SOURCE: “Gassendi's Account of the Nature of Things,” in French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire, Athlone Press, 1960, pp. 85-102.

[In the excerpt below, Spink considers Gassendi's adaptations of Epicurus, comparing Gassendi's work with Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. The critic also examines Gassendi's Syntagma philosophicum, finding Gassendi singular among his French contemporaries as a proponent of atomism.]

It is difficult to determine which of several possible reasons attracted Gassendi to Epicurus in the first place in 1626. He had just given up, or was in process of giving up his plan for publishing a series of direct attacks on the old school in continuation of his Exercitationes paradoxicae. Doubtless it was prudence which caused him to do so; not that he felt menaced by the campaign of his friend Mersenne against the sceptics and deists; more probably he realized that attempts of the type of the Exercitationes paradoxicae were neither new nor effective. The old guard was strongly entrenched, especially in Paris, and was merely irritated without being shaken by such skirmishing. Was he attracted by the idea of rehabilitating Epicurus as a means of decrying Aristotle without openly flouting the authority of his elders? Very possibly. He at any rate intended his Epicurus to be a sequel to his Exercitationes paradoxicae,¹ and such an indirect approach was entirely suited to his cautious temperament. He had no desire to stir up a hornets' nest, but at the same time his lively intelligence must have been tempted by the prospect of justifying, with sound evidence in hand, a man so universally condemned by the unintelligent as was Epicurus: here was a ‘paradox’ he could victoriously force upon the adversary! Did the success of others with whom he was in contact, Galileo, Mersenne, Beeckmann, Descartes, who were achieving results by reducing the problems of physics to those of mechanics, encourage him to develop his study of a mechanistic philosophy? Was he attracted by Epicurus's method as a means of overcoming his own natural scepticism? All these factors may have weighed with him. In 1628 he was still asserting, to both Peiresc and Mersenne, that he was of a sceptical turn of mind, but on one of these occasions he was referring to astrology and so probably meant no more than that he was intellectually cautious to a fault and found it difficult to convince himself rationally of the truth of any proposition. Such a scepticism would not be the same as Pyrrhonic doubt, content with an exact equilibrium of pro and con; it would rather be an inhibiting excess of caution, to be overcome by intellectual effort and courage. In Epicurus's ‘Canons’ lay a means of acquiring a reasonable degree of certainty, or at least the means of making possible an advance in philosophic inquiry beyond one's starting point. This is the attitude which Gassendi eventually reached, as is amply shown by the Syntagma philosophicum; it is the attitude of mind which has since become general in the scientific world, where theories which no one would claim as ultimate are nevertheless used as working hypotheses.

Gassendi's friends were from the first acquainted with his plans and Beeckmann, going straight to the heart of things, was anxious that he should tackle at once the problem of how sensitive organisms can be formed from insensitive atoms.² Neither of the two philosophers was worried by the religious significance of such an inquiry; at least neither mentioned it. It was indeed to Mersenne, the author of l'Impiété des déistes, that Beeckmann addressed his inquiry. Both he and Gassendi were prepared to take elasticity in bodies as the starting point in an attempt to proceed from the insensitive to the sensitive.

Gassendi's plan grew in scope as he worked upon it. By 1631 he intended to put into his book all that could be learned on the life and thought of Epicurus; he was planning a work of scholarship rather than of science. The first part was to be a life of the philosopher and a defence of his character. This was to be followed by the Physics of Epicurus. The Physics was to contain first an account of Epicurus's views on the nature of things in general: the atoms and their properties, motion, space, the existence of God, the existence (or rather non-existence) of demons. The second part of the Physics was to deal with the origin and structure of the world, the existence or non-existence of a Providence, the end of the world and the existence of innumerable other worlds. The third part was to deal with the heavens, the stars, their motion and whether they exercise an influence on human affairs. And the last book was to deal with the Earth, with animate and inanimate beings on the Earth, the generation, nutrition and reproduction of animals, the senses; the soul or mind, its seat and functions, the appetites, animal motions, sleep, health and sickness and the immortality of the soul. A final section, on Epicurean moral philosophy, was not yet planned.

The various chapters were sent round to Gassendi's friends in manuscript form as they were written, and were read and argued about in an active philosophical correspondence. The work progressed slowly because of interruptions, occasioned by Gassendi's ecclesiastical duties and his numerous journeys. Sometimes the interruptions were of long duration, from 1637 to 1641 for example. In 1647 Gassendi allowed the first part to appear under the title De vita et moribus Epicuri libri octo³ and in 1649 he edited with long philological and philosophical commentaries drawn from his voluminous notes the tenth book of Diogenes Laertius, which deals with Epicurus. His systematic treatment of the subject was as yet known only to the friends to whom he had communicated his manuscript or summaries of it.

