The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World

Duchess of Margaret Cavendish Newcastle · 1666 · 149 pages

The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World

Duchess of Margaret Cavendish Newcastle98

At last, having with much ado cleansed and cleared her mind of these dusty and misty particles, she endeavored to create a World according to Aristotle's Opinion; but remembring that her mind, as most of the Learned hold it, was Immaterial, and that, according to Aristotle's Principle, out of Nothing, Nothing could be made; she was forced also to desist from that work, and then she fully resolved, not to take any more patterns from the Ancient Philosophers, but to follow the Opinions of the Moderns; and to that end, she endeavoured to make a World according to Des Cartes Opinion; but when she had made the Æthereal Globules, and set them a moving by a strong and lively imagination, her mind became so dizzie with their extraordinary swift turning round, that it almost put her into a swoon; for her thoughts, but their constant tottering, did so stagger, as if they had all been drunk: wherefore she dissolved that World, and began to make another, according to Hobbs's Opinion; but when all the parts of this Imaginary World came to press and drive each other, they seemed like a company of Wolves that worry sheep, or like so many Dogs that hunt after Hares; and when she found a re-action equal to those pressures, her mind was so squeezed together, that her thoughts could neither move forward nor backward, which caused such an horrible pain in her head, that although she had dissolved that World, yet she could not, without much difficulty, settle her mind, and free it from that pain which those pressures and reactions had caused in it.

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