the only philosophical book that Leibniz published in his whole life, and it was the direct product of his debates with the Queen.5
* * *
Gradually a third royal woman gained Leibniz’s allegiance – Caroline of Ansbach, who married George I’s son (the future George II) and so became England’s Princess of Wales in 1714. Despite her privileged birth, Caroline had had only a perfunctory education, but she dedicated herself to learning. Like Sophie Charlotte before her, Caroline was preoccupied with the theological and philosophical issues of evil that had entered into Leibniz’s Theodicy. After she moved to London and struggled to become accepted amongst her new subjects, Caroline became renowned for entertaining an intellectual circle of England’s finest scholars, including Newton, with whom she engaged in long conversations. Her correspondence grew to cover Newton’s ideas about gravity, time and space, which were very different from those of Leibniz.
Stranded in Hanover, Leibniz had a royal ally right inside the English court – since George I’s wife had remained behind in Germany, Caroline was Britain’s most powerful royal woman. Leibniz relied on Caroline to ensure that his salary was paid, and urged her to help negotiate a position for him as court historian. As Newton and Leibniz jockeyed for favour with George I, Leibniz savagely attacked Newton in his letters to Caroline, attempting to discredit his rival and further his own interests. She participated in one of the most famous debates in scientific history – the triangular exchange of letters between Caroline, Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, a keen Newtonian propagandist. This correspondence was published in 1717 to advertise Newton’s views, and did much to establish his still slightly uncertain position. Caroline was no mere box-office address. Although she is often depicted as only an intermediary, she argued with Clarke and Newton, commented on Leibniz’s opinions and arbitrated in the arguments.6
Caroline was just one of many learned women in England whose contributions have been marginalised by subsequent historians. Another of Leibniz’s correspondents was Damaris Masham, daughter of the famous Cambridge philosopher Ralph Cudworth and close friend of John Locke. Locke experts are at last acknowledging the important part that she played in the development of his ideas. In long letters – hers in English, his in French, the international court language – Leibniz and Masham debated philosophical issues over a couple of years. When she politely protested her unworthiness, he politely reassured her. The Countess of Conway, he wrote, has already convinced me how brilliant English women are.7
Leibniz never met the Countess of Conway (1631–79), who was born Anne Finch and died fifteen years before he was introduced to her ideas. The following decade of his life was exceptionally fertile, the period when Leibniz consolidated a metaphysical system that bears strong resemblances to Conway’s. Leibniz’s references in letters confirm his deep admiration for her philosophy, as well as his expectation that other people should be familiar with her work. He evidently regarded her as an important intellectual predecessor.8
The international network of powerful women played a vital role in bringing about their interaction. The philosophical messenger who carried Conway’s ideas from her large stately home in Warwickshire to Leibniz’s rooms in Hanover was Francis Mercury van Helmont, renowned throughout Europe as a medical alchemist. He was the doctor of Elisabeth of Bohemia, who had originally sent him over to England to try to collect a pension for her. And how did van Helmont get to know Leibniz so well? Through Elisabeth’s sister Sophie, who had forwarded two of his books to Leibniz, and discussed them with him in their philosophical correspondence.
Sophie invited van Helmont to Hanover for a few months in 1696, and every morning punctually at nine o’clock, Leibniz and van Helmont met in her rooms. Leibniz was surprised to find that this eminent physician, who was now a Baron, was dressed like a workman. Nevertheless, he sat and listened while van Helmont enthused about the new ideas he had developed together with Conway. ‘He was a close friend of the Countess of Kennaway,’ reported Leibniz (in slippery spelling), ‘And he told me the story of that extraordinary Woman.’9 This is an up-to-date version of what Leibniz learned.
As a child, Anne Finch adored her older brother John. Although he was often away at school and university, her love was reciprocated: he wrote her fond letters and sent her books to feed her avid intellectual appetite. Fluent in Latin and Greek, she read all the classical philosophers as well as the modern controversial authors – men like Descartes and Spinoza, who were accused of squeezing God out of their cosmology. Many clever girls must have studied vicariously in this way when their brothers went off to university. Others benefited from sympathetic fathers, husbands, or even perhaps their sons. For instance, John Evelyn first met Mary Browne when she was only thirteen, yet he was so impressed by her learning that he married her two years later and took over her education himself. She later spelt out how women could study through their men, ranking relationships in an interesting order when she described John Evelyn’s different types of influence over her – ‘a Father, a Lover, a Friend and Husband’. Her son’s tutor lived in the house for six years, and she grasped the opportunity to carry out long intellectual conversations with him; when he left, they continued to correspond for the rest of her life.10
Conway’s lifelong scholarly relationship was with her brother’s philosophy tutor at Cambridge, Henry More. This eminent, charismatic teacher had introduced Descartes’s ideas into England, even though he disagreed with some of them. More belonged to a group of Cambridge scholars, the Platonists, who emphasised the importance of religious, mystical experiences. Anne was about eighteen when John introduced them to each other, launching an intimate philosophical friendship that lasted until she died thirty years later.