A certain amount of opposition and doubt was expressed by his friends. In 1632 Campanella wrote to him announcing his Atheismus triumphatus, which sets Campanella's own picture of a world permeated with intelligence beside that described by Lucretius from which design and purpose are excluded. Gassendi replied that there were indeed aspects of Epicurus's philosophy which he would have to refute, but that he should not for that reason fail to give a complete and impartial account of it. Mersenne did not think atomism could be made acceptable to religion, nor could he accept as conceivable an atom extended in space and at the same time indivisible.⁴ He had however already expressed his approval of Gassendi's Apology, which he had read in manuscript.⁵

Chapelain was worried both by the general idea of a defence of Epicurus⁶ and by what seemed to him a contradiction affecting the whole system. If the atoms were to replace the old idea of matter, how could they at the same time be the cause of motion? ‘Matter’ was something essentially inert. Gassendi replied that the atoms are always in motion, that motion is one of their properties: his conception of the atoms was essentially ‘dynamic’, though he did not use the term. While making motion essential to the atoms, he was however careful to point out to Chapelain that he considered Epicurus to be in error for having assumed the existence of eternal atoms eternally in motion. God created the atoms and directed their motion according to his own design; all their movements are therefore the expression of God's providence.

Indefatigably Gassendi strove in his correspondence to show his friends how the difficulties of Epicurus's system could be removed. Epicurus assumes an infinite number of atoms in an infinite space. If that were so, God's providence would not be necessary in order to explain the present appearance of things, as an infinite number of atoms, moving eternally in an infinite space would at some time or other, in some place or other, actualize every possible combination of themselves and there would be no problem to solve in explaining why the present constitution of things as we see them has come about: it would merely be one of an endless series of possible combinations of atoms. Gassendi's reply was that God alone is absolutely infinite; Epicurus was therefore wrong in postulating an infinite number of atoms.⁷

In order to put his answer to Epicurus on a rational basis, he had to be prepared to prove at least the existence of God, and not be content with the authority of religion as sufficient grounds for affirming it, and indeed, in the years following 1631 he showed himself more and more ready to admit the importance of reasoned argument as against unquestioning faith. In 1636 he was prepared to prove the existence of God, God's providence and the immortality of the soul by reason,⁸ and in 1642, in his controversy with Descartes, he had his own proofs to offer as an alternative to his adversary's.

So far, such objections as had been made against Gassendi's Epicureanism had been made by personal friends. Descartes indulged in harder hitting, but had no desire to cause his adversary any trouble with the religious authorities; the argument between him and Gassendi was purely philosophical. That was not the case with J.-B. Morin, who declared publicly that Gassendi was fit to be burnt at the stake. Morin was a teacher of the old school and an astrologer. He took up the cudgels for Aristotle against Etienne de Claves in 1624 and in 1643 published a refutation of Copernicus. A reply by Gassendi in the same year, published without the author's consent in 1649, started a violent quarrel between the two and it was in Morin's Dissertatio de atomis et vacuo contra Gassendi philosophiam Epicuream in 1650 that the menace of the stake occurred. Bernier continued the argument and succeeded in presenting Morin in a ridiculous light.⁹ No one in authority took any notice of Morin as far as one can make out, and it was not until long after Gassendi's death in 1655 that it was again suggested that Gassendi's teaching was dangerous for the faith, by the Cartesian theologian Antoine Arnauld. By that time (1692)¹⁰ the atmosphere had changed and Cartesian habits of thought had made possible interpretations of Gassendi's ideas which Gassendi probably never even dreamed of. Gassendi's Epicureanism was framed at a time when scholastic theology was scarcely challenged and was taken for granted in its own domain; it was Cartesianism itself, with its ruthless simplification of current ideas, which was to cut away that framework and leave the picture almost as Epicurus had originally painted it.

Apart from Lucretius himself, whose De rerum natura was always readily available and widely read, Gassendi seems to have had few competitors as an exponent of Epicurean atomism. Descartes was developing a corpuscular physics, but his particles of the first, second and third elements were not atoms; they were mere parts of a continuum and were divisible to infinity. It is true that at Pavia, a Frenchman by birth, Jean Chrysostome Magnen, was professing an atomic theory taken from Democritus, and that his lectures were published, but there is no evidence of his having had many readers in France.¹¹ One can also mention an abortive effort of two Frenchmen, Jean Bitaud and Etienne de Claves to defend in public a certain number of theses (one of them being a clear statement of atomism) in Paris in 1624. The Parlement intervened at the request of the Sorbonne and drove the two disputants out of the confines of its jurisdiction. It was on this occasion that attacks on the ‘ancient and approved author’—meaning Aristotle—were forbidden on pain of death; the Aristotelian professors of the University of Paris had claimed and obtained the protection of the civil authorities. As for Bitaud's and Claves's claim that ‘all things are composed of indivisible atoms’ it was condemned by the Sorbonne as ‘false, audacious and contrary to the faith’. Their statement of the principle is dogmatic enough, but they do not seem to have developed it systematically. They were interested in chemistry and not mechanics, to the point of being suspected by Peiresc of seeking in chemistry the revelation of all nature's secrets, and though they were sufficiently scientific in their attitude for us to call them ‘chemists’ rather than ‘alchemists’, they were not, of course, in a position to make a systematic application of the atomic theory to chemistry; they were still at grips with the five ‘elements’: water, earth, salt, sulphur and mercury, which were for them the component parts of all ‘mixed’ substances (theses nos. IV to X). However one looks upon it, they cannot be thought of as serious rivals of Gassendi, who, be it said by the way, seems not to have been in contact with them.

When Gassendi died on 9 November 1655 he was still engaged in putting his notes in order under the title Syntagma philosophicum. In 1658 the work was published by his literary executors in two volumes at the head of his complete works. Such parts as were still not written up in their final form were printed from earlier drafts dating from 1636-45. The Syntagma is the most complete and systematic exposition which Gassendi made of his teaching, and while it follows more or less the author's original plan (1631) for an account of Epicurus's opinions, it does not limit itself to them, but on the other hand discusses other ancient and contemporary theories relating to each question under discussion. It is indeed an account of Epicurean atomism presented in the light of seventeenth-century speculation.

The Syntagma begins with a discussion of philosophical method and continues through ‘physics’ (physics, biology and psychology) to morals. The first part, the Institutio logica tries to overcome the sort of scepticism which makes philosophy impossible and replace it by a ‘prudent confidence’ in being able to attain to truth, holding the balance evenly between reason and experience, accepting the axioms and the law of contradiction as limits beyond which the necessity of proving first principles need not be pushed and contending that to know the properties or operations of a thing is to know the thing itself. Our ideas come to us through our senses; there are no innate ideas. All the ideas we receive through our senses are singular or particular, not general; it is the mind that makes general ideas out of singular or particular ideas. But ideas can also be communicated to us by other people, so that we can say that our ideas come to us from two sources, (1) our own experience, and (2) another's teaching. A good philosophical method consists in discovering hidden relations between things, in interpreting these relations correctly and in expounding their explanation clearly.

The second part of the Syntagma, that is to say the Physica, begins with a discussion of the nature of things followed by a discussion of the causes of things. In discussing the nature of things, Gassendi deals first with the four categories of being which he calls space, time, substance and accident. Space and time are not primary substances, nor are they ideas, nor are they modes of a primary substance, nor are they mere fictions: they are categories of being. One can summarize the foregoing by saying that according to Gassendi the things which are and which we can know by experience are accidents of a primary substance existing in temporal and spatial relations with each other. Accident alone, substance alone, time alone, space alone cannot be objects of experimental knowledge; they can only be known as part of a complex of all four. The term ‘substance’ then disappears from Gassendi's discussions and is replaced by the term ‘matter’. ‘Matter’ is that which is permanent under the ceaseless change and variety we see in things; it is the matrix from which all things come and to which they all return. It is not merely an indeterminate something, capable of receiving forms and qualities, as was taught in the schools. Such a being would be nothing and nothing could come from it. No purpose is served, on the other hand, by imagining four primary elements, fire, air, water and earth, because the immense variety we see in nature cannot be explained by combinations of only four elements. The most satisfactory theory is that of the atomists Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius. The atoms can be imagined by analogy with the motes one sees in a ray of sunlight. From their innumerable combinations come all things with all their properties, which are the properties of matter. We cannot see the atoms, but we can determine their characteristics by reasoning. They must be indestructible, indivisible, solid; they must have size, however minute they be. Their essence cannot be mere extension, as Descartes says, otherwise nothing could be produced from them. They must be indivisible, because if matter was infinitely divisible there would be as many parts in a grain of sand as in a mountain. They must be very (though not infinitely) varied in shape in order to explain the great variety we see in things, and there must be a finite number of atoms and not an infinite number of each shape as Lucretius says. The atoms must have weight and they must have a tendency to movement or action by their nature. Repose is a mere illusion; everything is constantly changing, although some things change very slowly. Where the atoms are not, there is vacuum, otherwise movement would be impossible, as can be shown by reasoning and proved by experiments such as the dissolution of salt in water or the compression of air.

After discussing the nature of things, Gassendi deals with the causes of things. He distinguishes the first cause and the secondary causes. The first cause of all things is God and the existence of God must therefore be established first and foremost. For Gassendi the existence of God is proved by our having the idea of him in our minds and by the evidence of harmony and order in the universe. Of these two proofs the first is drawn from the second, so that the one great proof of the existence of God is the evidence of harmony and order in the universe. Lucretius is wrong therefore in giving fear as the source of our idea of God; we do not fear God in times of danger, we turn to him for help. The idea of God is not an innate idea, but on the other hand it does not come entirely from experience. There is in the mind a predisposition to know God, so that we readily believe what we are told about him, and form the idea of him spontaneously when we behold the harmony of nature and its laws. To say with Lucretius that the world needs no cause is unreasonable. A prosperous state presupposes a good ruler, a magnificent palace presupposes a clever architect; by analogy the world presupposes God. God must be distinct from the world and must exist necessarily or by himself. We cannot conceive his nature because our senses give us no help: he can be thought of as the reason for all things and as perfection, but no relative quality can be attributed to him. He must be intelligent because he is the cause of an intelligible effect; he can have nothing in common with matter because matter is limited, composite, divisible, changeable, corruptible. He is known by the intellect and not by the imagination, and as our language is never devoid of imaginative content it can never correspond with his nature. Considered in himself, or as a substance, his attributes are unity, eternity, immensity (understood as a quality and not as an extent of space). Considered as the intelligent cause of all things he is omniscient, omnipotent, good, free, wise and blessed. In the world his intelligence and activity are seen, for example, in the regularity of the crystals of which minerals are composed, in the wonders of the bodies of animals, in the return of the seasons. It is not reasonable to attribute these marvels to chance. Creation is incomprehensible, but is a fact none the less. Before the creation God was an active intelligence contemplating his own perfections; in the creation his goodness radiated outside himself for his own glory alone. Nothing thereby was added to his being because he is sufficient unto himself: creation is the expression of God's goodness. Lucretius was so preoccupied with the sight of evil, that he failed to understand that life is good (or rather a good, not an evil) and that it is better to be, than not to be, alive.

Providence in general is not inconceivable because for God to care for his creation is surely a perfection in him. Without it he would not be all perfect. Also, as action is more perfect than contemplation, he would not be all perfect if he were not active. A posteriori his providence can be proved by the order and harmony of the universe. Chance is no explanation of order and harmony. The idea of chance is merely an expression of our ignorance. God has a special providence for man, the most perfect of his creations. To say with Lucretius that God's felicity would be deranged thereby is sheer anthropomorphism, and to ask why there are dangerous animals in the world, and why the virtuous suffer, is to fail to see that God allows the causes he has created to act independently of himself. He allows man the liberty to do evil, but he gives him the strength to do good, and the fact that the virtuous suffer is a proof of the immortality of man's soul because the balance must be redressed in a future life.

The secondary causes of things can be reduced to one, that is to say motion. Motion according to Lucretius is the passage of a body from one place to another. The principle of motion is the atoms themselves which are naturally active and always active. When they meet an obstacle their effort is not destroyed, it continues to be exercised. Differences of movement are explainable by the different shapes of the atoms, for their motion is more or less hindered by their shape. The principle of motion is in bodies. There is no point in making a distinction between motion and what moves, as the Aristotelians do, nor is Aristotle's way of explaining motion by the desire of the world to turn towards God any more than the product of his imagination. The principle of motion is in bodies and especially in the most active of the atoms, the ‘flower of matter’ so to speak, the part that is usually called ‘form’ in the schools. Gravity is a movement of one body towards another body to be understood by analogy with the action of the magnet. One must suppose an emanation of particles (species) from one body (the earth, say) which operate on another body (a stone, say) either by squeezing from the sides, as Descartes suggests, or (and this Gassendi would prefer to believe) one can imagine a sort of feeling in the stone in response to an impression carried to it by the emanation of species from the earth, the species themselves being very fine and subtle atoms such as the sentient faculties are made of. This hylopsychistic theory Gassendi develops at length and with obvious affection. It is the first of a whole series of explanations in which he gives preference to hylopsychistic over mechanistic theories, throughout the whole of his physics and biology. The similarity with Maignan is too obvious to need to be stressed. The principle of latent sensitivity diffused throughout the whole of nature and differing only in degree from our own, is essential to the teaching of both authors, and in this respect they carry on the traditions of the philosophers of the Italian renaissance, and especially Telesio, just as Bacon had done in England. Later in this same book (book V of Section I), Gassendi compares the earth with a living creature calling back to itself the parts that become detached from it, as though by a vague sense of self-preservation, and here again his acquaintance Campanella, who had brought with him into France the ideas of sixteenth-century Italy, would certainly have approved, had he lived to read the Syntagma, though he was at variance with Gassendi on most other questions and particularly that of the atoms themselves. Gassendi develops the theory tentatively and as a hypothesis, but there can be no doubt that he was attracted by it, and it is indeed an attractive notion, although science has resolutely turned its back upon it ever since the seventeenth century.

