 Here Cavendish is taking a stand on a critical question of the early modern period – the question of how bodies would be able to think if their most basic features did not include mentality of some kind. Many of her contemporaries argued that the most basic features of body are extensive features like size, shape and motion; they concluded that bodies cannot think because there is no way to explain how thinking would arise or emerge from building blocks that are utterly non-mental. Descartes is an example (Descartes 1644, I.53, 210–1), as is Malebranche: