 For Conway, God creates only beings that are alive, and so the everyday objects that surround us are something other than what Plotinus, Malebranche and Cudworth had thought. There exists nothing that is brutish, inert, and unthinking, and instead there is a continuum of creatures that exist on a spectrum from highly intelligent and active to largely dim and dull. Cavendish agrees with Conway that nothing answers to the traditional conception of matter, but unlike Conway she is happy to say that matter surrounds us. Cavendish and Conway are for the most part in agreement; Cavendish simply rejects the traditional conception of matter as inadequate, and then proceeds to argue that the things that our concept of matter has always picked out—the things that our language has designated as ‘material’—are something more (Borcherding 2022). Unlike many of her opponents, Cavendish is not disappointed by the result that minds are material. She thinks on the contrary that it is a source of hope. For example, if we appreciate that minds are corporeal, we will be able to come up with better and more systematic and less groping treatments of mental  illness.[9]  As evidence for her view, she points to the obvious facts that a person’s mood and energy are affected by nutrition (Cavendish 1663, 431–2), and that old age and injury to the brain can neutralize some of our cognitive functions (Cavendish 1668b, 85–6, 113; Cavendish 1663, 334–5). Cavendish is breaking with her tradition and arguing that the fulfillment of a person is not a matter of turning away from the body but understanding all of its dynamics and embracing  it.[10]