Seventeenth-century materialism: Gassendi and Hobbes
Seventeenth-century materialism: Gassendi and Hobbes
T.Sorell
In the English-speaking world Pierre Gassendi is probably best known as the
author of a set of Objections to Descartes’s Meditations. These Objections, the
fifth of seven sets collected by Mersenne, are relatively long and full, and
suggestive of a number of distinctively Gassendist doctrines—for example his
nominalism, his insistence on distinguishing mathematical objects from physical
ones, and his doubt whether we can know the natures of things, even our selves.
Perhaps more prominent than these doctrines, however, is a kind of materialism.
Gassendi adopts the ironic form of address ‘O Mind’ in challenging Descartes’s
claim that one’s nature has nothing to do with body. He insists that all ideas have
their source in the senses, and he sketches an account of perception that
dispenses with a role for a pure intellect but emphasizes the contribution of the
brain. In physics he was partial to explanation in terms of the motions of matter,
ultimately the motions of material atoms. These points suggest that Gassendi was
a mechanistic materialist of some kind, and they link him in intellectual history
with Hobbes, who proposed that physical as well as psychological phenomena
were nothing more than motions in different kinds of body.
The grounds for associating Gassendi and Hobbes are contextual as well as
textual. They both lived in Paris in the 1640s. They were close friends and active
in the circle of scientists, mathematicians and theologians round Mersenne. They
were both at odds, intellectually and personally, with Descartes. They read one
another’s manuscripts, apparently with approval. There are even supposed to be
important similarities of phrasing in their writings about morals and politics.
Gassendi wrote a tribute to Hobbes’s first published work, De Cive,and Hobbes
was reported in a letter as saying that Gassendi’s system was as big as Aristotle’s
but much truer.
Whatever the extent of the mutual admiration and influence, it did not produce
a particularly marked similarity of outlook except in psychology, where each
developed strongly materialistic lines of thought, and even in psychology the
match between their views is not perfect. Unlike Hobbes’s materialism,
Gassendi’s cannot be said to be wholehearted. He held that there was an
incorporeal as well as a corporeal or vegetative part of the soul, and he ascribed
to the incorporeal part cognitive operations that in some respects duplicated, and
in other respects surpassed, those of the corporeal part. Hobbes denied that there
were such things as incorporeal souls, and he would have doubted the
conceivability of an incorporeal part of the soul. His theory of knowledge
invoked no purely psychological capacities and he recognized no purely spiritual
entities. The different materialisms of Hobbes and Gassendi also fit into rather
different systems of philosophy. Both systems were motivated by a repudiation of
Aristotle and a desire to provide philosophical grounding for the new science of
the seventeenth century, but Gassendi’s provides that grounding in the form of a
theory attributed to, or at least inspired by, an ancient authority, while Hobbes’s
does not. The ancient authority in question was Epicurus. Probably Gassendi
revised Epicurean thought to a greater degree than he revived it; nevertheless, he
took himself to be engaged in a humanist enterprise of bringing back to life a
badly understood, unfairly maligned and long-discredited way of thinking.
Hobbes’s system was in no sense intended to rehabilitate traditional thought. It was
supposed to lay out the new elements of a new natural philosophy and an even
newer and largely Hobbesian civil philosophy.
INTRODUCTION
The different intellectual development of the two writers makes it surprising that
the philosophies of Gassendi and Hobbes converge as much as they do. Gassendi
was the younger of the two by about four years, born in Provence in 1592. At
Digne, Ruez and Aix he received a thorough scholastic education in
mathematics, philosophy and theology during which, at the age of 12, he began
to train for the priesthood. He was a very talented pupil, even something of a
child prodigy. At the age of 16 he was a teacher of rhetoric at Digne. He received
the doctorate in theology from Avignon six years later, and in 1616, when he
was 24, he won competitions for two chairs at the university of Aix, one in
theology and one in philosophy. He chose the chair in philosophy. Though his
career as a teacher was cut short when the university was transferred to the
control of the Jesuits in 1622, Gassendi was occupied for virtually the whole of his
working life with theological, philosophical, historical and scientific studies. He
conducted these to begin with as a member of the chapter, and eventually as
provost, of the cathedral at Digne, and at intervals under the patronage of
wealthy and powerful friends in Provence and Paris. By the time he came into
regular contact with Hobbes in the early 1640s he had already lectured and
written extensively about the whole of Aristotle’s philosophy, had carried out a
number of astronomical observations, as well as investigations in biology and
mechanics, had corresponded with and travelled to meet some eminent
Copernicans, had read widely in natural philosophy and had engaged in numerous
erudite researches concerning the lives and thought of Epicurus and other ancient
authorities. He had also worked on reconciling the scientific theories that he
admired with his Catholicism.
Hobbes did not have a comparable grounding in the sciences or philosophy.
Prior to 1629 or 1630 he is supposed to have been completely innocent of
Euclid. When he took up residence in Paris in 1640 he had a respectable
grounding in the classics but a still not very deep knowledge of the elements of
geometry, or the new astronomy or mechanics. He was over 40 before he took a
serious interest in natural science or its methods, and he was probably over 50
before he began to articulate a considered general philosophy of his own. He had
published a translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian Wars in
1628. He had completed a treatise on psychology, morals and politics shortly
before leaving England for Paris in 1640. He may have composed a fairly
substantial optical work in the late 1630s, and a socalled ‘short tract’ on first
principles in natural philosophy as early as 1630: the date of the one and the
authorship of the other are not entirely certain. But it was apparently after
arriving in Paris rather than before that Hobbes engaged in any concentrated
scientific research.
That he developed an interest in natural philosophy at all was probably a kind
of accident. For most of his life he was attached to the households of successive
Earls of Devonshire as tutor, travelling companion, secretary, confidant, political
adviser, keeper of accounts and, finally, elderly retainer. From 1608, when he
first entered the service of the Devonshires, to 1629, when he temporarily took
employment elsewhere, he seems not to have had scientific interests. At Oxford
he had received an arts degree. As tutor he gave instruction in rhetoric, logic and
morals. In his spare time he studied classical poetry and history. It was not until
he left the Devonshires and was employed for two years as the travelling
companion of a baronet’s son on the European Grand Tour that he happened to
come upon an open copy of Euclid in a gentleman’s study. From then on,
according to Aubrey’s biography, Hobbes was in love with geometry. On this
journey to the Continent also he is supposed to have stopped for some months in
Paris in 1629. It was then that he met Mersenne, according to the latter’s
correspondence, probably becoming acquainted with some of the scientific
researches of Mersenne’s circle.1 Another episode at about this time is supposed
to have made him curious about natural science. Either during the Grand Tour or
shortly afterwards Hobbes was present at a discussion of sense perception in
which it emerged that no one present was able to say what sense perception was.
His best scientific work—in optics—probably had its origins in thinking that was
prompted by this discussion.
After the Grand Tour Hobbes’s interest in science found outlets in England.
When he returned to the service of the Devonshires in 1631, he started to come
into frequent contact with a branch of his master’s family who lived at Welbeck,
near the Devonshire family home of Hardwick Hall. For the Welbeck
Cavendishes, who were headed by the Earl of Newcastle, he performed some of
the duties that he had been discharging for the Earls of Devonshire. He became
their adviser and agent and did other odd jobs. These Cavendishes had scientific
interests. The Earl of Newcastle is known to have sent Hobbes to London in the
early 1630s to find a copy of a book of Galileo’s. The Earl’s younger brother,
Charles, had an even greater interest in science, and acted as a kind of patron and
distributor of scientific writing, notably the writings of a scientist called Walter
Warner. Hobbes was one of those who gave his opinion of the writings that
Charles Cavendish circulated. Cavendish also had contacts with many
Continental scientists, including Mersenne and Descartes.
Hobbes accompanied the third Earl of Devonshire on another Grand Tour from
1634 to 1636. He probably met Galileo in Italy and once again saw Mersenne
when he passed through Paris. His activities in the 1630s, however, did not
provide him with a real scientific education, and it may seem surprising that
when he renewed his contact with Mersenne in the 1640s he should have been
treated as the equal of people whose knowledge of natural philosophy and
mathematics was far greater than his own. Perhaps his knowledge mattered less
than his enthusiasm. Hobbes shared with the intellectuals that he met in Paris a
profound admiration for Galileo, and a belief that deductive methods could be
applied to fields outside natural science. He was applying them himself in
psychology, ethics and politics, subjects that Mersenne especially was keen to
see placed on a scientific footing. Then, apart from what he had in common
intellectually with members of Mersenne’s circle, many of them found him an
agreeable personality.
It was one thing for Hobbes to be accepted as a full member of Mersenne’s
circle, however, and another for his views to be endorsed. His extreme
materialism could not be reconciled with orthodox theology; his views about the
necessity of subordinating the ecclesiastical to the secular power could not have
been accepted by members of the circle who were subject to the Catholic
authorities. Mersenne and Gassendi, who were both Catholic churchmen, needed
to keep their distance in matters of doctrine. Mersenne managed to do this while
at the same time acting as a publicist for Hobbes’s hypotheses in natural
philosophy and a promoter of his political treatise, De Cive. His method was to
be vague in identifying the author of the hypotheses, and discreet in his praise
for Hobbes’s civil philosophy. When Mersenne published any of Hobbes’s work
or reported it to correspondents, Hobbes was usually referred to merely as
‘l’Anglais’. At other times Mersenne exercised an influence from behind the
scenes. He encouraged the publication in 1647 of a second edition of Hobbes’s
political treatise, De Cive: the first, limited and anonymous printing had been a
success in Paris five years earlier. However, Sorbière, who saw the work through
the press, was instructed by Mersenne not to publish his own or Gassendi’s
letters praising the book. In Gassendi’s case, the need to keep Hobbes at arm’s
length was made urgent by the parallels between his and Hobbes’s responses to
the Meditations. It is also possible that during the 1640s Gassendi saw in
Hobbes’s writing precisely the combination of atheistic materialism and
determinism that a too sympathetic treatment of Epicurus might have committed
Gassendi himself to, and that, in order to avoid this, he strengthened the
theological ‘corrections’ to the doctrine.2
Though they were friends, then, and though their views coincided up to a
point, Hobbes and Gassendi also had some unsurprising doctrinal differences.
We shall see more of the differences to do with theology and materialism later.
But there were also others. They differed in important ways in their attitudes
toward the ancients. Gassendi was a critic of Aristotle throughout his intellectual
life and a critic also of the neo-Aristotelian doctrines of the scholastic curriculum.
In the preface to his first published work, Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversus
Aristoteleos, he says that he was disappointed that the philosophy that he was
taught brought him none of the freedom from vexation that writers such as
Cicero promised the subject could provide. Still, Gassendi did not believe that a
better overall philosophy was to be found in his own age, and those of his
contemporaries whom he did admire, such as Pierre Charron, made use of ancient
rather than modern doctrine to criticize Aristotle. In Charron’s case the ancient
doctrine employed was pyrrhonism. Gassendi followed Charron’s lead in his
lecture courses in the university of Aix. Pyrrhonist arguments were used in
criticism of the whole range of Aristotle’s philosophy, and the material for these
lectures was the basis in turn for the first volume of the Exercitationes, which
appeared in 1624. Book II of this work contained arguments suggesting that
science in Aristotle’s sense, that is, demonstrative knowledge of the necessity of
observed effects based on knowledge of the natures or essences of substances,
was beyond human capacities, while a more modest science, presupposing no
essences of substances and no knowledge of essences and ending up only in
probabilistic conclusions about effects, was possible. Books IIIV were devoted to
would-be refutations, inspired by pyrrhonism, of Aristotelian doctrines in
physics, astronomy and biology. Book VI was an attack on Aristotle’s
metaphysics. Finally, Book VII expounded the non-Aristotelian moral
philosophy of Epicurus.
A second volume of the Exercitationes was planned, but it was suppressed by
Gassendi for reasons that still are not well understood. He may have become
dissatisfied with sceptical arguments, believing that they fuelled a potentially
endless controversy about Aristotelian science without putting anything in its
place. He may have come to the conclusion that others, such as Patrizi, had
already criticized Aristotle so thoroughly as to make more of the Exercitationes
redundant. He may have found in Mersenne’s writings a more sophisticated and
satisfactory approach to the questioning of Aristotle.3 Or again, he may have
taken his cue from the increasingly severe reaction of the educational
establishment in Paris to challengers of the learned authorities: in 1624 the
Sorbonne managed to prevent the public defence in Paris of a number of theses
against Aristotle. Whatever his reasons for holding back the second volume,
Gassendi did not cease to make use of the ancients in working out an anti-
Aristotelian philosophy of science. Within a few years of the publication of the
first volume, and perhaps on the advice of Mersenne, he was already studying
Epicurus and contemplating the rehabilitation of his philosophy as a rival to
Aristotle’s. He was confirmed in this plan by a journey he made in December
1628. He travelled to Holland to meet, among others, scientists sympathetic to
the Copernican approach to astronomy. The one who most impressed him was
the physician and savant Isaac Beeckman, who ten years earlier had been
Descartes’s mentor. Beeckman discussed the physical problem of free fall with
Gassendi and spoke with approval of Epicurus. It was apparently after this
meeting4 that Gassendi began to think of publishing a treatise favourable to
Epicurus. That this work on Epicurus was supposed to take further the anti-
Aristotelianism of what he had already published is suggested by the fact that at
first Gassendi planned to bring out a demythologized life of Epicurus and an
apology for Epicureanism as an appendix to the Exercitationes. As early as
1630, however, this modest project had given way to the much more ambitious
one of writing a perfectly comprehensive exposition and defence of
Epicurus, something that could articulate a positive philosophy to rival
Aristotle’s but without its pretensions to demonstrativeness or to acquaintance
with essences that transcended appearance.
Now a little later than Gassendi Hobbes also began to plan a large-scale work:
an exposition of the ‘elements’ of a non-Aristotelian philosophy. Perhaps by the
late 1630s he had completed an outline that divided the elements into three
sections, on body, man and citizen. None of these, however, was derived from
traditional philosophy. Indeed, when it came to the elements expounded in the
first section, Hobbes claimed that they could be collected together by reflection
on the mind’s contents in the abstract. In the Epistle Dedicatory of De Corpore,
the book that opened the trilogy, Hobbes likened the process of deriving the
concepts of first philosophy to the creation described in Genesis. From the
inchoate and undifferentiated material of sense, distinction and order would be
created in the form of a list of definitions of the most general concepts for
understanding body. In arriving at the foundations of his philosophy de novo,
Hobbes was closer to Descartes than to Gassendi. As in Descartes, an entirely
ahistorical and abstract starting point is adopted and this proclaims the novelty of
the philosophy subsequently developed, and its independence of the approved
learned authors, Aristotle, Ptolemy and Galen.
The intention of breaking with such authorities was underlined in Hobbes’s
writings in his account of correct teaching or demonstration. ‘The infallible sign
of teaching exactly, and without error’ Hobbes writes in The Elements of Law, ‘is
this: that no man hath ever taught the contrary…’ (Pt 1, ch. 13, iii, 65). Or, as he
goes on to put it, ‘the sign of [teaching] is no controversy’ (ibid., 66). Hobbes
goes on to explain what it is about the content and format of exact teaching or
demonstration that keeps controversy from breaking out. He considers the
practice of successful teachers and observes that they
proceed from most low and humble principles, evident even to the meanest
capacity; going on slowly, and with most scrupulous ratiocination (viz.)
from the imposition of names they infer the truth of their first proposition;
and from two of the first, a third, and from two of the three a fourth, and so
on.
(ibid.)
Practitioners of this method are called ‘the mathematici’, and of the two sorts of
men commonly called learned, they alone really are learned. The other sort are
they that take up maxims from their education, and from the authority of
men, or of authors, and take the habitual discourse of the tongue for
ratiocination; and these are called the dogmatici.
(EL, Pt 1, ch. 13, iv, 67)
These men are the breeders of controversy, according to Hobbes, breeders of
controversy precisely because they take their opinions undigested from
authorities and act as mouthpieces for views they have not worked out from ‘low,
humble and evident’ principles. He seems to be referring to the same class of
men at the beginning of De Corpore when he speaks of people ‘who, from
opinions, though not vulgar, yet full of uncertainty and carelessly received, do
nothing but dispute and wrangle, like men that are not well in their wits’ (ch. i, i,
E I 2). And in the same spirit there is the remark in Leviathan that ‘he that takes
up conclusions on the trust of authors, and doth not fetch them up from the first
item in every reckoning, which are the significations of names settled by
definitions, loses his labour, and does not know anything but merely believeth’
(ch. 5, E III 32).
Hobbes blames the dogmatici for the backward state of moral and civil
philosophy before De Cive, and he traces the then modest development of
natural philosophy to a misconception that had prevailed for a long time about
how far the methods of the mathematici could be applied. The misconception
was due to the Romans and Greeks (cf. De corp. ch. 6, xvi, E I 86), who wrongly
believed that demonstration or ratiocination was only applicable to geometrical
figures, as if it were the figures that made the conclusions of geometrical
demonstrations evident. What in fact made the geometrical conclusions of
writers like Euclid so compelling was not the use of figures but the use of true
principles as the starting-points of geometrical demonstrations. Were other
doctrines to start from similar principles, they too would enjoy conclusiveness
and truth. As Hobbes writes in De Corpore, ‘there is no reason but that if true
definitions were premissed in all sorts of doctrines, the demonstrations also
would be true’ (ibid., E I 87). The idea that ‘all sorts’ of doctrine might be true,
that is, that doctrines on all sorts of topics might be true, if they were to begin
from true principles, has an epistemological counterpart: demonstrative
knowledge of all sorts of truth might be acquired, were the knowledge to be the
result of reasoning from definitions known to be true.
GASSENDI
When Hobbes warns against relying on authors and insists on reaching
conclusions from evident first principles, he may seem to reflect the intellectual
style of early modern philosophy better than Gassendi does by his use of
Epicurus. But this impression may have more to do with a certain kind of
historiography than with the facts of intellectual life in the 1600s. The usual
histories of this period of philosophy emphasize novelty, revolution and
methodological principles that seem to prepare the way for nineteenth- and
twentieth-century science. Bacon’s, Galileo’s and Descartes’s writings lend
themselves particularly well to this conception of a time of decisive intellectual
change, a time that ushered in modernity and saw out tradition, and these
writings tend to be discussed to the exclusion of works of other seventeenthcentury
figures—even figures whom the canonical moderns respected and took
for allies, such as Gassendi. The standard histories may not only be criticized for
overlooking the celebrity and influence that Gassendi enjoyed in his own day;
they may not only be criticized for making this celebrity hard to understand once
it is pointed out; they may also be criticized for missing the strengths of the
traditional form of presentation used by Gassendi in the context of the early
seventeenth century.
Many of those who promoted the new science and attacked the old philosophy
did so in books that they knew would meet hostility from the church and the
schoolmen. By choosing for some of his works the literary form of the erudite
rehabilitation of an ancient authority like Epicurus, Gassendi was employing the
methods that the doctors of the church had used to appropriate Aristotle. Again,
by being comprehensive in his treatment of Epicurus’s critics Gassendi gave the
impression of being an even-handed exponent of his chosen author, in contrast
with sycophantic followers of Aristotle. He discussed the views of Epicurus in the
context of the antagonisms between the ancient Greek schools of philosophy,
including the Peripatetics, and so he was able to revive a sense of Aristotle and
his school as representing just one way of thinking among others during a period
in which Greek philosophy was sectarian, and when no one sect had any special
authority. Again, by showing that the genuine Epicurus had been completely lost
in the lore about Epicurus, Gassendi was able to introduce to intellectual life a
virtually new figure, not just a relatively familiar one who deserved a second
hearing. Apart from the novelty of the Epicurus that Gassendi revived, there was
the relevance of his views to the topical issues of the anomalies in Aristotle’s
physics, and the significance of scepticism. In relation to scepticism,
Epicureanism seemed to claim less, and so to be less vulnerable to sceptical
criticism, than Aristotelianism. This was the lesson of Gassendi’s exposition of
Epicurean canonics as a preferred logic. In relation to seventeenth-century
physics, Epicurean explanations avoided some of the anomalies that Aristotelian
explanations were increasingly embarrassed by.5 At the same time, it could be
regarded as a comprehensive natural philosophy.Finally, Gassendi was able to
give special prominence to views, for example about whether the world was
eternal, that showed Epicurus in a better theological light than Aristotle. Of
course Epicurus needed theological correction; but so did Aristotle.
That it made sense for Gassendi to present ideas favourable to the new science
in the form of erudite commentary does not mean that he hit on the most
satisfactory form for such a commentary, or even one that was adequate in his
own eyes. His principal work on Epicurus, Animadversiones in Decimum Librum
Diogenis Laertii (1649), was disorderly and ran to three volumes. Gassendi
allowed it to appear with great reluctance. The posthumously edited Syntagma
Philosophicum (1658), which is generally taken to be the culmination of his
work on Epicurus, is a commentary in part and contains material from redactions
intended to result in a commentary, but it is also and primarily a statement of the
philosophy Gassendi himself arrived at from a starting point in Epicurus. It is
known that he revised the manuscripts incorporated into the Syntagma many
times over a period of decades and that he tried out many different ways of
putting together his material, never finding one that was satisfactory.6 The point
is that it was reasonable, even shrewd, to choose some form of erudite commentary
as a medium for his ideas, given the hostile elements in the audience he was
addressing. Descartes, who in the Discourse and the Meditations experimented
with quite different and innovative literary styles for the presentation of his
ideas, and who was either misunderstood or criticized for not being explicit
enough as a result, himself turned to something like a scholastic presentation in
the Principles of Philosophy, which was much more widely cited by his
followers and critics in the second half of the seventeenth century than the other
two works. And he toyed with the idea of writing an abrégé of a summa
philosophiae by Eustachius a Sancto Paulo as a vehicle for some of his thought.
What were the main Epicurean ideas that Gassendi expounded? In logic, the
idea that ‘canons’ or precepts for conceiving the real and finding the true were an
antidote to the complexities of Aristotelian dialectic, and the idea that we might
have, through signs, some access to what otherwise are relatively unknowable
things beyond sensory experience; in physics, the idea that the universe is
composed of atoms of matter in the void, and that the substances composed of
these atoms do not realize purposes intrinsic to those substances; in ethics, the
idea that well-being is an unperturbed state, in particular a state of freedom from
pain or of elevated pleasure. To see how these ideas were adapted to the
requirements of a ‘modern’ philosophy, it is necessary to turn to Syntagma
Philosophicum.
Logic
Logic occupies the First Part of the Syntagma, and Epicurus is mentioned in
different connections in each of the two introductory books. In the first of the
two, De origine et varietate logica, Epicurus’s canons for cognitive and practical
judgement are listed as part of a survey of existing logical systems. The second
book, De logicae fine, on the goal of logic, makes clear the significance of
Epicurus’s canons for cognitive judgement. Gassendi says (ch. 4) that the canons
reveal Epicurus to be one of those who held, contrary to the sceptics, that criteria
of truth and falsity exist, and that they are provided by both sense and intellect.
Chapter 5 of De logicae fine defends the anti-sceptical claim that, with the help of
signs determined by the criteria of truth and falsehood, some knowledge is
possible. Among the things that are supposed to be knowable by sense are the
shapes of closely observed things, that is, things observed with allowances made
for the distorting effects of media like water or the failings of sight at long
distances. As for things knowable by signs determined by reason—indicative
signs—Gassendi explains what he means with the help of examples:
The indicative sign pertains to things naturally hidden, not because it
indicates a thing in such a way that the thing can ever be perceived and the
sign can be visibly linked to the thing itself, so that it could be argued that
where the sign is the thing is too, but on the contrary, because it is of such
a nature that it could not exist unless the thing exists, and therefore
whenever it exists, the thing also exists. An illustration of this is sweat as it
indicates the existence of pores in the skin, for pores cannot be seen; still
sweat is of such a nature that it would not appear upon the skin unless
pores existed through which it could pass from inside to outside. Such also
is vital action as it indicates the existence of the soul, and motion as it
indicates the existence of the void….
(Brush, 323)
These signs, when properly made use of in reasoning, are supposed to make
possible a kind of science, though not one with the pretensions of the science
described by Aristotelian dogmatists. That this antisceptical view is seen by
Gassendi as Epicurean is shown by the attribution to Epicurus of a virtually
identical position in an earlier manuscript commentary (IL, 256–7).
Though Gassendi seems to follow Epicurus in his views about the availability
of criteria of truth, there are aspects of Epicurean logic that he finds unappealing.
In Chapter 6 of De logicae fine he criticizes Epicurus for failing to state rules of
deduction, and then blames some of Epicurus’s mistaken conjectures in natural
philosophy on this omission. He also complains that ‘the rules for organizing
thought clearly are…lacking’ (Brush, 360), and he seems to suggest that
Epicurus was wrong to suppose that ethics had to make use of criteria other than
those of sense and reason (ibid.). Sense has a bearing on ethical questions, he
says, because pleasure and pain are among its objects (ibid.).
Gassendi’s disagreements with Epicurus are reflected in the logic that he
himself puts forward. He borrows only selectively from Epicurus, just as he
picks and chooses from the other logics he has surveyed, logics ranging from
Aristotle’s to, in his own day, those of Ramus, Bacon and Descartes. Gassendi’s
positive logical doctrine is set out in the Institutio Logica, the part of the
Syntagma that follows De logicae fine and that serves as transition from logic to
physics. The Institutio is in four parts, corresponding to the four ways in which
good thinking brings one closer to the truth and so to achieving the goal of logic.
There are canons for (1) forming clear ideas, (2) forming propositions, (3)
making sound inferences and (4) ordering or organizing correctly, by which
Gassendi means methods of discovery and of instruction. Of the four sets of
canons, it is the first and last that have the most philosophical interest. The third
set consists almost entirely of rules for simplifying Aristotelian syllogistic.
Gassendi has moved from the extreme hostility to syllogistic that he expressed in
the Exercitationes to a guarded acceptance of its value in the last chapter of De
logicae fine, and in the canons he suggests ways of improving Aristotelian logic
rather than arguing that it should be scrapped altogether. The tedium of the rules
for simplifying syllogistic is relieved by canon 16, which has some deflationary
remarks about the strength and source of knowledge conferred by so-called
‘scientific syllogisms’. These remarks are in keeping with Gassendi’s adoption in
De logicae fine of a via media between dogmatism and scepticism. The second
set of canons—concerned with forming propositions—is once again mainly on
Aristotelian lines.
The remaining two sets of canons, on forming clear ideas and on method
respectively, have closer connections with Gassendi’s physics than the other two
sets, and also reflect more clearly the influence of Epicurean canons that
Gassendi has discussed earlier in the logical books of the Syntagma. The first set
is to do with ideas or images of things in abstraction from the operations of
affirming or denying propositions about those things. Canons 1, 7, 8 and 18 tell
us what we are to aim at in our ideas. Accuracy and vividness are desirable
(canons 1 and 10); the greater the number of things of which we have ideas the
better (canon 18); and, above all, ideas should be ‘complete’ (ibid.).
Completeness in singular ideas or ideas of individuals is a matter of the
comprehensiveness of parts and attributes registered:
Since a particular thing…is also some kind of whole made up of its own
parts, just as a man is made up of a head, trunk, arms, legs and the other
smaller parts from which these are made, and is also some kind of subject
endowed with its own attributes, adjuncts, properties or qualities, just as
the same man is endowed with size, shape, colour, strength, wit, memory,
virtue, wisdom and so on, it is quite clear that the idea of this man will be
the more complete the more parts and attributes of him it represents.
(IL, 91)
Gassendi recommends ‘anatomy, chemistry and the other sciences’ as means of
acquiring more perfect singular ideas. More perfect general ideas are acquired
the more particulars are known to be covered by a given genus. An idea of
mankind that is at first confined to Europeans, Africans and Asians becomes
more perfect if it comes to extend to Americans. In the ideal case an idea of a
kind of thing can serve as its definition (canon 15). Completeness in ideas can be
achieved only within the limits allowed by our ways of forming ideas, which
Gassendi stipulates in the first few canons of the logic. All our ideas come from
the senses and are in the first place ideas of individual things. Mental operations
rather than the external world are responsible for our general, analogical and
chimerical ideas (canon 3). Finally, our ideas can only aspire to perfection or
completeness if we are aware of the way in which the senses deceive us and keep
in mind these sources of deception as we form ideas (canons 11–14).
The fourth set of canons in Gassendi’s logic have a different relation to the
physics. Instead of speaking of operations of the mind that physics illuminates,
they prescribe methods of ordering thought that regulate physics and other
sciences. Only the first four canons govern investigation in science; the
remaining ten are to do with teaching what one learns. Canon 4 reintroduces the
Epicurean criteria of truth: judgements are to be submitted to sense and reason
(IL, 160). Canon 1 recommends the use of signs as a way of finding the key or
middle term in the solution of questions. Canon 3 introduces the distinction
between analysis or resolution and synthesis or composition, suggesting that
whichever has been used to arrive at an answer, the other should be used to
check it.
When he comes to the precepts governing the presentation of one’s findings
for the purposes of instruction Gassendi produces by way of illustration a
description of how to teach physics that is hard not to take as a blueprint for the
next major part of the Syntagma. He is making the point that in the sciences, as
in the productive arts, it pays to teach as if you were explaining how something
was made; in the case of natural science, how the universe is made up from its
parts:
Thus a physicist who is giving instruction in the natural sciences places as
a model before our eyes, like the larger and smaller parts of a building,
only on an extended scale, the structure of nature or the machine of the
world, the sky, the earth, all that they contain, and analysing them into
their smallest possible components takes these as the primary units which
go to make up the whole. His next step is to inquire into the precise nature
and pattern of the various combinations responsible for the formation of
the sun, the moon and the other heavenly bodies, and in the same way the
earth and all the many inanimate, animate and sentient beings…until he
has unfolded the entire panoply of the world like a man who has explored
and thoroughly inspected a house which someone else has built.
(IL, 162–3)
An order very similar to the one prescribed is apparent in the sections on physics
in the Syntagma.
Physics
Gassendi’s physics begins with questions about the number of worlds, the
existence of the world-soul and the known locations of the known parts of the
world. This helps to define in a preliminary way the scheme of nature that
physics is concerned with. He goes on to consider the metaphysical status of
place and time. From Galileo’s results concerning falling bodies he knew that
physical effects could be a function of elapsed time or space traversed, and yet
none of the traditional categories for real things—substance, attribute, corporeal
or incorporeal —seemed to classify place and time adequately: Gassendi opens his
physics with reasons why the traditional categories are unsuitable and reasons
why place and space and duration are real and similar in their incorporeal
natures. He then tries to play down his evident departure from Aristotelian
physics by saying that what he calls space is just the same as ‘that space which is
generally called imaginary and which the majority of sacred doctors admit exists
beyond the universe’ (Book II, ch. 1, Brush, 389). By ‘imaginary’ he does not
mean fictional. Rather, as he explains, he means something that it takes
imagination, and in particular the power the imagination has of constructing
analogues of the space it senses, to conceive. The power of making analogues
is mentioned in Part One of Institutio Logica (canon 3) and consists of forming a
likeness to something borne in by the senses.
Section One of the physics continues with the exposition of a number of
competing theories of the nature of the matter of the universe, culminating in the
acceptance of a revised Epicurean atomism in Book III, ch. 8. The chapter starts
with a list of departures from Epicurus. Although Gassendi agrees that ‘the
matter of the world and of all the things in it is made up of atoms’ (Brush, 398),
he denies all of the following: that the atoms are eternal; that they are uncreated;
that they are infinite in number, capable of being any shape, and self-moving
(ibid., 399). He claims instead that ‘atoms are the primary form of matter, which
God created finite from the beginning, which he formed into this visible world,
which, finally, he ordained and permitted to undergo transformations out of
which, in short, all the bodies which exist in the universe are composed’ (ibid.,
399).
He conceives matter not in Cartesian fashion as extension in three dimensions
simply, but as solid or offering resistance. Atoms are indivisible particles of
matter. To the question of whether a physical indivisible is conceivable, given
that whatever is physical would seem to have parts, Gassendi generally replies by
drawing an analogy between a physical minimum and minimum sensible.
Something so small as to be at the limit of what the human eye can register—
Gassendi’s example is the itch mite—can nevertheless be conceived to have a
surface made up of indefinitely many physical parts—atoms, say. This does not
take away its claim to be the smallest visible thing; similarly, the fact that it is
possible to think of the atom’s extremities matched one to one with indefinitely
many geometrical points does not take away its status as the smallest physical
thing: though there is a way of dividing it into parts in thought, the atom cannot
actually exist in parts (cf. Op. Omn. VI, 160; I, 268).
Matter coexists with the void. The existence of motion is supposed to be a sign
of this, as Gassendi has already been quoted as saying in a passage on the
indicative sign. The existence of relatively soft bodies is another sign of the
existence of a void, or, more specifically, of the existence of a void enclosed by
compound bodies. In the void there are no privileged directions and positions,
and in particular no central point toward which a body like a stone might move if
it were put into the void. A stone would move in any direction it is propelled or
attracted to move, in a straight line with uniform velocity. The Aristotelian
doctrine that there are natural positions for different substances is rejected. So is
the Epicurean idea that atoms naturally move ‘down’ in straight lines unless
deflected by an arbitrary swerve.
Gassendi has arrived at ‘the primary units’ of the material world. He thinks
that the primary units are a very large number of atoms with a large number of
different shapes. In Book IV of the Syntagma, on causation, he insists on viewing
the primary units as active, rather in the way that the troops in an army are, once
the general has given his orders (ch. 8, Brush, 418). All motion of matter is local
(Op. Omn. I, 338), even gravitation, which is effected by a kind of hooking
together of particles between bodies. Different atoms are endowed with different
kinds of mobility, as well as different shapes, and these are capable of producing
everything else observed in the physical world. Motion is at the root of effects
rather than form; causation in nature is efficient rather than formal (Op. Omn. I,
283). Gassendi takes qualitative differences to be the joint effect of the primary
qualities of atoms and their effects on our senses (Book 5, ch. 7). The variety in
biological creation he traces to God’s production in the beginning of ‘the seeds,
so to speak, of all things capable of generation, in other words, that from selected
atoms he fashioned the first seeds of all things, from which later the propagation
of species would occur by generation’ (Book 3, ch. 8, Brush, 401).
Having discussed the nature of atoms and indicated in a general way how their
possibilities of combination can explain the existence of big classes of
substances, his next task, if we are to go by the passage about teaching physics
that we quoted earlier from Part Four of Institutio Logica, is to ‘inquire into the
precise nature and pattern of the various combinations responsible for the
formation of the sun, the moon and the other heavenly bodies, and in the same
way the earth and all the many inanimate, animate and sentient beings…’. This is
indeed how he proceeds in the subsequent sections of the Syntagma. We can pass
over the astronomy and his treatment of terrestrial inanimate objects and come at
once to the area where the atomistic explanation is extended to psychology, only
to be curtailed in the interest of theological orthodoxy.
This occurs toward the beginning of Section III, Part 2, of the Syntagma, in the
book De anima. Gassendi discusses the animating principle in non-human as
well as human creatures. He thinks it is a highly mobile corporeal substance, a
flame-like tissue of very subtle atoms (Op. Omn. II, 250) spread throughout the
animal body. It accounts for body heat and provides the heat for digestion and
nutrition; it is sustained by the circulation of the blood. This animating principle
is present in humans as well as animals, but in humans it is present together with
a rational soul. The rational soul is infused by God in each human being
individually, presumably at the moment of conception; the non-rational soul is
transmitted by the processes of biological generation themselves. A letter of
16297 suggests that it was only to reconcile his position with Scripture, not with
biological evidence, that Gassendi departed from the simple hypothesis that a
single soul was derived by each person from its parents (Op. Omn. VI, 19).
Finally, in the Syntagma the relation of the rational soul to the human being in
whom it is infused is said to be rather like that of a substantial form to the matter
it informs, Gassendi suggests (Op. Omn. II, 466), lifting what is otherwise a total
ban on the invocation of substantial forms in the rest of the physics.
Gassendi’s account of the soul (Op. Omn. II, 237–59), and of its faculties of
phantasy (II, 398–424) and intellect (II, 425–68), is for the most part an account
of the biologically generated soul, not the divinely instilled one. It is the
biological soul that is the seat of the faculty of imagination or phantasy, and
most cognitive operations are varieties of operations on ideas in the imagination.
This is true in particular of the operations regulated by the canons of Gassendi’s
logic: forming ideas, reasoning, correcting for the deceptions of sense and so on.
The logic says that all our ideas come from the senses and are in the first place
ideas of individual things. The physics explains that corpuscles constituting the
sensible species enter channels in the eye, ear and so on, and make impacts on
tensed membranes, the vibrations from which are communicated to the brain by
nerves filled with animal spirits. The brain then interprets the vibrations and they
occur to the mind as conscious sensations. Episodes of the sensation leave traces
or vestiges in the brain, and these are the physical substrate of ideas. As for
operations on ideas, the physics relates each of these to vestiges of sense
understood as brainfolds (Op. Omn. II, 405). Habits of mind also have a material
basis. Finally, various forms of deception of the senses are possible because it is
possible for the same pattern of vibration reaching the brain to be produced in
different ways, or for it to be interpreted in different ways.
So much for the biological soul. A rational soul is needed to account for
capacities that surpass those of the imagination, such as the capacity of the soul
to know itself, to know the universal independently of abstracting from
particulars, and to know God. Not that it is incapable of forming, composing,
analysing and ratiocination: it can do what the non-rational soul can do: but it
can do more as well. On the other hand, it is dependent on the material of the
imagination: when it apprehends things it apprehends the same sort of ideas that
the imagination does, not intelligible species. In this sense intellection and
imagination are not really distinct (as for example Descartes had claimed in
Meditation VI). Apart from cognitive operations, the rational soul is called upon
to make sense of some practical capacities, specifically the ability to will the
Good rather than aim for pleasure.
Ethics and politics
In his physics Gassendi departs considerably from Epicurus but retains a version
of atomism and a largely materialistic account of the biological soul.8 The effect
of the departures is to make the Epicurean doctrine cohere with Christianity. God
is brought in not only as creator but as a maintainer of order in material
causation: the combination of atoms by chance is outlawed. God is also brought
in as immediate source of a higher immaterial soul. Epicurean physics is
corrected by theology, and it is the same with Epicurean ethics, which Gassendi
takes up in the third and concluding part of the Syntagma.9
Epicurus is upheld in claiming that pleasure is to be pursued and pain avoided,
but the pleasure of certain types of action is interpreted by Gassendi as a divinely
appointed sign of the individual or communal preservation that such actions
promote, while the pain of other types of action must be seen as a sign of their
interfering with conservation (Op. Omn., 701). There are pleasures of motion and
pleasures of rest, and Epicurus was right, according to Gassendi, to associate
happiness with enjoyment of the pleasures of rest. He was right, in other words,
to prefer the quiet pleasures of the mind to the pleasures of eating, drinking and
sex. The fact that it does not come naturally to us to give the quiet pleasures their
due; the fact that we are inclined to pursue the earthier pleasures to the exclusion
of the others; these facts do not show that happiness is beyond us. They only
show that happiness is not automatically attained. Fortunately, however, we are
blessed by God with a freedom that, if properly used, enables us to judge that the
earthier pleasures are not superior and are even at times merely apparent rather
than real pleasures. This power of correcting valuations through judgement does
not deprive the lower pleasures of their attraction, or bring it about that there is
nothing to disturb us once we have chosen the higher goods. In other words, our
freedom cannot bring about happiness in the form of perfect freedom from
perturbation; on the other hand, it does make choices of the higher pleasures into
genuine choices. Someone whose valuations of pleasure were completely correct
morally speaking and who was incapable of making the wrong choices would in
a certain sense resemble creatures who acted badly under the influence of
impulse, for they, like the unfailingly right-acting, act in the absence of
spontaneity (Op. Omn. II, 822–3).
Going by the theological corrections one finds elsewhere in his system, one
might expect Gassendi to make Epicurean tranquillity consist of the quiet
contemplation of God in a place away from the distracting pressures of social
life. This would fit in not only with the demands of piety but with Epicurus’s
endorsement of the life in retirement. But in fact the pleasant life appears to be
both more active and more social than this (Op. Omn. II, 717, 720). For
Gassendi, the preferred sort of tranquillity appears to be that of the man who
quietly and calmly gets on with large undertakings (ibid., 717), rather than
someone who withdraws into serene and solitary meditation. Of course, it is
possible to get on quietly and calmly with purely self-interested projects, such as
that of making oneself as wealthy as one can or as famous as one can, but
Gassendi advocates stillness of mind in the pursuit of not just any personal
project, still less any self-interested project. One is supposed to confine one’s
desires to those that are natural and necessary (Op. Omn. II, 694): a dedication to
wealth or luxury or fame is out of keeping with the pleasant life; and so is much
else—even a strong desire to stay alive may be criticized as the product of a
misplaced fear of death.
Quiet determination in someone of modest desires, someone who has the
pleasures of motion in proportion and under control—this comes close to the
principle of a pleasant life. But it takes wisdom to aim at the right pleasures; and
prudence to know how to get what one aims at. And the pleasant life calls for the
exercise of other virtues, including justice. Justice is giving to each what is his
right: it is the virtue that answers to the status of humans as social beings, and it
is what keeps people from suffering the excesses of a natural struggle for human
survival.
Justice manifests itself in the existence of mutual agreements that limit the
steps anyone can take to preserve himself. It is prudent to enter such agreements,
since otherwise people have a natural right to do whatever they like and go to
whatever extremes they like to improve their chances of staying alive. They can
take anything or do anything, and they must be prepared to see others take the
same liberties (Op. Omn. II, 751). The extreme unpleasantness of a situation in
which no holds are barred and no one is secure in whatever he has motivates
people who are rational to lay down the natural right. Or, instead of speaking of
the way the unpleasantness of pre-social existence rationally motivates people to
lay down rights, Gassendi is willing to speak of a ‘law of nature’ (ibid., 800), or
universally acknowledged rational precept, that men will come together to live in
society (ibid., 802). This they do by making pacts with one another. At first they
make a pact laying down their unlimited right to do and take what they like. The
effect of this pact is to leave each in rightful possession of whatever the pact
does not say should be given up. The pact also leaves each protected by the
combined forces of the other parties to the pact. A second pact creates laws
specifying rights, and so creates conditions for justice, that is, conditions for
recognizing infringements of rights and determining what belongs to each by
right (Op. Omn. II, 786, 795).
The two pacts already described are not by themselves sufficient for the
smooth running of society, for it is impractical to have all the parties to the social
contract involved in making and declaring laws. The authority to do these things
must be delegated by the many to a single person or to a group of men (ibid.,
755), and according to Gassendi this delegation of authority may be understood
to originate in a third pact. It is by this third pact that people become subject to
government. Is this third pact in their interest? It may seem not to be: the
authority that the many vest in government may, Gassendi admits, be misused, as
when a monarch or assembly makes too many laws or makes what laws there are
too exacting. Nevertheless the interest of rulers themselves in a certain kind of
pleasant life gives them a reason to refrain from making laws that overburden
their subjects, while the predictable excess of pain over pleasure in rebellion or
civil disobedience provides a reason for law-abidingness on the part of subjects.
In Gassendi’s theory of politics the pleasure principle promotes the stability of
states.
HOBBS
How far does Gassendi’s Epicurean system agree with Hobbes’s philosophy?
Their politics appear to provide at least one point of agreement, for the respective
treatments of the state of nature and the right of nature are similar. They diverge
strikingly, however, in their theories of the social contract, the laws of nature,
and the relations of subjects to rulers. Not three pacts but one take people from
the Hobbesian state of nature into society. Hobbes’s laws of nature provide a
more detailed analysis than Gassendi’s of what it is to come into society, and
they rest on an account that implies that people’s personal judgements about the
relative pleasantness of life within the state and out of it are unreliable.
Accordingly, in the act by which a Hobbesian subject simultaneously contracts
for protection and makes himself subject to a sovereign, he also gives up the right
to let his own judgements about pleasure and pain rule his impression of his wellbeing.
He delegates the judgements to someone—a sovereign—who has a wider
and more detached view than he does.
The disagreements between Hobbes and Gassendi do not stop there. It is
crucial to Hobbes’s morals and politics that death be an evil and that it be rationally
compulsory to avoid premature death (De cive, ch. 1, vii, E II, 8), while
Gassendi’s account tends to minimize the disvalue of death and the importance
of staving it off. Another disagreement, this time on the borderline between
ethics and politics, is over whether man is by nature sociable. Gassendi,
inclining uncharacteristically toward Aristotle, thinks that man is naturally
sociable; Hobbes, in a political treatise that Gassendi admired, argues vigorously
to the contrary. The divergences extend to other sectors of philosophy. In logic
Gassendi puts forward precepts that reflect his sensitivity to scepticism; Hobbes
does not. In metaphysics and physics Gassendi makes much of God’s activity; in
comparable parts of Hobbes’s philosophy, on the other hand, a discussion of
God’s nature and attributes is either omitted or is highly curtailed. In physics
proper Hobbes doubts the existence of the vacuum (De corp., ch. 26, vi–xi, E I
426–44) and probably also, though not so explicitly, the divisibility of anything
material (De corp., ch. 7, xiii). He is thus at odds twice over with Gassendi’s
belief in the existence of atoms in the void.
Where the theories of Hobbes and Gassendi do resemble one another is in the
reductive and materialistic bent of their psychologies. After examining Hobbes’s
doctrine in this connection I shall consider the relation of his materialism to the
rest of his philosophy. Then I shall ask whether there is a way of comparing
Hobbes and Gassendi that takes account of their shared materialism while
accommodating other points of contact.
Matter and motion
Perhaps no passage in Hobbes’s writings declares his materialism with greater
directness than the following one from Chapter 46 of Leviathan:
The world, (I mean not the earth only, that denominates the lovers of it
worldly men, but the universe, that is, the whole mass of things that are), is
corporeal, that is to say, body; and hath the dimensions of magnitude,
namely length, breadth, and depth: also every part of body, is likewise
body, and hath the like dimensions; and consequently every part of the
universe, is body, and that which is not body, is no part of the universe:
and because the universe is all, that which is no part of it, is nothing; and
consequently nowhere. Nor does it follow from hence, that spirits are
nothing: for they have dimensions, and are therefore really bodies.
(E III 381)
Hobbes is claiming that to exist is to exist as a material thing. Even spirits are
bodies. If spirits seem not to be bodies, he goes on to suggest, that is only
because in common usage ‘body’ is a term for things that are palpable and
visible as well as extended in three spatial dimensions (ibid.).
Forthright as the passage just quoted is, Hobbes’s materialism is more often
implied than asserted in his writings. The reason is not that Hobbes was particularly
prudent or cautious outside Leviathan, but that he thought that motion rather than
matter was the key concept for the explanation of natural difference and change.
It is true that, as he defines it, cause is motion, and motion is the displacement of
body, so that his frequent references to the varieties of motion, and his frequent
attempts to reduce phenomena to motion, are at the same time expressions of
materialism. Still, it is through a commitment to mechanical explanation in
physics, rather than as a result of some argument or requirement in an entirely
prior and independent metaphysics, that Hobbes is materialistic.
An early example in Hobbes’s writings of the inclination to mechanistic,
rather than materialistic, reduction comes from The Elements of Law (1640). Just
as ‘conceptions or apparitions are nothing really, but motion in some internal
substance of the head’ he says, so ‘…contentment or pleasure…is nothing really
but motion about the heart…’ (Pt I, ch. 7, i, 28). In the same vein, but from the
Introduction to Leviathan, written about eleven years later, there is the remark
that ‘life is but a motion of the limbs’. And that there is a principled basis for the
stress on motion can be seen from the chapter on the methodology of philosophy
or science in De Corpore, the first volume of Hobbes’s three-part statement of
the elements of philosophy. In that chapter, method in philosophy or science is
related to the definition of philosophy as the working out of causes from effects
or effects from causes. Method prescribes, as a stage in the search for causes, the
identification of universal things in particulars, that is, the most general properties
that can be inferred from the analysis of descriptions of specific phenomena. But
to find the relevant universals is not yet to know the ultimate cause of the
phenomena, for the universals themselves have a universal cause, which is
motion.
Finding causes is a matter of finding one of the many varieties of motion that
is capable of generating a given effect. The varieties of motion that each of the main
branches of science are concerned with are described in article 6 of Chapter 6 of
De Corpore. Geometry studies motion in general—motion in the abstract—in
body in general (E I 71). The rest of the sciences deal with differentiated motions
in differentiated bodies. Thus pure mechanics deals with motions in bodies
considered only as numerically distinct, and as having parts. It deals with the
effects of motions of the parts of bodies on whole bodies, and also with the
transmission of motion in collisions involving different numbers of bodies (E I
71–2). Physics deals with the sensory effects in animate bodies of motions
transmitted by inanimate bodies. It deals also with the after-effects of sensory
episodes and images compounded in imagination (E I 71; ch. 25, vii, E I 396–7;
cf. L, ch. 1, E III 6). Moral philosophy, or, perhaps more accurately, moral
psychology, deals with further after-effects of sensation in the form of passions.
In this branch of science ‘we are to consider the emotions of the mind, namely,
appetite, aversion, love, benevolence, hope, fear, anger, emulation, envy etc.’
(De corp. ch. 1, vi, E I 72).
It should now be clear that for Hobbes physics and moral psychology are
sciences of motion, and therefore branches of mechanics. Both sciences are
supposed to be concerned with the motions of the mind, physics because it
considers the nature of sensation, and moral psychology because it studies some
of the psychological effects of sensation. It is clear also that the psychological
parts of physics and moral psychology are at the same time, but secondarily,
sciences of matter, and support the classification of Hobbes as a materialist.
It is time to look at these sciences in more detail. The theory of sensation is
not only a part of Hobbes’s physics, but the part that Hobbes thinks has to be
expounded first. The reason is that the data explained by physics are appearances,
and these appearances could not exist if there were no sensation to produce
them. Sense being what provides the data of physics, how does it work?
Hobbes’s answer is that it works by reaction, reaction to motion propagated
through the parts of the sense organs. The process that culminates in sense
experience affects the whole living creature, but it starts with pressure on some
external and sensitive part of the living creature. This is the ‘uttermost’ part of
the sense organ. When
it is pressed, it no sooner yields, but the part next within it is pressed also;
and, in this manner, the pressure or motion is propagated through all the parts
of the sense organ to the innermost.
(De corp. ch. 25, ii, E I 390)
‘Press’ and ‘pressure’ are terms from the theory of pure mechanics. Hobbes
defines them in Part Three of De Corpore. One body presses another when ‘with
its endeavour’ the first body displaces the other or displaces part of the other (De
corp. ch. 15, ii, E I 211). In the case of sensation, the pressure on the outermost
part of the sense organ is exened either by the body sensed, what Hobbes calls
‘the object of sense’, or by some part of the medium, like air, which is itself set
in motion by the object of sense. The pressure on the outermost part of the organ
of sense displaces the nearest internal parts, which in turn press the next
adjoining, which in turn press the next. Sensation does not result simply from
this communication of pressure, but from the resistance of pressed to pressing
bodies. Each pressure inwards is met with resistance outwards by the parts of the
sense organ, so that there is a chain of reactions to a chain of pressures in the
parts of the organ. From the last of this chain of reactions and its effect on the
brain ‘a phantasm or idea hath its being’ (ch. 25, ii, E I 391). Only the strongest
of the endeavours outward from the innermost parts of the sense organ
constitutes a sensory reaction, and there can only be one sensory reaction at a time.
Moreover, a given sensory reaction at a time can be experience of no more than
one object at a time (De corp. ch. 25, v, E I 395), if the various sense organs are
applied at a single time to a single object. So sense experience is an orderly
succession of images of discrete things.
This much of the theory of sense is supposed to explain more than the
existence of phantasms and their occurring in orderly sequences: it explains also
some features of their content. For example, since a phantasm or idea results
from the last of a chain of reactions outwards in the parts of the sense organ, to
have a phantasm of a thing is to have an experience as of something outside the
organ of sense (ibid.). Again, the theory as so far sketched makes some sense of
the fact that ‘things when they are not the same seem not to be the same but
changed’ (cf. De corp. ch. 6, vi, E I 72). Hobbes gives the example of things that
appear to sight to be different sizes at different times. This is the effect of
variations in the angle at which motion from the innermost part of the organ of
sight is propagated outwards (De corp. ch. 25, xi, E I 405). Another phenomenon
is variation in the number of stars visible in the heavens. This is the effect not of
generation or destruction of stars, but of the state of the medium through which
the motion of the stars is propagated. Cold air facilitates, and hot air hinders,
stellar action on the eyes; so more stars appear on cold, calm nights, than on
warm, windy ones (cf. De corp. ch. 25, xi, E I 406).
Hobbes’s theory of sense is an account not only of the objects and causes of
phantasms but also of the cognitive operations performed with them. To be
endowed with sense, Hobbes believes, is not merely to be the momentary site of
phantasms; it is to be able to recall ideas to mind, and to be able to compare and
distinguish them. Indeed, judgement, which is the capacity to keep track of
differences between objects presented to the senses (De corp. ch. 25, viii, E I
399; L, ch. 8, E III 57), is not really a capacity distinct from sense (De corp. ch.
25, viii, E I 399). Neither, apparently, is memory or imagination. Even the
distinction between imagination and dreaming is not very firmly drawn (cf. EL,
Pt 1, ch. 3, viii, 12; L, ch. 2, E III6f.; De corp. ch. 25, ix, E I 399f.)’ The reason
is that Hobbes tries to mark differences between these psychological capacities
with the same apparatus he has applied in the account of sense proper. To explain
the variety of sense experience he appeals to the variety of the sense organs, the
different ways in which the sense organs are linked up with the nervous
and arterial systems, differences in the objects of sense, and differences in the
motions they impart to the sense organs. But when it comes to accommodating
the variety of ways in which sense information can be operated upon after
transactions between the sense organ and external objects are completed, he no
longer has available to him a wide enough array of distinct causes for the distinct
operations. He must make the retention of motion in the sentient suffice as a
basis for memory, imagination and many other apparently quite distinct mental
capacities. Unsurprisingly, this basis proves too slight for explaining the range of
effects proper to the individual capacities. By memory, for example, we are not
only supposed to be able to compare and distinguish the individuals we observe;
we are also supposed to be able to hit upon regularities involving them so as to
be able to form expectations (EL, Pt 1, ch. 4, vii, 15). Can all of this be managed
by short-lived reflection on qualitative similarity and difference in objects we
have fleeting contact with? Can even qualitative comparison and discernment be
accomplished by memory if it is no more than a device for storing and scanning
the colours, shapes, smells etc. of unsorted bodies? Hobbes offers a sophisticated
reconstruction of the mechanisms that make it possible for us to be affected with
phantasms, but he lacks the resources for a substantial account of the various
operations—memory is only one—that cognition involves.