Qualities can be reduced to the arrangement of the parts of a thing. ‘Form’ is a useless word if it does not have the same meaning. All qualitative differences are differences of quantity or arrangement. The secondary qualities, such as heat and cold or colours, are not in things nor in us: for secondary qualities to exist, species must pass from the thing into a sense organ and be perceived.

Motive force is the resultant of all the movements of the atoms in a body. The more active atoms drag along the more sluggish and force them into positions suitable to their own rapid movement. The more sluggish atoms become fixed in such positions and thus certain movements of the body become ‘habitual’.

The generation or coming into being of things is not caused, as the Aristotelians say, by a ‘form’ coming into ‘matter’, nor, on the other hand, is the problem of generation a false problem, as Epicurus says. According to Epicurus there is no idea of the whole anterior to the idea of the parts and it is obvious that the whole will act in conformity with the arrangement and movement of the atoms which compose it. Gassendi rejects the idea that the whole is merely the sum of the parts, and is not impressed by Lucretius's examples of eyes without sight, genital organs in a sterile mule, rudimentary teats in the male or by the fact that one organ can perform the functions of another organ. He has no doubts about the evidence of design or purpose in the world. He is not put off by the existence of monstrosities and thinks they are greatly exaggerated anyway and are merely relative imperfections about which our limited intelligence has no right to judge. Design is for him perfectly apparent in everything and if some organs exist before their functions, they do not exist before the idea of their functions in the mind of the creator. His application of the idea of design leads in the direction of hylopsychism rather than of mechanism. Everything that exists develops from a kind of semen. Gassendi not only rejects the idea of plants and animals being produced by spontaneous generation from ‘dead’ matter, he suggests that God arranged the atoms at the beginning in the form of ‘seeds’ and that metals, plants and animals grow by means of atoms collecting round the original semen under the influence of formative principles which he compares with little prudent and industrious artisans. Or God may have placed the atoms originally in such a position that the ‘seeds’ would be formed by the atoms' own natural motion. None of this is dogmatically stated and Gassendi frankly admits his ignorance on the subject, but his hypothesis carries him the whole way towards universal animism.

The third section of the Physica begins with a long historical account of the doctrine of the Anima Mundi, which Gassendi finally rejects, except as a way of referring figuratively to God, or of referring to the heat of the sun, or of expressing the principle of unity of the whole world, and provided that no similarity is implied between such a Soul of the World and the souls of beasts and men. The use of the term in the last of these three senses Gassendi himself finds attractive, and he is prepared to say that the world has a soul sui generis, as one might say that minerals have a soul sui generis, suited, that is to say, to their peculiar operations. Next comes a review of the opinions expressed by the ancients for and against the eternity of the world, and in this dispute Gassendi sides first with the ancient Atomists against the ancient Academicians, preferring, that is to say, the theory of a world formed from eternal matter to the theory of an eternal world, but then he sides with the Church against the ancient Atomists and decides in favour of the creation of the world from nothing. His descriptions of minerals need not detain us, nor what he has to say about rain, thunder, the rainbow and other ‘meteors’, but then he returns to the need for a ‘formative’ or ‘seminal’ agent in stones, especially precious stones and the magnet, and the magnet becomes the subject of a discussion concerning a sort of sensation in metals, with references taking us back to Cardano and Pliny. Cardano wrote of iron's ‘appetite’ for the magnet, and Pliny of the magnet's ‘sense’ by which it perceives the iron and the ‘hands’ by which it draws the iron towards itself. Of the plants Gassendi uses the word ‘soul’ because their functions allow of its use. Their roots find food, their leaves turn to the light; creepers wind round sticks, the sensitive plant reacts to touch. There is a corporeal soul in plants, like a spirit or flame, very active and industrious and spread out throughout the plant. This spirit wilts if it is deprived of food; it is exhaled if it becomes too hot; it governs the growth of the plant. But again Gassendi proceeds warily and admits that we can only stammer (balbutiendo solum et quatenus licet) in dealing with these matters, and Bernier adds in his analysis¹² that Gassendi is far from having given a clear idea of the soul of plants, although he has penetrated deeper into the subject than any other natural philosopher.

Gassendi's section on animals begins with a classification followed by a discussion on the nature of the soul in animals. He gives first an account of the opinions of the ancient philosophers, then examines the solutions worthy of consideration and finally gives his own opinion. The soul of animals is known by the understanding, in an abstract manner, from its functions. It must be a real principle and not just a proportion or symmetry of the parts of the body, for in such a proportion or symmetry there would be no source of activity. It must be a contexture of very fine and mobile particles like those of heat, moving in the cavities and passages of the body. Heat is its instrument and it is inseparable from heat; it is of an igneous nature. It comes into the body in the semen.

