What Is Everything Made Of? Anne Conway’s Strange and Beautiful Answer

Imagine you have a rock in one hand and your own hand in the other. They seem totally different. The rock is cold, still, silent. Your hand is warm, moves when you want it to, feels things. Most people would say: the rock is matter—dead stuff—and your hand is alive. Two completely different kinds of things.

But what if that’s wrong? What if the rock and your hand aren’t different kinds of stuff at all? What if everything—rocks, trees, worms, your brain, the air, the stars—is made of the same stuff, just in different forms? And what if that stuff is, in some way, alive?

That’s what a 17th-century philosopher named Anne Conway believed. And her reasons for believing it are stranger, more beautiful, and more unsettling than you’d expect.

The Philosopher Who Couldn’t Go to School

Anne Conway lived in England in the 1600s. She was born into a wealthy family and grew up in a house you might have heard of—Kensington Palace in London. She was extremely smart, and she wanted to study philosophy. But there was a problem: she was a girl. Girls weren’t allowed to go to university.

So she did something clever. Her brother was studying at Cambridge with a famous philosopher named Henry More. Anne asked Henry More to teach her by letter. And he agreed. So Anne Conway learned philosophy through the mail—reading books, writing letters, arguing with her teacher about ideas.

She was sick for much of her life, with terrible headaches and other pains. That experience of suffering would end up shaping her philosophy in surprising ways. Later, she met a physician named Francis Mercury van Helmont, who introduced her to two things that changed her thinking: a mystical Jewish tradition called the Kabbalah, and a radical Christian group called the Quakers. Both would push her away from the ideas she’d learned as a student and toward something completely new.

The Problem with Dead Stuff

To understand what Conway thought, you first need to understand what everyone else thought. In the 1600s, most philosophers believed in a kind of split. They said reality was made of two totally different substances:

Matter: dead, dumb, mechanical stuff. It just sits there, moves when pushed, has no thoughts or feelings.
Spirit (or soul): alive, thinking, conscious stuff. It’s what makes you you.

This view is called dualism—the idea that there are two kinds of stuff. René Descartes (day-CART) made this famous. He said your body is matter, a machine. Your mind is spirit, totally different. They somehow interact, but nobody really knows how.

Conway thought this was wrong. Deeply wrong. And she thought she could prove it.

Her argument starts with a simple question: where did everything come from?

If you believe in God—and Conway did, very much—then God created everything. And God, Conway says, is not dead. God is alive. God is thinking, loving, creating, acting. So if God made everything, and God is life itself, wouldn’t everything God makes share that quality? Wouldn’t everything be, in some way, alive?

Here’s how she put it: if something is totally unlike God, it can’t come from God. And if “dead matter” really existed—totally inert, lifeless, senseless stuff—it would be completely unlike God, who is pure life and action. So dead matter couldn’t exist. It’s a contradiction.

That might sound like a religious argument. But Conway thought it was a logical one. If the source of everything is alive, then everything that comes from that source must also be alive—just in different degrees.

One Substance, Many Forms

So Conway said: there is only one kind of created stuff. It’s all spirit. But “spirit” doesn’t mean ghostly and invisible. It means something more like “living, active, capable of perception and change.”

What we call “body” and what we call “soul” are not two different substances. They’re the same substance in different conditions. Body is just spirit that has become dense, heavy, slow, dark. Soul is spirit that is light, fast, bright, active.

Imagine water. Water can be steam (light and invisible), liquid (flowing), or ice (hard and solid). But it’s all H₂O. Same stuff, different states. For Conway, body and spirit are like ice and steam: same fundamental substance, just arranged differently.

She used the metaphor of light and darkness. The more “spiritual” something is, the more it’s like light—active, aware, powerful. The more “bodily” it is, the more it’s like darkness—dense, sluggish, less aware. But nothing is ever completely dark. Even the heaviest rock has a tiny spark of life in it. And nothing is ever completely light—except God.

Three Kinds, Not Two

Now, Conway did believe there were three distinct levels of being, which she called “species” (not like biological species, but types or categories). She wasn’t saying there are three different substances—all created stuff is one substance. But there are three kinds of being:

God: infinite, eternal, unchanging, pure life and goodness.
Christ (or “Middle Nature”): a bridge between God and creation. This being shares qualities of both—it’s closer to God than we are, but it’s still part of the created world.
Creature: everything else—angels, humans, animals, plants, rocks, air. All of us.

The important thing is that these three are not the same. A creature can never become God, or Middle Nature. You can’t upgrade your species. But within the third species—the world of creatures—you can change a lot. And you do.

You’ve Been a Horse. Maybe. Or You Will Be.

Here’s where Conway’s philosophy gets really weird and really beautiful.

She believed that creatures can change form—radically. Over many lifetimes, a creature can transform from one kind of being into another. Not because it’s magic, but because change is built into the nature of created spirit. Everything is always moving, always becoming.

Conway said: a horse might, through many lives, become a human. And a human might become something more spiritual, or might sink down and become something less. It depends on how you live, what you become, what you choose.