Hobbes’s account of the motions of the mind extends beyond sensation and
cognition. There is also a theory of the passions. Passions are understood as aftereffects
of sense. For example, when someone sees something, the thing imparts
motion to the innermost part of the organ of sight. One effect of the motion is to
set up an outward reaction to the brain that produces visual experience. But there
can be an additional effect. The ‘motion and agitation of the brain which we call
conception’ can be ‘continued to the heart, and there be called passion’ (EL, Pt
1, ch. 8, i, 31). The heart governs ‘vital motion’ in the body, that is, the
circulation of the blood. In general, when motion derived from an act of sense
encourages vital motion, the sentient creature experiences pleasure at the sight,
smell or taste of the object of sense, and is disposed to move his body in such a
way as to prolong or intensify the pleasure (De corp. ch. 25, xii, E I 407). If the
object of sense is at some distance from the sentient creature, the creature will
typically move toward it (ibid.). In De Corpore Hobbes describes the
physiological processes that underlie the approach. Animal spirits impulse into
the nerves and retract again, causing muscular swelling and relaxation and
eventually full-scale movements (E I 408). The ‘first beginnings’ of this process,
the small movements in the body below the threshold of consciousness that start
the process off, constitute what Hobbes calls ‘appetite’ (E I 407). With
appropriate adjustments aversion is treated in the same way. Aversion is
connected with retreat from an object of sense whose effect on a creature is to
retard vital motion.
In roughly the way that he tries to conjure imagination, memory and other
cognitive operations out of the basic capacity for sense, Hobbes tries to relate a
long list of passions to the basic affections of appetite and aversion. There are
many complexities, but the idea that the passions are kinds of motion involving
the heart is never abandoned. The heart and its motion are also appealed to in
Hobbes’s conception of biological life, and his conception of biological life is
brought into deflationary interpretations of the ideas of spirit, soul, eternal life
and resurrection. In a famous passage in Chapter 44 of Leviathan he says:
The soul in Scripture signifieth always, either the life, or the living
creature; and the body and soul jointly, the body alive.
(E III 615)
As for life itself, ‘it is but motion’ (L, ch. 6, E III 51). When God is said in
Genesis to have ‘inspired into man the breath of life, no more is meant than that
God gave him vital motion’ (L, ch. 34, E III 394). Death consists of the ceasing
of this motion, but the ceasing of this motion at a time does not preclude an afterlife.
If God created human life out of dust and clay, it is certainly not beyond Him
to revive a carcass (E III 614–15). For the same reason, it is unnecessary to hold
that a soul leaves the body at death in order to make sense of resurrection. One
can say that life stops and then starts again at the resurrection, with no
intervening incorporeal existence.
Hobbes’s materialism and Hobbes’s system
Hobbes identifies the ensouled human body with the living body, and he thinks
that the living body is a body with vital motion, that is, a body with a heart pumping
blood through the circulatory system. He identifies the passions with different
effects of vital motion, and he identifies thought or cognitive operations with
various effects on the sense organs, nerves and brain of impacts of external
bodies. It is a thoroughgoing materialistic psychology, and it is in keeping with
the method and first philosophy that Hobbes prescribes for natural philosophy in
De Corpore and other writings. Effects or phenomena of all kinds are referred to
bodily motion, the specific kinds of motion depending on the analysis of the
descriptions of the phenomena as well as relevant experiments. This is the
approach Hobbes follows for geometrical effects, pure mechanical effects,
physical and psychological effects. In the teaching of the elements of philosophy
as a whole, the assignment of causes to these effects is supposed to be
preliminary to stating the rules of morality and polity. Are the rules of morality
and politics supposed to be materialistic or mechanistic or based on a mechanical
conception of nature?
In some formulations Hobbes’s theory of politics does indeed draw on
mechanistic psychology. But in others, notably that of the official statement of
his politics in De Cive, the third volume of his trilogy, no properly scientific
claims about the passions or about psychology are employed at all. The Preface
to De Cive indeed insists on the independence of the principles of morals and
politics from those of the sciences of body and man treated earlier in the trilogy
(E II xx). And similar comments are made in Leviathan (ch. 31, E III 357) and
De Corpore (De corp. ch. 6, vi, E I 74). Hobbes’s insistence on the autonomy of
his morals and politics seems to go against the claim that his morals and politics
are derived from, or a case of, mechanistic materialism. It is better to say that the
morals and politics are consistent with, and sometimes worked out against the
background of, mechanistic materialism, but not strictly deduced from
mechanistic materialism.
Let us consider how Hobbes’s mechanistic psychology contributes to
Hobbes’s morals and politics when he does choose to make use of it, as in
Leviathan. A crucial passage in this connection, which incidentally shows
Hobbes in disagreement with Gassendi, concerns the son of happiness that man
can aspire to while he is alive.
Continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time
desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I
mean the felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual
tranquillity of mind, while we live here, because life itself is but motion,
and we can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without
sense.
(E III 51)
He is claiming that desire, fear and sense are permanent facts of life, and that life
being motion, it cannot be tranquil. Desire is a fact of life because it is an
inescapable effect of the vital functions of sense and vital motion; fear is a fact
of life because it is a probable effect of sense and vital motion. We learn through
trial and error what to avoid and pursue, and trial and error reveals that some
things we might otherwise try and get can harm us. So long as our environment
is not wholly hospitable there are bound to be fearful things. As for life being but
motion, this is an assertion of Hobbes’s identification of life with vital motion.
The claim that human life can never be without fear and desire has a natural
scientific grounding, and it in turn helps to support a central thesis of Hobbes’s
moral philosophy: that the prospects of felicity in human life in its natural
condition are not very good. For one thing, the pursuit of felicity is unending,
there always being a next desire to satisfy, and risky, there being things to fear.
The unendingness of desire and the constant presence of fearful things both
diminish the prospect of continual success in getting what one wants unless one
has tremendous resources to put into the pursuit of felicity. The unendingness of
desire and the permanence of fear are among the harsh natural conditions of life
that the construction of a body politic is supposed to alleviate. So Hobbes’s
mechanistic psychology does some of the stage-setting for Hobbes’s civil
philosophy.
It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that it is very extensive stagesetting.
A state or commonwealth or body politic is an answer to the problem of
war, and it takes more than continual desire and ever-present fear in the pursuit of
felicity to create conditions of war. War involves competition, insecurity of
possession and, crucially, what Hobbes calls ‘the right of nature’, that is, the right
of each person to be able to take whatever steps he thinks are appropriate for his
security and well-being (cf. L, ch. 14, E III 116). These additional conditions,
and especially the last, do not belong to a description of the state of nature purely
in terms of matter in motion. And while there may be analogies between the way
that human beings come into conflict with one another, and what happens when
inanimate bodies meet on a collision course, the explanation of war and the
prescriptions for avoiding it are not for Hobbes primarily mechanistic. War and
peace are primarily things that can be deliberated about and chosen or
rejected.They are only secondarily the effects of blind impersonal forces within
human beings. That is why Hobbes presents the causes of peace in the form of
precepts it is rational to follow and the causes of war as seditious beliefs or illconceived
policies of action that it is rational to abandon.
At the heart of his case-both for following the precepts and abandoning the
seditious beliefs is the fearfulness of death through war and (though less
prominently) the desirability of commodious living in the commonwealth (EL,
Pt 1, ch. 14; De cive ch. 1; L, ch. 13). War is what the pursuit of felicity
degenerates into when each human being is the rightful judge of how to pursue
felicity, that is, when no-one can be blamed by any one else for any choice of
means to ends, and when it is common knowledge that this is so. In these
circumstances, whatever one’s character or personality, it can make sense to
injure or dispossess one’s neighbour. Vainglorious people will be disposed to
pursue felicity ruthlessly anyway, and will not stop at fraud or theft or even, if
there is nothing to stop them, killing to get what they want. Moderate people,
concerned with safety before felicity, will have reason to act violently to preempt
the attacks of the vainglorious. And in any case people will be set against
one another by the mere fact of having to compete for goods everyone wants.
Whether they are vicious, virtuous or morally indifferent, people who pursue
felicity, and who have no common power to fear, must suffer from the general
insecurity Hobbes calls ‘war’.
By ‘war’ he does not mean only open fighting between large numbers of men.
It is enough that most men show that they are willing to come to blows (EL, Pt 1,
ch. 14, xi, 73; De cive ch. 1, xi, E II 11; L, ch. 13, E III 113). Hobbes recognizes
what we would now call ‘cold war’, and he does not underestimate its costs.
When most people show that they are willing to enter a fight that can be foreseen
to be a fight to the death, most people are unlikely to channel their efforts into
production. If people agree to work at all while under the threat of all-out war,
then, according to Hobbes, they will tend to produce things on their own and for
themselves. War, even cold war, threatens production by the division of labour,
and indeed threatens to halt production of any kind (ibid.). And the effects of
open as against latent war are of course much worse. Besides the loss of the good
of society, open war brings the loss of reliable shelter, the loss of methods of
distributing goods in general demand, the decline of learning, the good of
assured survival, the probable loss of life and, what is worse, a probably painful
death. The life of man is reduced to being ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and
short’ (E III 113).
The fearfulness of war is supposed to give people who are at war a reason for
putting an end to it and people who are not at war a reason for continuing to live
in peace. The goal of securing peace and the means of doing so are specified by
the so-called laws of nature (L, chs 14 and 15), about eighteen such laws in all.
The fundamental laws require one to seek peace if it is safe to do so; and to lay
down rights that will enable peace to be made and kept. These two laws, as well
as one requiring that one keep one’s agreements, are the laws of nature that
enable the state to be established and war ended. Further laws of nature call for
traditionally recognized virtues: equity, gratitude, a willingness to be
accommodating and so on.
