Platonism

Platonism in The Blazing-World is both a theory of relations between souls and a literary language for intimacy that exceeds ordinary bodily and political boundaries. The doctrine that lovers’ souls may dwell in one another’s bodies helps explain the Duchess’s spiritual companionship with the Empress, while the later scene in which both women’s souls enter the Duke of Newcastle’s body gives the idea a distinctive narrative form. At the same time, the book questions any simple separation of soul from matter: spirits and souls are repeatedly described in relation to the bodies or vehicles through which they move and act.

Doctrine and the Body

In conversation with the Empress, the Immaterial Spirits invoke the Platonists’ belief that lovers’ souls live in the bodies of their beloved. The claim appears amid questions about whether souls choose their bodies and what happens when one body is left behind. The Spirits suggest that souls cannot lack bodies in a world of matter: when a soul parts from one body, it enters another, because it has no motion of its own and must be embodied in the nearest parts of matter. The passage makes the Platonist idea of a beloved’s body one account among several, rather than a settled explanation of the soul’s fate.

That qualification matters to the novel’s broader material philosophy. The Spirits deny that incorporeal beings move independently: they say that their corporeal vehicles give them motion, and that a soul without a body has no natural motion. They distinguish supernatural from natural knowledge, but maintain that created spirits do not possess God’s absolute knowledge. Their account of souls therefore places spiritual life in a continuing relation to material embodiment, even as it preserves a difference between immaterial spirits and the living, self-moving bodies that serve as vehicles.

The discussion also resists reducing every soul to an immaterial substance. The Spirits argue that two immaterial souls cannot inhabit one inanimate body, since immaterial beings have neither parts nor place; by contrast, a composed body may contain numerous material souls, because every material part has its own natural soul. Nature, they explain, is one infinite, self-moving, living, and self-knowing body, composed throughout of inanimate, sensitive, and rational matter. The sensitive degree is life, the rational is soul, and the inanimate is body. In this framework, the Platonist language of lovers sharing bodies coexists with a more material account in which life and soul are woven into Nature rather than simply placed outside it.

From the Empress’s Scribe to a Spiritual Friendship

The novel turns the doctrine of lovers’ souls into the premise for the Duchess’s arrival as the Empress’s spiritual scribe. When the Empress asks for a writer to help her compose a Cabbala, the Spirits say they can dictate but need a bodily hand or arm to write. Asked whether the soul of a living person can leave its body, they answer by appealing to Plato’s doctrine of the conversation of souls and the claim that lovers’ souls live in the bodies of their beloved. The Empress then chooses the Duchess of Newcastle, whose writing the Spirits praise for its sense and reason, rather than selecting one of the ancient or modern male writers they have discussed.

The Duchess’s arrival is presented as a meeting of souls, not as a visit by her physical body. The Empress receives her with an embrace and spiritual kiss, then asks whether she can write. The Duchess warns that her handwriting resembles characters more than well-formed letters and may be unintelligible to readers who have not learned it. The Empress replies that her secretaries can learn the hand and copy it clearly. This exchange makes the writing arrangement depend on a negotiated relation between the Duchess’s distinct authorship and the practical work of transcription.

The Duchess advises against the Empress’s planned Cabbala in several forms. A mystical interpretation of Scripture, she says, offers no advantage to a ruler outside the Jewish religion; a philosophical Cabbala risks confusing human understanding with an addition of nonsense to infinite numbers; a moral one need go no further than fearing God and loving one’s neighbor; and a political one need not exceed the principles of reward and punishment. If the Empress insists on making a Cabbala, the Duchess recommends a poetical or romance form that may use metaphors, allegories, and similitudes. The Empress accepts her counsel, makes her a favourite, and keeps her in the Blazing-World for a time.

When the Duchess’s soul is later allowed to return to her husband and kindred in her native world, the Empress requires that it visit from time to time. The repeated visits deepen their intimacy until the two women are described as Platonick Lovers, despite being of the same sex. Platonism thus supplies the novel with a language for a friendship that is at once spiritual, affectionate, and sustained across separate worlds. The Duchess’s position as a visitor and adviser also gives her a role in relating the events of the Blazing-World.

Ambition and the Immaterial Alternative

During one later visit, the Duchess’s soul tells the Empress that her melancholy comes from extreme ambition: she wishes to become a great Princess. The Empress answers that the Duchess already holds a high rank as a Duchess, and the two discuss the distinctions between dukes, princes, and sovereigns. Their exchange makes ambition a question of public titles and recognition, rather than merely an inward disposition.

