 Cavendish does not suppose that there are actual winged fairies flying around in our brain. What she does suppose is that there must be a cause that puts before our mind the intelligent thoughts that we come to have – in the coherent and intelligent order in which we come to have them. Otherwise we would not have those thoughts, or we would come to have them in an order that is jumbled and random. In the course of a conversation, and in the course of any train of thought, there is something of which we are not aware that “in order set[s]” our ideas. This something is cognitive and perceptive and discriminating by nature. If a comedian or philosopher or witty person is identified as intelligent for articulating a clever idea, the process by which the idea comes to them is properly identified as intelligent – if not more so. But by hypothesis we are not conscious of that background process; we are just conscious of the thoughts themselves. The background process is quite intelligent, however; and we would be lost without it. Indeed, a fun exercise in which a person might engage is to notice when a funny quip comes to them out of the blue, and ask how it arose. Cavendish would say that it’s fairies, which are the intelligent (and hence mindful) entities that “in order set” our ideas. These engage in a tremendous amount of mental activity, and for every bit of conscious reflective activity that we count, there is at least one bit of unconscious mental activity (if not more) that makes it possible. And then there is digestion, the absorption of nutrients, the disposal of waste, reproduction, the significant amount of communication that takes place between cells, etc. Just a fraction of the thinking that takes place in a human body is of the conscious and reflective variety, according to Cavendish, even if we think that kind of thinking is special and that it is the only kind of thinking that we do. But conscious thinking is an outlier, and if so, at most a fraction of the thinking that takes place in nature is of the sort with which we identify. The parts of a human body exhibit mentality – “one part of a mans body, as one hand, is not less sensible, then the other, nor the heel less sensible then the heart, nor the legg less sensible then the head, but each part hath its sense and reason, and so consequently its sensitive and rational knowledge….” (Cavendish 1664, 113–14). If a human hand or heel is composed of the same elemtental bodies that compose the rest of the bodies in nature, then unconscious embodied mentality abounds.