Three degrees of Matter

The Three degrees of Matter are the inanimate, sensitive, and rational degrees that, in the Empress’s account, permeate all of nature. Rather than treating matter as inert substance awaiting a separate soul or spirit to move it, the concept makes nature one infinite, self-moving, living, and self-knowing body. Its degrees differ in function, yet remain intermingled: the inanimate is body, the sensitive is life, and the rational is soul. This material continuum underlies the book’s challenges to a strict division between bodily and spiritual agency.

Nature as Self-Moving Matter

The concept first appears in the Empress’s rebuke to the Ape-men, whose competing chemical theories seek the primary ingredients of natural bodies. Some point to substances that fire can separate; others name salt, sulphur, and mercury; still others argue that water is the sole principle from which all bodies arise. The Empress rejects the premise shared by these experiments: nature cannot be reduced to a set of fixed ingredients. It is one infinite self-moving body, divided into infinite parts that continually change through composition and division. Self-moving matter, not any ingredient disclosed by fire, is the universal principle and cause of natural effects.

Her argument also limits what experimentation can establish. Fire is itself a particular natural effect, and it affects different bodies differently; gold, she observes, has not been made to change its interior figure by fire. The Ape-men’s methods therefore cannot disclose nature’s ultimate principles simply by breaking substances down. The Empress redirects their labor toward experiments beneficial to the public, turning a dispute about chemical analysis into a broader claim about the limits of knowledge and the explanatory priority of living matter.

The Three Degrees and the Spirit Dialogues

In conversation with the Immaterial Spirits, the Empress tests whether spirits can move bodies, act without bodily organs, or possess knowledge independent of embodiment. The Spirits say that they have no motion apart from their corporeal vehicles: the vehicles move them, not the other way around. They cannot speak or possess bodily senses without organs, although they claim a supernatural kind of knowledge distinct from natural knowledge. Their vehicles, being self-moving bodies, are living; they vary in form, from gross and dense to pure, rare, and subtle. The exchange unsettles any simple picture of spirits as independent agents who animate otherwise passive matter.

The account of the three degrees extends that argument to souls. A composed body can contain numerous material souls because each material part has its own natural soul. Nature itself consists of inanimate, sensitive, and rational matter so thoroughly intermingled that no part, not even an atom, lacks any of the three. The sensitive degree supplies life, the rational degree supplies soul, and the inanimate degree supplies body. These are not three separable ingredients assembled from outside nature, but interdependent aspects of one living material whole.

The dialogue distinguishes this material plurality from immaterial souls. The Spirits maintain that two immaterial substances cannot occupy one inanimate body: being bodiless, they have neither parts nor place. They also deny that souls give bodies life in the ordinary natural sense; bodies give souls motion, while spirits and divine souls are said to possess an indivisible life of their own. The Empress tests the relation through an analogy between Sun and Moon, but the Spirits reverse her proposed comparison: the vehicle is like the Sun, and the soul like the Moon, receiving motion from the body as the Moon receives light from the Sun.

Matter, Life, and the Limits of a Separate Spiritual World

The same principle governs the Spirits’ discussion of worlds. They contend that a world belongs to material creatures, not to immaterial beings; yet natural matter cannot exist as a world without lives and forms, just as natural lives and forms cannot exist apart from matter. Matter, motion, life, and form are therefore inseparable in nature. The distinction between material and immaterial remains meaningful in the dialogue, but it does not make immaterial spirits the creators or independent movers of material life.

The Empress’s questions about souls entering bodies sharpen the consequences. The Spirits report the Platonick belief that lovers’ souls live in the bodies of their beloved, then suggest that a soul departing one body must enter another, since souls have no motion of their own. They cannot settle whether all matter is ensouled, but reason that if all matter moves through spiritual power, a departing soul would necessarily enter another ensouled body. Their answers expose tensions rather than providing a complete account: the dialogue tests how far immaterial souls can be reconciled with a nature in which every material part participates in life and motion.

Imagination and the Making of Worlds

The Three degrees of Matter also provide a framework for imaginative creation. When the Duchess abandons borrowed philosophical models, she makes a world from self-moving matter, described as composed of the sensitive and rational degrees and, more particularly, as consisting only of rational matter, the subtlest and purest degree. The sensitive motions sustain perception and the body’s consistency, while rational motions create the imaginary world. Though the degrees are mixed, their parts can move in different ways at the same time; the Duchess’s world-making is thus presented as a distinct activity within the mind’s material motions.

The Empress, who has been making and dissolving worlds in her own mind without settling in one, asks the Duchess to show her this creation. The Duchess brings her beloved world and invites the Empress’s soul to observe its structure, order, and government. The Empress is so captivated that her soul wishes to live there, but the Duchess instead advises her to make a world of her own, with the rational motions of the Duchess’s mind assisting through sensitive expressions. The episode makes world-making an exercise of rational material power, not a departure from matter into an immaterial realm.

The idea also changes the terms of the Duchess’s desire for fame and political dominion. The Spirits tell her that every human creature can create an immaterial world within the head, populated by immaterial subjects and fashioned with whatever motions, forms, and government the creator chooses. They contrast this inward creation with the limited enjoyment of a material kingdom: even a monarch who possesses a whole world can experience only a part of it, while governing brings general burdens. Set beside the Duchess’s later composition of a world from rational matter, this counsel makes imaginative sovereignty both a practical alternative to conquest and an expression of the book’s larger insistence that mind, life, and material motion cannot be cleanly separated.