Now anyone who sees that peace is good and sees that the behaviours enjoined
by the laws of nature are means to peace has a reason for abiding by the laws of
nature—even in the course of a war. Each person has a reason for abiding by the
laws of nature, but not an utterly compelling or categorical reason. For in a state
of war each person retains the right of conducting himself as he likes, and may
judge that it is better to violate the laws of nature even while others obey them.
Since those who obey the laws put themselves at risk by doing so, and since even
the laws of nature do not have to be observed when it is unsafe to do so, the general
uncertainty over how others will behave makes the laws of nature into ineffective
instruments of peace.
Hobbes’s solution to this problem is to make the right of private judgement
one of the rights laid down for the sake of peace. He describes a covenant that
transfers responsibility for the personal safety and well-being of individuals from
those individuals themselves to a man or body of men who are empowered to act
for the safety and well-being of them all. The covenanters become subjects of the
responsible individual or assembly, and are obliged to obey his or their laws for
as long as it is not life-threatening to do so. In other words, the parties to the
covenant delegate the right to see to security and well-being to others, in return
for more certainty about survival and well-being. The man or body of men to
whom the decisions are delegated then declares, in the form of coercive civil
laws, those things that must and must not be done if the peace is to be kept and
security and well-being promoted. The laws can touch virtually any sphere of
private or public life, though Hobbes counsels against a legal regime that is very
intrusive and very exacting. The authority of the sovereign power extends in
particular to declaring what forms of religious practice are lawful and who may
or may not preach. This, in a nutshell, is Hobbes’s solution to the problem of
war: the many are to agree to subject themselves absolutely to a sovereign with
undivided and absolute power.
Hobbes’s system and Gassendi’s
How satisfactory is it to classify Hobbes’s system as a whole—the elements of
natural and civil science taken together—as materialistic or mechanistic? Plainly
the mechanical conception is prominent in all of Hobbes’s writings in natural
science. In morals and politics, on the other hand, it is far less conspicuous, and
in De Cive it virtually disappears. Commentators sometimes claim that, however
different in content they are, Hobbes’s natural and civil sciences are nevertheless
worked out according to the same methodological precepts, precepts calling for
the resolution of bodies—either natural or artificial—into properties for which
causes can be found, causes which, when put together, make the body from
which one started fully intelligible.10 Though Hobbes himself encourages the
idea that there is a close parallel between the methods of civil and natural
philosophy, it is very difficult to read any of the political treatises as exercises in
the resolution of a state or civil society into its parts.11 They are better seen as
justifying precepts for the behaviour of subjects and sovereigns engaged in the
common project of keeping the peace.
Another interpretation of Hobbes’s system, which avoids the implication that
Hobbes’s civil philosophy is mechanistic, or that natural and civil philosophy are
methodologically unified, is to the effect that each of the two principal parts of
Hobbes’s system are responses to the seventeenth-century pyrrhonist challenge
to science: on this reading, the metaphysics and natural philosophy attempt what
Descartes attempts in the Meditations, only without relying on doubtful proofs of
God’s existence, while the civil philosophy meets a sceptical challenge to a
science of morals along the lines of one that Grotius tried to meet.12 Putting these
readings together, the whole system may be regarded as ‘post-sceptical’. If this
interpretation were correct, it would have the considerable merit of linking not
only the two parts of Hobbes’s system but the two systems of Hobbes and
Gassendi; for it can hardly be doubted that Gassendi’s system has consciously
antisceptical motivation.
Unfortunately, the textual evidence for the claim that Hobbes directed his
philosophy against pyrrhonism is very slight.13 The main proposer of the ‘postsceptical’
interpretation has mainly relied on Hobbes’s association with Gassendi
and Mersenne. Though the interpretation seems uncompelling, its form seems to
me to be right. That is, it seems sensible to look for a way of unifying the two
parts of Hobbes’s philosophy and the two systems of Hobbes and Gassendi in
something they were both reacting against. There is much stronger evidence for
the claim that it was Aristotelianism than that it was scepticism about the
possibility of science. We have already seen that Gassendi was attracted to
Epicureanism partly because it could rival Aristotle’s philosophy, and because
Gassendi was from early on dissatisfied with Aristotelianism. In Hobbes’s case
equally the departures from Aristotle’s theory of causation and the categories, as
well as the theory that man is naturally sociable and that one exercises the duties
of citizenship by judging and legislating rather than obeying, are very clear and
well documented.
Hobbes does not believe, as people do who take scepticism seriously, that one
can live long or well by appearances alone. He thinks that to live and live well in
both nature and society one needs science, that is, some methodical way of
finding the causes of appearances and the consequences of one’s actions. But he
also thinks, this time very much as Gassendi does, that, except with regard to the
appearances of things we make, appearances of artefacts, science does not reveal
the necessary causes of appearances; and though he believes that science can be
acquired by human beings he does not think that they have a natural aptitude for
it. Similarly, though he thinks that virtue can be acquired, and even that there can
be a science of virtue in the form of the system of the laws of nature, he does not
think that the virtues can be learned by simple habituation, or that there is the
relation of virtue to pleasure or virtue to personal judgement and experience that
Aristotle insists upon. In all of these respects he is antiAristotelian.
With Gassendi Hobbes is a mechanistic and-Aristotelian in natural
philosophy. He is a different kind of anti-Aristotelian in civil philosophy. In civil
philosophy he is anti-Aristotelian in redrawing the distinction between natural
and artificial so that politics no longer falls on the ‘natural’ side of the divide;
aptness for the polity is not written into human nature, according to Hobbes: man
has to be made sociable and the order with the polity is not a natural one either,
but one that is artificial and expressible in the terms of a contract. Gassendi, too,
is a contract theorist, but apparently not one who invests the fact that contracts
are made and states manufactured with anti-Aristotelian significance. For him
entering into a contract can be the expression of natural sociableness, albeit
understood in an Epicurean rather than Aristotelian way.
ABBREVIATIONS
The following abbreviations are used in references. Gassendi: Op. Omn.—Opera
Omnia (Lyon, 1658), 6 vols, references are by volume and page number; Brush—
The Selected Writings of Pierre Gassendi, trans. C.Brush (New York, Johnson
Reprint, 1972); IL—Institutio Logica, ed. and trans. Howard Jones (Assen, Van
Gorcum, 1981). Hobbes: EL—The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, ed.
F.Tönnies (London, Simpkin & Marshall, 1889), references are by part, chapter,
section and Tönnies page number; L—Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and
Power of Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil, references are by chapter and
page number to the edition in vol. 3 of the English Works (E), ed. Sir
W.Molesworth (London, 1869), 11 vols; De corp. —Elementorum Philosophiae,
Sectio prima de corpore, references are by chapter, section and page number of
the English translation in vol. 1 of Molesworth; De cive—Elementorum
Philosophiae, Sectio tertia, de cive; I use ‘De cive’ to refer to the English
translation, Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society, in
vol. 2 of Molesworth; DP—Decameron physiologicum or Ten Dialogues of
Natural Philosophy, vol. 7 of Molesworth.
NOTES
1 For more detail, see A.Beaulieu, ‘Les Relations de Hobbes et de Mersenne’, in Y.-
C.Zarka and J.Bernhardt, Thomas Hobbes: Philosophie Première, Théorie de la
science et politique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), pp. 81–90.
2 See Sarasohn [7.32], 370–1.
3 See Joy [7.13].
4 For more detail, see Clark [7.17], 353.
5 See Brundell [7.11], ch. 2.
6 See Brundell’s Introduction for more detail.
7 Quoted in Brett [7.10], 114n.
8 For a review of the textual evidence of Gassendi’s materialism which adds to the
details given here, see Bloch [7.9], ch. 12.
9 I am indebted in my discussion of Gassendi’s ethics and politics to Sarasohn [7.
34].
10 The originator of this interpretation is J.W.N.Watkins. See Watkins [7.61], 47–81.
11 See Sorell [7.50], ch. 2.
12 See Richard Tuck, ‘Sceptics and Optics’, in E.Leites (ed.) Conscience and
Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1988), pp. 235–63; ‘Hobbes and Descartes’, in G.A.J.Rogers and A.Ryan (eds)
Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, Clarendon, 1988), pp. 11–42; Tuck [7.53].
13 See my ‘Hobbes without Doubt’, forthcoming in M.Bell and N.Martin (eds)
Scepticism and Modern Philosophy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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7.2 Animadversiones in Decimum Librum Diogenis Laertii, Lyon, Barbier, 1649.
Translations and abridgements
7.3 Bernier, F. Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi, Lyon, 8 vols, 1678.
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Correspondence
7.8 Rochot, B. (ed.) Lettres familières à François Luillier pendant l’hiver 1632–1633, Paris,
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Gassendi’s philosophy: general surveys
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Métaphysique, La Hague, Nijhoff, 1971.
7.10 Brett, G.R. The Philosophy of Gassendi, London, Macmillan, 1908.
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Dordrecht, Reidel, 1987.
7.12 Gregory, T. Scetticismo ed empiricismo. Studio su Gassendi, Bari, Editori Laterza,
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7.13 Joy, L. Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science, Cambridge,
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Gassendi’s metaphysics and physics
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1893.
English translations
7.37 Introduction and chapters 10–15 of De Homine, trans. Charles T.Wood, T. S.K.Scott-
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7.38 Thomas White’s De M undo Examined, trans. H.Jones, Bradford, Bradford
University Press, 1976.
Bibliographies
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University Press, 1977.
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