Abstract:

In 1693 and 1694 Mary Astell and John Norris engaged in a correspondence that was collected and published in 1695 as the Letters Concerning the Love of God [hereafter LG]. The correspondence began after Astell read Norris’s A Discourse Concerning the Measure of Divine Love [Discourse]. In this work, Norris, often called the ‘English Malebranche’, defends a version of Malebranche’s infamous doctrine: occasionalism—the view that God alone has true causal power. In her first letter to Norris, Astell writes: “Methinks there is all the reason in the World to conclude, That GOD is the only efficient Cause of all our Sensations, and you have made it as clear as the Day” (LG 69-70). With claims like this, as well as passages from her 1705 The Christian Religion, Astell seems sympathetic to occasionalism, as scholars like E. Derek Taylor, Richard Acworth, and Ruth Perry argue.

But others, who focus on different parts of Astell’s corpus, disagree. Eileen O’Neil reads Astell as a non-occasionalist who holds an “orthodox Cartesian account of sensation” (2007); Jacqueline Broad agrees with this interactionist reading. The debate is further complicated by the fact that the non-occasionalist textual evidence comes chronologically after the first letter to Norris, but before Christian Religion. While Astell’s position does evolve some, it seems implausible that she makes a wholesale change of view twice: first endorsing occasionalism, then giving it up, only to later reembrace it.

In this paper I argue that Astell’s account is relatively consistent throughout all of her texts and is neither occasionalist nor interactionist. I suggest that the debate about Astell’s position can be resolved by attending to two sets of distinctions. First, there are many different types of causal relations: body-to-body, mind-to-body, and body-to-mind, and one can plausibly hold different causal accounts of each type. Second, there are many conceptions of causal relations and theories, not least: efficient causality, occasional causality and occasionalism. Occasionalism is the best-known type of occasional causation, but it is not the only one. I argue that while Astell endorses occasional causation, she never endorses occasionalism, nor does she ever hold interactionism.

With these distinctions in mind, I argue that in LG, Astell commits to God being the only efficient cause of sensations, but does not deny any causal role for the body. I further make my case by looking at Norris’s Discourse, and the Port-Royal Logic by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole—which Astell cites in other works. These works show that Astell was working with a more nuanced view of causation than is often supposed.

I also consider the later parts of the correspondence with Norris where Astell seems to explicitly walk back her earlier claims and show that despite some subtle changes her discussion remains consistent with this occasional cause account. I conclude that Astell’s views on causation and sensations remain relatively consistent throughout her career and are neither occasionalist nor interactionist.