The following sections on the formation of the foetus, nutrition and the circulation of the blood show Gassendi abreast of contemporary theory, but he was not leading the way by any means and was prepared to believe stories of men with goats' heads and the like due to cross-breeding.

In discussing sensation he begins again from the magnet and the piece of iron. Iron perceives the magnet and a stone does not; a goat perceives a branch of an ash tree and a fox does not. It can be said that iron has a ‘phantasm’ or ‘imagination’ of the magnet as something which suits it, provided that too much meaning is not read into the terms ‘phantasm’ and ‘imagination’, but only such as is fitting to the operations of iron and the magnet.

Sensation is not merely passive: it is an ‘immanent’ not a ‘transitive’ motion and consists of the self-motion of the atoms. It does not consist merely in receiving the species emanating from an object but also in apprehending them and striving towards their source. The species press upon the sense organ and their pressure is transmitted to the brain, but the sensation is in the organ as well as in the brain, an opinion Gassendi affirms while being well aware of what is said of people who lose a limb and can still imagine pain in it. The sensitive part of the soul is composed of very fine particles and is divided into parts corresponding to the various senses, the atoms of each part being variously shaped and variously mobile so that they move through different passages in the body according to their shape and mobility. Lucretius teaches that insensitive atoms combine to form sensitive things, and points to the worms which appear in dunghills and the grass which is assimilated to the substance of the cow as experimental proof, and Gassendi here seems prepared to go all the way with him and find the source of sensation in a certain ordering of the atoms. But he attempts to make sensibility fade off into insensibility by minute stages and would like to see in the way the flames devour a piece of wood a sort of rudimentary feeling of hunger. Similarly, he argues, the roots of a plant must have something like taste and the rain must give a sort of pleasure to plants. The sensitive plant has a sort of touch and oysters and worms slightly more. But though one can distinguish these rudimentary forms of sensation as various degrees of the same power, yet the original problem of how insensible atoms begin to feel remains and is above human understanding. For that matter, it is equally difficult to explain how atoms, which are not hot, make hot things, and how atoms, which are not white, make white things. We must conclude that a body composed of atoms has properties which the individual atoms do not have.

When he comes to discuss the Internal Sense, Gassendi is willing to start from a scholastic distinction between the Imagination, attributed to both beast and man alike, and the Understanding, reserved for man alone, but he is careful to say that, apart from what religion teaches, very little is certain concerning this distinction. He refuses to follow the schoolmen when they divide up the Internal Sense into various faculties, such as those of judging, cogitating, remembering, and is content with a sensus communis, in the brain, to which all the sense organs are connected by the nerves. The differences between sensation and imagination are, firstly, that the object of sensation must be present, whereas the object of imagination may be absent, and, secondly, that sensation implies no comparison between impressions, whereas imagination does. These are not however essential differences. When the impression is made by an absent object, it is made by means of a trace left previously by the spirits on the soft substance of the brain. Sometimes these traces, or ‘vestiges’, become confused, so that one can imagine eyes in the middle of a man's shoulders, for instance, but no new factor is involved in such fantasies. The Internal Sense can put together two images and can perceive their suitability or unsuitability to each other. In the beasts this process is implicit; in man it is explicit, because man enjoys the power of reflection and the use of language. A beast's imagination contains no universal ideas, but merely a collection of particular apprehensions. A beast has no apprehension representing all men, but it has a collective apprehension representing many men and this collective apprehension representing many men, is distinct from one representing, say, many sticks. In a dog's imagination a particular apprehension representing a particular man can appear beside the collective apprehension representing many men and suffice for a judgment. A dog has no abstract ideas and no use of speech, so he cannot think or say, ‘This man is my master’, but he can put together the concrete apprehensions man—master and the verb to be seems to be potentially present. Brutes can therefore reason in a certain manner called ‘sensitive reasoning’, which is used by men also in certain cases, though man is also capable of intellectual reasoning. Brutes can make inferences: a dog runs away when he sees a man pick up a stone, a fox turns back when he hears water running under the ice; a swallow wets its wings in order to mould the clay of its nest; an ass suffers blows rather than be driven over a cliff. The brute is not only able to unite and separate simple apprehensions according to their suitability or unsuitability to each other; it can also link each one with a third or separate each one from a third, and this is argumentation.

The brute's Imagination can be said to exist from the moment it receives its first sense impressions. These first sense impressions are those of pleasure and pain, from which the brute proceeds by experience to the knowledge of the useful and the noxious. The brute also learns by example and from the teaching of its parents, as when the parent birds teach their young to fear and flee from men. And knowledge is also transmitted to them by the semen, as in the case of the silkworm which knows how to spin its cocoon without instruction.