The Duchess then asks whether she might become Empress of one of the many other worlds. The Spirits reply that these worlds are inhabited and governed, and warn that conquerors often fail to enjoy their conquests because they are more feared than loved and commonly meet an untimely end. The Duchess says she would rather risk death in a noble achievement than live in obscure security, because an achievement might give her glorious fame. The Spirits counter that fame, like human life, may last long or end quickly, and that circumstances may prevent the Duchess from gaining it.

Instead of offering another route to territorial power, the Spirits propose that a human being can create an immaterial world within the head or skull, populate it with immaterial creatures, and choose its government and forms. Such a world might be made of ideas, atoms, or lights, and altered at will. They contrast this freedom with the burdens of governing a material domain: even the Empress, though she possesses a whole world, knows neither all the places and countries she governs nor all their dominions. A monarch bears general responsibility while subjects enjoy particular places and pleasures. The passage makes imaginative world-making an alternative to seeking satisfaction through conquest, fame, or sovereign rule.

This alternative does not simply discard the world of bodies. The Spirits describe the imagined world as one that can contain many forms, motions, and inhabitants, while insisting that a material sovereign can enjoy only a portion of the domain under her rule. The contrast turns the Duchess’s ambition into a question about the scale and limits of possession: political authority brings care and incomplete knowledge, whereas an inwardly created world offers the maker control over its design and revision. Platonism here joins the novel’s interest in spiritual relations to its exploration of the power of the mind to make worlds.

The Duke’s Body and a Three-Souled Conversation

The most concrete enactment of the doctrine comes during the Empress and the Duchess’s spiritual visit to the Duchess’s native world. The women approach the Duke of Newcastle while he is attending to his horses of manage. The Duchess’s soul is so overjoyed at seeing him that her aerial vehicle becomes splendid; the narrator presents this change as evidence that the passions of souls or spirits can alter their bodily vehicles. The Empress and Duchess remain imperceptible to the Duke as they follow him indoors.

The Empress watches the Duke practise swordsmanship and admires his skill. Concerned that he is exercising before a meal and might overheat himself, the Duchess leaves her aerial vehicle and enters her husband’s body. The Empress does the same. The Duke now has three souls in one body: his own, his wife’s, and the Empress’s. The scene transforms the earlier discussion of lovers’ souls into a shared experience, but gives it an unusual configuration: two women’s souls join the husband’s body, and all three converse there.

The Duke’s soul delights the Empress with scenes, songs, music, witty discourse, recreations, and harmless sports. His conversation and the Empress’s soul’s response lead them to become enamoured of one another. The Duchess is initially jealous, but sets aside that feeling because she understands Platonic love as divine and believes that no adultery can be committed among Platonick Lovers. The scene does not dissolve the marriage or replace the Duchess’s attachment to her husband; rather, it places the Empress’s spiritual affection alongside the Duchess’s marital bond and uses the shared body as the setting for a temporary, three-way intimacy.

The visit ends when a Spirit reports that, although the Emperor and his subjects have not noticed the Empress’s soul is absent, the Emperor’s soul has become so sad and melancholy without his beloved that the whole Imperial Court has noticed. The Empress is advised to return to her own body in the Blazing-World. The Duke’s soul and the Duchess’s soul regret her departure, but accept that she cannot stay. The episode gives spiritual attachment a consequence in another relationship: the Empress’s absence is registered not through public knowledge of her soul’s journey, but through the Emperor’s evident melancholy.

Significance and Limits

Platonism connects several strands of the novel: a speculative account of souls and bodies, the Empress and Duchess’s continuing friendship, and a scene in which spiritual intimacy crosses the boundaries of a single body. Its language allows affection to be imagined as a bond that can persist between worlds and exist alongside marriage. The Duchess’s initial jealousy and subsequent acceptance make that possibility part of the scene’s action rather than a merely abstract doctrine.

Yet the novel does not present Platonism as a complete explanation of existence. The Spirits’ account repeatedly stresses that natural motion depends on bodies, that created spirits lack universal knowledge, and that natural lives, forms, and matter are inseparable. The Duchess’s and Empress’s souls can enter the Duke’s body, but the narrative’s wider philosophy also treats bodies and matter as active conditions of motion and experience. Platonism is therefore both a resource for imagining spiritual friendship and a position tested against a world in which life and matter cannot be cleanly divided.