- Lived:
- 1631–1679 · London and Ragley Hall, Warwickshire, England
- Tradition:
- Early modern rationalism; Cambridge Platonist circle; monist metaphysics of spirit
- The Big Idea:
- Matter and spirit are not two different kinds of thing but two ends of one living continuum — everything that exists is life at some degree of density, and every creature, however fallen, can rise.
- In their words:
- "Every pain and torment excites or stirs up the life or spirit existing in every thing which suffers."
- If you remember one thing:
- A bedridden viscountess with three decades of unrelenting headaches wrote one small book arguing that nothing in the universe is dead — and Leibniz said her philosophy came closest to his own.