But—and this is crucial—you can’t become another person. Peter can’t become Paul. You keep your identity. There’s something like a “captain spirit” at the center of every creature, a kind of core self that persists through all your changes. That’s what makes you you across all your lifetimes.

Why does Conway believe this? Because she thinks the universe is heading somewhere. Everything is moving toward greater perfection—becoming more spiritual, more active, more good, more like God. But the journey takes time. A lot of time. And sometimes you mess up and go backward.

Why Suffering Makes Sense

Conway thought about suffering a lot, probably because she suffered so much herself. And she came to a strange conclusion: pain is not pointless. It’s part of how creatures get better.

Here’s how she sees it. When a creature does wrong, it becomes more “bodily”—denser, heavier, darker, less active. That’s not a punishment God inflicts from outside. It’s just what happens. Doing bad stuff makes you become heavier, spiritually speaking. And being heavy is itself painful. The suffering is the experience of being stuck, dense, cut off from the light.

But that pain serves a purpose. It wakes you up. It makes you want to get unstuck. The suffering is like a fire that burns away what’s heavy in you, so you can become lighter again. Eventually, after enough purification, you recover. You start moving back toward the light.

This means, for Conway, that hell cannot be eternal. If God is perfectly good and just, then endless punishment for finite wrongdoing would be unjust. It wouldn’t make sense. So all suffering is temporary. No one is lost forever. Eventually, every creature will be restored to goodness and light.

This idea is called universal salvation—the belief that everyone and everything will eventually be saved. It’s controversial. A lot of Christians then (and now) believe that some people are damned forever. Conway disagreed. She said that would make God cruel, and God cannot be cruel.

Why Bother?

You might be thinking: okay, this is interesting in a weird-history way, but why should I care about a 350-year-old philosopher who believed in reincarnation and that rocks are alive?

Here’s why. Conway’s central idea—that everything is connected, that there aren’t really separate kinds of stuff, that change is real and possible, that suffering can have meaning, that nothing is lost forever—this is still a live set of questions.

Scientists today are asking: is “dead matter” really dead? What is consciousness? Is it something that only humans have, or is it everywhere, in different forms? Some philosophers and scientists argue for panpsychism—the idea that some form of mind or experience is present in all things. That’s very close to what Conway believed.

And the question of whether suffering can be justified, whether there’s a point to pain, whether everyone eventually gets another chance—those aren’t just philosophical puzzles. They’re things people wrestle with for real, when bad things happen, when they wonder if the world is fair.

Conway’s answer is radical: everything is alive. Everything is connected. Nothing is beyond repair.

What We Don’t Know

Philosophers still argue about whether Conway was right. Some say she didn’t fully solve the problem—if everything is alive, why do some things seem so dead? If everything is connected, why do we feel so separate? If suffering is restorative, why does so much suffering seem pointless?

Conway would probably shrug and say: you’re not done yet. Keep going. You’ll see.

Key Terms

Term	What it does in Conway’s philosophy
Substance	The basic stuff everything is made of—Conway says there’s only one kind, which is living spirit
Species	A category or level of being—God, Middle Nature, and Creature are the three species
Dualism	The view Conway rejected: that reality is made of two totally different kinds of stuff (matter and spirit)
Middle Nature	A being that bridges God and creation, sharing qualities of both
Perfectibility	The idea that all creatures can become better, more spiritual, more like God, forever
Universal salvation	The belief that all creatures will eventually be saved and restored to goodness
Captain spirit	The core self that stays the same through all your changes across lifetimes

Key People

Anne Conway (1631–1679): A brilliant English philosopher who couldn’t attend university because she was a woman, so she learned philosophy through letters. She argued that all of creation is one living spiritual substance.
Henry More (1614–1687): A famous philosopher and Conway’s teacher. They disagreed later, but she took his ideas seriously and transformed them.
René Descartes (1596–1650): The French philosopher who made dualism famous. Conway admired his science but thought his separation of mind and body was a mistake.
Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698): A physician and philosopher who introduced Conway to the Kabbalah and Quakerism, which shaped her later ideas.

Things to Think About

Conway says everything is alive—rocks, air, everything. If that were true, what would change about how you treat things? Would it matter morally how you throw a stone or step on a flower?
If suffering is purifying—if it makes you better in the long run—does that mean we shouldn’t try to prevent it? Or is there a difference between suffering that helps and suffering that just hurts?
Conway believes everyone eventually gets restored to goodness. No one is lost forever. Is that comforting? Or does it make things less meaningful, knowing that nothing is really at stake?
If body and spirit are the same substance, just in different arrangements, does that change how you think about your own body? Is your body part of who you are, or is it just a temporary form?

Where This Shows Up

Environmentalism: The idea that everything is alive and connected influences some environmental philosophies that say we should respect nature, not just use it.
Animal rights: If animals and humans are made of the same spiritual substance, the boundary between us is less clear. Conway’s philosophy suggests animals matter morally.
Panpsychism: Some contemporary philosophers and scientists think consciousness might be a basic feature of all matter, not just brains. This is a modern version of Conway’s view.
Discussions about justice and punishment: Conway’s argument that eternal punishment would be unjust—that suffering should have a point—shows up in debates about prisons, rehabilitation, and whether people can change.