...every Passion which doth rise Is as the several Atomes lies. ...Sicknesse, Health, and Peace, and War, Are alwaies as the several Atomes are.12 Cavendish's atomic determinism was a threat to other seventeenth-century conceptions of order that rely heavily on the mind, or soul, as evidence and expression of immanent order. ...order for Cavendish is not absolute, or even rational in a Hobbesian sense, but contingent on the interplay of autonomous, independent forces.14 Cavendish suggests that her brain is one such provisionally ordered system. Cavendish sees not only her own, but other people's ideas as physical, self-reflexive objects. ...Dioptrics," or science that makes use of magnifying lenses, is a "brittle art," and the arcane theory that the world was formed from circular motions of air is a "giddy and Dissie opinion. Perhaps not surprisingly, most new philosophers embraced a version of the Cartesian notion of the immaterial soul. ...many women writers used the notion of the immaterial soul to legitimize their work, arguing that if discourse is the product of an immaterial soul, sex ought not interfere with one's ability to write sensibly.