In public, More openly declared his admiration for Conway’s intellect, even dedicating one of his books to this ‘noble Person . . . whose Genius I know to be so speculative, & Wit so penetrant, that in the knowledge of things as well Natural as Divine you have not onely outgone all of your own Sexe, but even of that other also’.11 Their emotional relationship is harder to pin down. Surviving letters suggest that she was more devoted to him than to her wealthy husband, Edward Conway, who was often away from home. ‘I profess, Madame,’ wrote More, ‘I never knew what belonged to the sweetness of friendship before I mett with so eminent an example of that virtue . . . But discretion bids me temper myself, and absteine from venturing too farr into so delicious a theme.’12 Despite such tantalising hints, historians fall back on facile platitudes – since More was Cambridge’s leading exponent of Platonism, his love for Conway is described as Platonic.
Conway spent most of her married life at Ragley Hall, a large country house near Stratford upon Avon. Now a tourist site owned by the Earl and Countess of Hertford, Ragley Hall is an imposing columned building which then lay at the centre of a large estate designed with geometrical regularity. Only one candidate for a portrait of Conway survives (Figure 15). It shows a solitary young woman absorbed in reading her letter, dwarfed by Corinthian columns and elaborate architecture. This picture, which partners a similar one of (probably) John Finch, belongs to a group of paintings by Samuel van Hoogstraten in which he played with perspectival illusions. Like other Dutch artists, van Hoogstraten enjoyed peering in on women holding letters, eliciting erotic sentiments through the mystery of the absent correspondent.
Fig. 15 Anne Conway’s experience. Samuel van Hoogstraten, Young Woman with a Letter.
Even if this is not in fact Conway, the scene does evoke her daily existence, tucked away with her books in the Warwickshire countryside. Who might the letter be from? More, perhaps? Or her busy husband? And who is the shadowy man in the background? The seductive statues reinforce the intensity of her emotion, but the staring dog – conventional symbol for marital fidelity – challenges the gaze of us, the external viewers, as though the animal were warding off unwelcome visitors. Conway seems an open prisoner in this semi-enclosed courtyard, adorning her husband’s mansion like the faithful dog and the cat trapped behind the railings.13
Conway’s philosophical writing is scholarly but vivid, enriched by analogies drawn from her own daily life. She uses concrete examples, ones familiar to all her readers – freezing alcohol, digestion, rotting meat. Far from being idle ladies of leisure, women running large homes like Ragley Hall were skilled managers, responsible for the household’s health as well as the preservation and preparation of food. Their expertise in gardening, brewing, herbal plants and curative medicines gave them a good knowledge of the biological and chemical sciences. When she wrote philosophy, Conway drew on her own experiences.14
Her most potent experience was pain. Ever since a childhood fever, she had been plagued by crippling headaches, which a succession of Europe’s best doctors tried unsuccessfully to cure. This chronic illness made Conway a semi-invalid. Isolated at Ragley Hall, she saw her husband less often than doctors, faith healers and the devoted Henry More, who visited for months on end to discuss philosophy – intense conversations that affected the ideas of both. Together they studied modern controversial writers, including Descartes, Spinoza and Gassendi, as well as the older Jewish mystical works of the Kabbalah. Sometimes they were joined by Masham’s father and other academic philosophers; and when More was away from Ragley, they continued their debates in long letters. Unlike Conway, More published prolifically, yet she effectively co-authored some of his books. Together they developed a spiritualist, holistic cosmology very different from the one that Newton was about to introduce.15
More packed his letters with well-meaning advice on her health. Don’t try mercury, he warned – instead, watch your diet, try this secret red powder from Wales. He also insisted on accompanying her to Paris for surgery. This proved an exciting trip. There were debates with the French doctors, who wanted to bore a hole in her skull to release the pressure of the vapours on her brain; they eventually decided to open her arteries instead. Even her husband’s arrival was delayed because he was thrown into prison for a time. After the three of them had returned to England, it was More who eventually persuaded van Helmont to treat her, a decision he probably came to regret. The itinerant physician failed to cure Conway, but decided to stop wandering around Europe. Instead, he stayed at Ragley Hall for the last nine years of Conway’s life, gradually pressing More away from his former privileged position.16
Conway’s chronic pain also imbued her philosophical thought. While More was looking after Conway in Paris, he read Descartes’s book on the passions and discussed it with her. Descartes’s book had stemmed from his correspondence debates with Elisabeth of Bohemia, and – like Elisabeth – Conway realised from her illness that she disagreed with Descartes’s separation of mind and matter. Conway proposed what we might call a more holistic approach. If the soul really was completely distinct from the body, she argued, then how could it ‘suffer so with bodily pain? . . . why is it wounded or grieved when the body is wounded?’ The solution was simple, she answered – just recognise ‘that the soul is of one nature and substance with the body . . . the soul moves the body and suffers with it and through it’. Body and spirit, she believed, were composed of male and female principles, but she had faith in cooperation, not domination. In her version of physiology, these male and female principles functioned differently, yet collaborated.17
Medical men thought otherwise. As an aristocratic woman, Conway could summon England’s finest doctors to Ragley Hall. Thomas Willis, an eminent anatomist from Oxford, made an intensive study of her illness, and incorporated his observations into his influential study of the brain and neurological disease. Hailed as a Baconian, Willis set out to penetrate nature, to peer inside human brains and ‘unlock the secret places of Mans Mind’. He retold the myth of Minerva’s birth, casting himself as the man-midwife who delivered her from Zeus’s brain with his instruments. By this ‘Caesarean Birth,’ he wrote, ‘Truth will be brought to Light, or for ever lye hid.’18
Conway pointed to the blood as the essence of life. In contrast, Willis moved the human centre to the brain, and so made rationality – the attribute of masculinity – the body’s dominating principle. The men clustered round Conway were convinced that she was ill because she was a woman. More boasted that he had staved off a fever by reading some mathematics, but this was definitely not a treatment he prescribed for Conway. Because she was a woman, he insisted, hard work would weaken her physically rather than helping her to rein in her passions. Her male advisers were genuinely concerned about her mysterious headaches, but they also felt threatened by her intellectual powers, which seemed more appropriate for a man than a woman. More worried that her brilliance would make men (him?) look inferior. ‘Really Madame,’ he wrote to her, ‘I think it was designe in Providence to add the head-ache to all other gifts she bestowed on your Ladiship in mercy to our sex, that they might not be putt out of countenance and grow out of conceit with themselves by being so infinitely surpassed (in what they pretend to most) by yours.’19
Conway was caught in a double-bind. The more she studied, the more she was accused of risking her health because, as a woman, she was intrinsically incapable of intellectual labour. And if she stopped working? Well, then she would fall into the trap of confirming expectations that women were emotional creatures, very different from self-disciplined, rational men.
Leibniz freely acknowledged his female predecessor’s importance, commenting that ‘my philosophical views approach somewhat closely those of the late Countess Conway, and hold a middle position between Plato and Democritus . . . all things are full of life and consciousness’.20
Like Leibniz after her, Conway proposed that everything is made up from one single substance (although she did treat God and Christ as special cases). Mind and matter, Conway and Leibniz both believed, are just different combinations of various self-activating principles, which can develop and improve. (Put more technically, they were both monist vitalists.) Leibniz encountered Conway’s version of monads just as he was incorporating this term into his own philosophy. ‘Concrete matter,’ she wrote, ‘disperses into physical monads [and] is ready to resume its activity and become spirit.’21
Conway and Leibniz were both worried about God, and they both asked the same questions. If matter and spirit are distinct, they wondered, then how could a spiritual God have created the material world? And how could a benevolent God permit the existence of evil, or condemn His creatures to eternal hell? Together with More and van Helmont, as she explored these issues Conway deviated from Christian orthodoxy into the Kabbalah, the ancient Jewish texts. This move was less outlandish than it might seem – precepts derived from the Kabbalah also entered Leibniz’s philosophy.22
Harmony, perfection, optimism: these themes pervade the views of Leibniz as well as of Conway. Drawing on the Kabbalah, Conway argued that God is good because He has given matter the innate ability to become perfect through its own efforts. Every creature moves from evil to good, she insisted, so that any individual’s improvement was both physical and spiritual – from sickness to health, from sin to salvation. ‘As we see from constant experience,’ she wrote with memories of her own agony, ‘through pain and suffering whatever grossness or crassness is contracted by the spirit or body is diminished.’ Perhaps that was how she made sense of her ceaseless headaches – being ill was purifying her soul.23
In the last years of her life, Conway turned to Quakerism. More, who had faithfully stood by her for many years, was gradually crowded out of Ragley Hall by the attentive van Helmont and a stream of Quaker visitors. As Conway became sicker, she tried to emulate the Quakers’ inner resilience, their resignation in the face of physical persecution. When she was forty-seven, her pain intensified to unprecedented levels, but her husband, inured to her constant sickness, coolly prolonged his trip round Ireland and was away when she died. Van Helmont thoughtfully preserved her body in spirits of wine so that her husband could take a last look before she was buried.
Overcoming their differences, More and van Helmont decided that the best way to commemorate ‘that incomparable Person’ was to publish her small notebook of pencilled jottings summarising her life’s thought. So van Helmont took the manuscript off to Holland, the international publishing centre for controversial works, although eleven years went by before it appeared, first in Latin (perhaps translated by More), and then translated back into English as The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. The original notebook has disappeared.
More wrote a long emotional preface that only surfaced later. He invited his readers ‘to admire with me the Sound Judgement and Experience of this Excellent Personage’.24 Conway’s Principles never became widely known – but some of her ideas live on in Leibniz’s philosophy.