Cavendish’s materialism rejected a first cause because immaterial things cannot move

Evidence

While many of her early writings emphasized the empirical methodology of the telescope and the microscope, her later works shifted toward a rationalist critique of empiricism and developed a materialist ontology. In the Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668), she took the materialist stance that motion was inherent in matter and that nature was self-knowing and perceptive. A “first cause” was nonsensical because the immaterial could not have material motion. Matter might be motionless but all motion must be attended by matter. Corporeal bodies could not have incorporeal perceptions; thoughts were corporeal motions united by conjunction. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 1008

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts with the vitalist monism of Conway (ch61) and mechanical dead-matter views (ch50-53); Cavendish holds a materialist-but-perceptive nature that fits neither camp cleanly.