In man the Intellect (or Understanding or Rational Soul) is incorporeal and is created by God. The Intellect differs from the Imagination in that man knows things by reasoning, such as the size of the sun, which it would be impossible to know by imagination. The Intellect differs too in that it knows itself and is conscious that it knows what it knows. It differs thirdly in that it has abstract ideas as its object; the Imagination can contain a collective apprehension such as man, but it cannot contain an abstract and universal idea such as humanity. And fourthly it differs in that it comprehends not only corporeal things (which it is able to do by virtue of being a superior faculty to the Imagination and so possessed of all the powers of the Imagination ‘eminently’) but also incorporeal things. It knows incorporeal things positively, only with the aid of corporeal images, it is true, but it knows them negatively, by reasoning as (being incorporeal) and abstractedly. At any rate it knows them sufficiently to be sure of their existence. The imagination represents something corporeal, the intellect understands something incorporeal. But the intellect, when associated with the body, proceeds only by stages, from experience. Separate from the body it comprehends immediately by intuition, but when it is associated with the body it cannot function without the brain; that is why illness destroys knowledge by obliterating the traces in the brain left by previous experience. The intellect agrees with the axioms as soon as it is acquainted with them, not because of any immediate connection between the intellect and the truth, but because the axioms are in accordance with any man's previous experience. It understands general ideas by means of the particular apprehensions of the Imagination. The best method of reasoning, in the search for new truths, is the ‘analytical’ method, which starts from experience and proceeds from effects to causes, although it may well be true that the ‘synthetic’ method, typified by the syllogisms of scholastic logic, provides a useful means of demonstrating truths already attained.

The Intellect is the same in all men by nature, but differences and inequalities arise from different temperaments and especially different temperaments of the brain. The temperament of the brain which is most favourable to the Intellect is one which is neither too hot nor too cold, neither too dry nor too humid, but on the hot, dry side rather than the cold, humid side, not too rare nor too dense, but on the rare rather than the dense side.

The Will or ‘Reasonable Appetite’, whose seat is the same as that of the Intellect and the Imagination, differs from the ‘Sensitive Appetite’, or Passion, as the Intellect differs from the Imagination. The Will uses the Passions as the Intellect uses the Imagination. Passion is an agitation of the soul caused by the anticipation of something advantageous or noxious, but the Will can love and pursue the good for its own sake.

Morals is the science, or rather the art, of living according to virtue and of turning other men's will towards the virtuous. Pleasure and pain are the sources of men's actions, even though at first sight this does not seem to be so, as when men sacrifice themselves for their children or for their country. Everybody's aim is supreme happiness, and though supreme happiness cannot be attained on earth, a relative felicity can be achieved. According to some (Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, Plato) it is to be found in knowledge, which frees us from passion. According to others (Zeno and the Stoics) it is to be achieved by virtue. According to Aristippus and the Cyrenaics it is to be found in the fleeting pleasures of the body, and Epicurus is often accused of holding the same opinion, but such an accusation comes from ignorance and prejudice. Epicurus begins from the fact that every living thing seeks pleasure and flees from pain. Pleasure can be pleasure of the body or pleasure of the mind and pleasure of the mind is superior to pleasure of the body. Tranquillity of mind and health of body are the highest pleasures each of its own kind, and the Epicurean term voluptas means only absence of agitation in the mind and absence of pain in the body. The way to it is through virtue.

For Gassendi this means firstly meditation upon the nature of God so as to become enamoured of his perfections and to seek to please him, and meditation upon death so that death becomes, not a source of fear, but an anticipation of greater happiness. Secondly it means the making full use of the present, because constant temporizing results in making of oneself the slave of the future. Thirdly it means the schooling of oneself in wisdom, which alone can give us the true discernment of what is good for us, in fortitude, which removes the fear of death and enables us to brave misfortune, in justice, without which quiet of mind is impossible. These precepts Gassendi draws from Epicurus, making only the changes necessary to adapt them to his Christian point of view. For instance, when he speaks of the nature of God, or rather the gods, Epicurus is concerned only with getting rid of a source of fear and disquiet of mind, whereas Gassendi discourses on the positive idea of God's perfections. But Gassendi claims Aristotle also as his ally and quotes the Aristotelian definition of virtue: the elective habit of choosing the happy mean determined by reason and prudence.

