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Rh physics and of Ethics, this very learned theologian (one of the most orthodox, professedly, of whom the Catholic church has to boast), carried his veneration for the authority of Epicurus to a degree bordering on weakness and servility; and although, on such occasions, he is at the utmost pains to guard his readers against the dangerous conclusions commonly ascribed to his master, he has nevertheless retained more than enough of his system to give a plausible colour to a very general suspicion, that he secretly adopted more of it than he chose to avow.

As Gassendi’s attachment to the physical doctrines of Epicurus, predisposed him to give an easier reception than he might otherwise have done to his opinions in Metaphysics and in Ethics, so his unqualified contempt for the hypothesis of the Vortices, seems to have created in his mind an undue prejudice against the speculations of Descartes on all other subjects. His objections to the argument by which Descartes has so triumphantly estaplished the distinction between Mind and Matter, as separate and heterogeneous objects of human knowledge, must now appear, to every person capable of forming a judgment upon the question, altogether frivolous and puerile; amounting to nothing more than this, that all our knowledge is received by the channel of the external senses,—insomuch, that there is not a single object of the understanding which may not be ultimately analyzed into sensible images; and of consequence, that when Descartes proposed to abstract from these images in studying the mind, he rejected the only materials out of which it is possible for our faculties to rear any superstructure. The sum of the whole matter is (to use his own language), that “there is no real distinction between imagination and intellection;” meaning, by the former of these words, the power which the mind possesses of representing to itself the material objects and qualities it has previously perceived. It is evident, that this conclusion coincides exactly with the tenets inculcated in England at the same period by his friend Hobbes, as well as with those revived at a latter period by Diderot, Horne Tooke, and many other writers, both French and English, who, while they were only repeating the exploded dogmas of Epicurus, fancied they were pursuing, with miraculous success, the new path struck out by the genius of Locke.

It is worthy of remark, that the argument employed by Gassendi against Descartes, is copied almost verbatim from his own version of the account given by Diogenes Laertius