Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 309 work, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, is therefore an important work in its own right and not simply as the work of a woman. As Lady Conway and van Helmont moved closer to Quakerism, More was increasingly excluded from their company. His biographer, Richard Ward, described the tears of anguish he shed at Lady Conway's conversion to a sect he believed personified enthusiasm--an anathema to More. But even More was affected by Lady Conway's confession that the persecuted Quakers were the only people who could offer her comfort in her suffering (42 l). Lady Conway died at the age of forty-nine. Van Helmont performed his last service to her as a chemist. He preserved her body in spirits of wine so that her husband could have a final look before her burial. She went to her grave with the simple words "Quaker Lady" her only epitaph. In terms of sheer intellectual interest the Conway Letters have few equals, but when one adds the drama and pathos of the lives of these extraordinary correspondents , they are without peer. The reader cannot help but become absorbed by a story in which even the minor characters include such luminaries as George Fox, Robert Barclay, William Penn, Valentine Geatrakes, Boyle, Newton, Spinoza, Hobbes, and Leibniz. The correspondence has been splendidly presented by Marjorie Nicolson. It is a delight to reread her evocative introductions. She came to know "her old friends," as she later referred to them, as few historians are ever privileged to know their subjects. Returning to Ragley Hall after completing her edition, she describes her sense of loss in a way that brought tears to the eyes of this reviewer. It was not, she says, the grounds, the stately rooms, nor even the portraits that made her realize how much she missed Anne Conway and her friends. "It was the tiny skeleton of a dog, found not long ago in the bole of a great oak at Ragley, which had been struck by lightning--a little dog of a breed unknown to English taxidermists, a skeleton they declared to be at least two centuries old. The story of that dog no one at Ragley Hall had ever known; but the memory of the editor went back across dead centuries, and for a lonely moment she realized that only she, and these men and women dead two hundred years, could know that little dog was one which John Finch had sent his sister from Italy, and that its name was Julietto!" (xxix). Marjorie Nicolson first brought the members of the Conway circle back to life. That they have returned with such vigor is entirely due to the efforts of Sarah Hutton, who has only added to the interest of this collection by including letters either overlooked or mistakenly thought too technical for inclusion. ALLISON P. COUDERT Arizona State University Robert G. Muehlmann. Berkeley's Ontology. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992. Pp. ix + 31o. Cloth, $37.95. The good bishop's metaphysical views continue to attract interpreters. Muehlmann's book, winner of the 1991 Johnsonian Prize in Philosophy, joins Kenneth Winkler's 31o .JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:2 APRIL 1994 recent Berkeley: An Interpretation (Oxford, t989) as an original reevaluation of Berkeley 's central doctrines of immaterialism and idealism. Muehlmann convincingly justifies this continued attention: Chapter i is devoted to establishing that it is surprisingly difficult to say exactly what/s Berkeley's argument for idealism--the thesis that sensed objects are existentially dependent on minds--or even why he believed it to be true. This problem dominates the first half of the book. Muehlmann's proposed solution runs as follows: Berkeley's case for idealism rests on his antiabstractionism, specifically, on the claim that "we cannot abstract any proper object of perception from the sensational conditions under which it is perceived" (947). It is argued that some version of this antiabstractionist claim (henceforth, C) underlies Berkeley's argumentation in Principles 3-5, and in Dialogues 176-78, x91-99, and also inspires the infamous "master argument. "~ Muehlmann maintains that Berkeley's antiabstractionism is in turn firmly rooted in his...