Gassendi's attitude is that of a teacher whose business it is to show his disciples how to live in society, and especially the aristocratic society of his time, in a post of command. The virtues he demands are fortitude (which includes firmness of mind and constancy), temperance (which includes modesty, chastity, long-sufferance, clemency and humility), and justice. Justice is based on Right, and Right is derived from social utility. Without society there is no law and no right. Right presupposes a contract, but is ‘natural’ in the sense that it is natural to seek the best way of safeguarding one's interest.

Without freedom of the will there is neither virtue nor vice. But free will does not mean unmotivated choice. As long as the understanding fails to discern the truth, the will hesitates, and similarly the will suspends its action while the understanding considers first one side and then the other of a question. Freedom of the will is this capacity to suspend its action. Once the evidence is clear, the will acts in accordance with it. It is not possible to know the good (the advantageous) and not pursue it, but one's knowledge of the good may be destroyed by drunkenness or passion. In that case, however, one's responsibility for one's actions is not removed, as one is at liberty not to get drunk and not to give way to passion. The complete determinism of Democritus has the advantage, as against the doctrine of free will, of emphasizing the order and connectedness of all the facts of nature, but this system cannot account for man's consciousness of his own liberty. Epicurus attempts to explain why he is free to move backwards and forwards at the bidding of his will by supposing that atoms sometimes follow a curved path instead of a straight one, but such a curved path would be just as much determined by fate as a straight one. And there Gassendi leaves the matter; he is content to accept the regularity of nature's operations on the one hand and the existence of free agents on the other. He was not faced, as Leibniz was to be faced, by the knowledge that no energy is ever lost and no energy is ever gained in any operation of nature and was not therefore obliged, as was his successor, to imagine two entirely separate explanations for each event that happens in the world, the one in terms of beginnings and the other in terms of ends, the one in terms of efficient causes and the other in terms of final causes, the one entirely mechanistic, and the other entirely teleological. Gassendi's world was still one world and for him the world has only one face and that face turned towards man. For him as for Maignan the material and the psychical are mingled intimately together except at the very bottom and the very top of the scale of creation.

Notes

1. ‘Ego tanto viro paravi Apologiam, destinato ipsius doctrinae volumine integro, quod Paradoxicarum Exercitationum adversus Aristoteleos volumini, cujus ideam, primumque librum feci jam juris publici, attexatur.’ (Letter to Du Puy, Opera, vi, p. 11; cf. B. Rochot, Les Travaux de Gassendi sur Epicure et sur l'atomisme, Paris, 1944, p. 31). Gassendi's close friend Peiresc (H. Fabri de) said explicitly (according to Morhof's Polyhistor philosophicus, l. 1, cap. xii, § 3) that the work on Epicurus was a continuation of the campaign: ‘Caeteros 5 libros, nimirium in libros Physicorum, de corpore simplici, de mixtis, in Metaphysicam et moralem Aristotelis Philosophiam, teste Honorato Fabri, ex concilio amicorum suppressit. Quam telam suam cum non posset absolvere, et vituperare Aristotelem amplius sine dedecore, ad alterum extremum delapsus, Epicurum laudare, ejusque Philosophiam illustrare coepit.’ (Lübeck, 1708, 1714, ii, p. 68; cf. Rochot, op. cit., p. 28.)

2. Rochot, ibid., p. 38.

3. Published at Lyons. Cf. below, p. 138. [Not excerpted.]

4. Mersenne to Gassendi, 1 Jan. 1636.

5. In his Preludes, 1634, p. 66, see R. Lenoble, Mersenne, Paris, 1943, pp. 419-20, and Rochot, op. cit., p. 74 n.

6. To Gassendi, 7 Dec. 1640, Rochot, op. cit., p. 104.

7. To the comte d'Alais, 24 Oct., 31 Oct., 7 Nov., 14 Nov. 1742; cf. Rochot, op. cit., pp. 95-6. Gassendi considered it possible to accept ‘imaginary’ infinite space(s), but not an infinite number of atoms: ‘Si quidem et nostri [i.e. theologians] plerumque admittunt esse ultra Mundum infinita spatia quae Imaginaria appellant, et in quibus fatentur Deum posse condere innumeros Mundos: non perinde tamen tolerari potest infinitudo corporum.’ (To the comte d'Alais, 7 Nov. 1642, Opera, vi, p. 158.)

8. Cf. R. Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit, p. 498.

9. Cf. R. Pintard, op. cit., p. 386; B. Rochot, op. cit., p. 16.

10. Cf. above, p. 16. [Not excerpted.]

11. J. C. Magnen was born at Luxeuil and studied at Dôle. He became professor of medicine and philosophy at the university of Pavia. He published his Democritus reviviscens sive de Atomis. Addita est vita Democriti at Pavia in 1646 (Leyden, 1648; The Hague, 1658; London, 1688).

12. Abrégé de la philosophie de M. Gassendi, Lyons, 1678, V, p. 395.