Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/116

Rh 106 G A S S ml:-ersus Aristoteleos. A fragment of tae second book was published later (1659), but the remaining ﬁve, requisite to complete the work, were never composed, Gassendi appar- ently thinking that aiter the 1)£scus.siones Peripateticaa of P-atricius little field was left for his labours. The Ere:-citutioucs on the whole seem to have excited more attention than they deserved. They contain little or nothing beyond what had been already advanced against Aristotle by the more vigorous of the Hnmanists, by Valla and Vives, by Ramus and Bruno. The first book expounds clearly, and with much vigour, the evil effects of the blind acceptance of the Aristotelian dicta on physical and philosophical study ; but, as is the case with so many of the anti-Aristotelian works of this period, the objections do not touch the true Aristotelian system, and in many instances show the usual ignorance of Aristotle’s own writings. The second book, which contains the review of Aristotle’s dialectic or logic, is throughout Ramist in tone and method. After a short visit to Paris in 1628, Gassendi travelled for some years in Flanders and Holland with his friend Luillier. During this time he wrote, at the instance of Mersenne, his examination of the mystical philosophy of ‘tobert Fludd (Epistolica disserlatio in qua prcecipua prin- cipia p/u'losop/u'(e R0. Fludcli detegmztzw, lG3l), an essay on parhelia (Epistola (le Ptzrlceliis), and some valuable observa- tions on the transit of Mercury which had been foretold by Kepler. He returned to France in 1631, and two years later received the appointment of provost of the cathedral church at Digne. Some years were then spent in travelling through Provence with the duke of Angouléme, governor of the department. The only literary work of this period is the Life of Peiresc, which has been frequently reprinted, and was translated into English. In 1642 he was again engaged by Mersenne in controversy, on this occasion against the celebrated Descartes. His objections to the fundamental propositions of Descartes were published in 164:2 ; they appear as the ﬁfth in the series contained in the Works of Descartes. In these objections Gassendi’s already great tendency towards the empirical school of speculation appears more pronounced than in any of his other writings. In 1645 he was invited by the archbishop of Lyons, brother of Cardinal Richelieu, to the chair of mathematics in the College Royal at Paris. He accepted this post, and lectured for many years with great success. In addition to some controversial writings on physical questions, there appeared during this period the ﬁrst of the works by which he is best known in the history of philo- sophy. He evidently found himself more in harmony with Epicurus than with any other philosopher of antiquity, and had collected much information regarding the Epicurean system. In l647 Luillier persuaded him to publish some of his works, which took the form of the treatise De Vita, Jloribus, et Doctrina Epicm-i libri octo. The work was well received, and two years later appeared his commentary on the tenth book of Diogenes Laertius (De Vita, rlloribus, et Placitis Epicuri, se-u Animadve-rsiones in X. librum Diog. Laer.). In the same year the more important ;S'ynta.gma philosophake Epic-uri was published. In 1648 Gassendi had been compelled from ill-health to give up his lectures at the College Royal. He travelled for some time in the south of France, spending nearly two years at Toulon, the climate of which suited him. In 1653 he returned to Paris and resumed his literary work, pub- lishing in that year his well-known and popular lives of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe. The disease from which he suffered, lung complaint, had, however, established a ﬁrm hold on him. His strength gradually failed, and he died at Paris on the 24th October 1655, in the sixty-third year of his age. ENDI His collected works, of which the most important is the .33/ntag/Ina 1’Iu'losopIuIc2un (Opera, i. and ii. ), were published in 1655 by Montmort ((3 vols. fol., Lyons). Another edition, also in 6 folio volumes, was published by Aver-anius in 1727. These volumes sufﬁciently attest the wide extent of his reading and the versatility of his powers. The ﬁrst two are occupied entirely with his S3/ntagmu. I’Iu'losopIu'c2cm ; the third contains his critical writings on Epicurus, Aristotle, Descartes, Fludd, and Lord l:lerbert, with some occasional pieces on certain problems of physics; the fourth, his Institutio Astronomica, and his ('o7n7ncnt<u'ii de Rebus Celeslibus; the fifth, his commentary on the tenth book of Diogenes Laertius, the biographies of Epicurus, Peiresc, Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, Peurbach, and Regio- montanus, with some tracts on the value of ancient money, on the Roman calendar, and on the theory of music, to all which is appended a large and prolix piece entitled l'otitius Ifcclesioe Dirziezwis; the sixth volume contains his corre- spondence. The Lives, especially those of Copernicus, Tycho, and Peiresc, have been justly admired. That of Peiresc has been repeatedly printed; it has also been translated into English. Gassendi was one of the ﬁrst after the revival of letters who treated the literature of philosophy in a lively Way. His writings of this kind, though too laudatory and somewhat diffuse, have great merit ; they abound in those anecdotal details, natural yet not obvious rellexions, and vivacious turns of thought, which made Gibbon style him, with some extravagance certainly, though it was true enough up to Gassendi’s time———“ le meilleur philosophe des littora- teurs, et le meilleur litterateur des philosophes.” Gassendi will always retain an honourable place in the history of physical science. He certainly added little original to the stock of human knowledge, but the clearness of his exposition and the man11er in which he, like his greater contemporary, Bacon, urged the necessity and utility of experimental research, were of inestiniable service to the cause of science. To what extent any place can be assigned him in the history of philosophy is more doubtful. His anti-Aristotelian writing has been already noticed. The objections to Descart.es—one of which at least, through Descartes’s statement of it, has become famous—have no speculative value, and in general are the outcome of the crudest empiricism. His labours on Epicurus have a certain historical value, but the inherent want of consistency in the philosophical system raised on Epicureanism is such as to deprive it of all genuine worth. Along with strong expres- sions of empiricism (m'Iu'l in intellectu quad non prius fucrit in sensu) we ﬁnd him holding doctrines absolutely irrecon- cilable with empiricism in any form. For while he main- tains constantly his favourite maxim “that there is nothing in the intellect which has not been in the senses,” and while he contends that the imaginative faculty, “ plian- tasia," is the counterpart of sense, that, as it has to do with material images, it is itself, like sense, material, and essen- tially the same both in men and brutes, he at the same time admits that the intellect, which he aﬂirms t.o be im- material and immortal—the most characteristic distinction of humanity—attains notions anrl truths of which no effort of sensation or imagination can give us the slightest ap- prehension (Op., ii. 383). He instances the capacity of forming “general notions ;” the very conception of uni- versality itself (ib., 384), to which he says'brutes, who partake as truly as men in the faculty called “phantasia,” never attain; the notion of God, whom he says we may imagine to be corporeal, but understand t.o be incorporeal ; and lastly, the reﬂex action by which the mind makes its own phenomena and operations the objects of attention. The .S'_;/ntagnza Philosophiczznz, in fact, is one of the eclectic systems which unite, or rather place in juxtaposi- tion, irreconcilable dogmas from various schools of thought.