GASSENDI (GASSEND), PIERRE (b. Champtercier, France, 22 January 1592; d. Paris, France, 24 October 1655), philosophy, astronomy, scholarship.

In this undertaking Gassendi may simply have become aware of his own ambiguities.3 A thorough study of the philosophical manuscripts preserved at Carpentras, Tours, and the Laurentian Library, and also of the published works, which repeat and correct each other (Disquisitio, 1644; Animadversiones, 1649; and the posthumous Syntagma, 1658), reveals neither the duplicity nor the denial suspected by Pintard4 but rather an effort to bring the Epicurean elements, accompanied by their materialist tendency, together with the traditional Christian elements. The two had previously been juxtaposed in Gassendi's writings without being mingled—but not without contradiction. This became evident after the beginning of the dispute with Descartes in 1641 and in the new drafts of the Epicurean works first undertaken in 1642. The factors that Gassendi emphasized to achieve a synthesis between Epicureanism and Christianity were nominalism, finality, and vitalistic or chemical analogies. A discussion of these factors is required before asking whether Gassendi felt that Descartes's reproaches really hit their target.

Nominalism had been born in a Christian atmosphere, where it remained a minority position, inspired by awareness of the limits of human understanding (modulus intellectionis). Feeble beings that they are, men (homonciones) cannot reach essential truth but only appearances, or phenomena, conditioned by laws that they did not make and cannot understand. God established these laws in order that things might endure and satisfy the needs of living creatures. Man establishes a system of signs, of names, which permits him to identify things perceived and to communicate with other men. But the concepts thus formed are conventions, not universal propositions. The universal does not exist ontologically. God has given man a mind capable only of conceiving the universal as the result of repeated contacts between the senses and well-ordered material realities. In animals imagination and memory record the facts to be retained. In man the rational spirit enables him to combine these representations with a view to action, guided by coherent predictions and based on reflections that take time and that are true inferences and not intuitions of some reality beyond the reach of sensation. But there is an evident providential finality in the Creation thus interpreted, and it is further illustrated by the wonders of the universe, of which man is the consummation and the goal. Hence, final causes are the “Royal Way.” They demonstrate the existence of God. The view was opposed to that of Descartes; and Gassendi, incidentally, refuted the ontological argument on which Descartes relied in much the same way that Kant later did.

Gassendi held that the atoms were the first things created, not in infinite number, as Democritus had said, but in a number sufficient to create the finite universe we know. They are endowed with an unalterable (in French inamissible) movement propelling them without interference in all directions through the void. There is no swerving (no clinamen). The collisions that necessarily take place annul motion and result in the appearance of immobility. Collisions form molecules which are particles identifiable by several attributes. The homogeneous atomic particles for their part are endowed only with shape, resistance, minimum size, and a “weight” that is the effect of their elementary movement. Molecules combine in fewer ways than atoms to form sensible objects, possessing not powers, or internal qualities capable of activity, but mechanical forces. Various circumstances may liberate these forces in such a manner that impressions are made on other objects, notably the senses of living beings. At this level, other forces become effective—for example, chemical forces.5

The dynamism that is sometimes noticed in Gassendian physics, and that justifies the expression semina rerum (borrowed from Lucretius) to designate the atoms, was merely this accumulation of an energy potential, conceivable even in biology. For living bodies are subjected to the same laws as others. Life is composed of movements of the “flower of matter,” the animal soul, which in a way resembles Descartes's animal spirits and subtle matter. Science is thus relative to our needs, a view in which there was both sensationalism and pragmatism. Thus, Gassendi was not only a belated humanist but also a precursor of Locke, Condillac, and the positivists and empiricists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

These ideas contained the entire arsenal upon which future materialists could draw. Yet Gassendi had no thought of being a materialist in the later sense of d'Holbach or Marx. The clash with Descartes had revealed to him the way in which his works, still unpublished, could scandalize certain readers; his role as a priest led him to take this danger into account. But until then he had been able to conjoin faith with Epicureanism with as little fear as Galileo had earlier felt in juxtaposing Copernicus and the Bible.

Galileo had pointed out in his letter to the grand duchess of Florence (see below) that the Bible had originally been addressed to the early Jews in terms that they could understand, while Copernicus, for his part, had offered his work to the pope, and it was not at first thought heretical. By the same token, in Gassendi's view, God had the power to make the world from atoms, as the Epicureans held, and was equally able to