But the rehabilitation of Epikuros, and the exposition of his doctrine, required great caution in Gassendi. see clearly from the preface to his book on the life and morals of Epikuros, that it seemed a bolder thing to follow Epikuros than to set forth a new cosmogony. Nevertheless the justification of his cause he wisely does not seek deeply, but puts together superficially, though with a great expenditure of dialectic skill-a proceeding which has always succeeded better with the Church than a serious and independent attempt to reconcile its doctrines with strange or hostile ingredients.

Is Epikuros a heathen?-so too was Aristotle. If Epikuros attacks superstition and religion, he was right, for he knew not the true religion. Does he teach that the gods neither reward nor punish, and does he honour them for their perfection?-we have only the thought of childish instead of servile reverence, and therefore a purer and more Christian conception. The errors of Epikuros must be carefully corrected; which is done, however, in that Cartesian

videri posse, illi quandam excusationis speciem obtendi. Intererat enim, quia jus civile et trauquillitas publica illud ex ipso exigebat: Improbabat, quia nihil cogit animum Sapientis, ut vulgaria sapiat. Intus, erat sui juris, extra legibus obstrictus societatis hominum. Ita per salvebat eodem tempore quod et aliis debebat, et sibi.... Pars haec tum erat Sapientiae, ut philosophi sentirent cum paucis, loquerentur vero, agerentque cum multis." Here the last clause especially seems to be more applicable to Gassendi's time than to Epikuros, who enjoyed great liberty of teaching and speaking, and availed himself of it. Hobbes (Leviathan, c. xxxii.) maintains that obedience to the state religion involves also the duty of not contradicting its doctrines. This course, indeed, he followed according to the letter, but at the same time was restrained by no scruples from withdrawing the VOL. I.

ground from under all religion-for those who are clever enough to draw conclusions. The "Leviathan " ap. peared in 1651; the first edition of the treatise "De Vita et Moribus Epicuri" in 1647; yet here no weight can be laid on the priority of the thought; it lay entirely in the time and in the general questions (where there was no reference to mathematics and natural science). Hobbes had undoubtedly been independent long before he came to know Gassendi.

4 Observe the unusually solemn tone in which Gassendi, towards the conclusion of the preface to the "De Vita et Moribus Epicuri," reserves the doctrine of the Church: "In Religione Majores, hoc est Ecclesiam Catholicam, Apostolicam et Romanam sequor, cuius hactenus decreta defendi ac porro defendam, nec mo ab illa ullius unquam docti aut indocti separabit oratio."

R

spirit which we have just observed in the doctrines of the creation and of motion. The frankest eagerness is shown to vindicate for Epikuros among all ancient philosophers the greatest purity of morals. In this way, then, are we justified in regarding Gassendi as the true regenerator of Materialism, and the more so when we consider how great was the actual influence he exercised upon succeeding generations.

Pierre Gassendi, the son of poor peasants, was born in 1592, near Digne in Provence. He became a student, and was at sixteen years of age a teacher of Rhetoric, and three years later Professor of Philosophy at Aix. He had already written a book which clearly shows his leaningsthe "Exercitationes Paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos,” a work full of youthful zeal, one of the sharpest and most contemptuous attacks upon the Aristotelian philosophy. This was later, in the years 1624 and 1645, printed in part, but five books at the advice of his friends were burnt. Advanced by the learned senator Peirescius, Gassendi was soon afterwards made a canon and then provost at Digne.

This rapid career led him through various departments. As Professor of Rhetoric he had to give philological instruction, and it is not improbable that his preference for Epikuros grew up in this period from his study of Lucretius, who in philological circles had long been highly prized. When Gassendi in 1628 undertook a journey to the Netherlands, the philologist Eryceus Puteanus, of Louvain, gave him a copy of a gem with a portrait of Epikuros, which was very highly reverenced by himself.5

5 De Vita et Moribus Epicuri, conclusion of the preface (To Luiller): "Habes ipse jam penes te duplicem illius effigiem, alteram ex gemma expressam, quam dum Lovanio facerem iter, communicavit mecum vir ille eximius Eryceus Puteanus, quamque etiam in suis epistolis cum hoc eulogie evulgavit: Intuere, mi amice, ct in lineis istis spirantem adhuc mentem magni viri. Epicurus est;

sic oculos, sic ora ferebat. Intuere imaginem dignam istis lineis, istis manibus, et porro oculis omnium.' Alteram expressam ex statua, Romae ad ingressum interioris Palatii Ludovisianorum hortorum exstante, quam ad me misit Naudacus noster (the publisher of the essay of Hieronymus Rorarius mentioned in the previous section) usus opera Henrici Howenii in eadem familia Cardinalitia

The "Exercitationes Paradoxicae" must, in fact, have been a work of uncommon boldness and great acuteness, and we have every reason to suppose that it did not remain without influence upon the learned world of France, for the friends who advised the burning of the five lost books must have been acquainted with their contents. It is also intelligible that Gassendi would take counsel of men who were near his own standpoint, and were capable of understanding and appreciating the contents of his work from. other aspects than the consideration of its dangerousness. So may in those times many a fire have quietly smouldered unsuspected, the flames of which were to break out later in quite other directions. Happily at least a brief statement of the contents of the lost books has been preserved to us. From this we see that in the fourth book not only the Copernican theory was advanced, but also the doctrine of the eternity of the world, which had been drawn from Lucretius by Giordano Bruno. As the same book contained an assault upon the Aristotelian elements, we may very easily conjecture that Atomism was here taught in opposition to Aristotle. This is the more probable because the seventh book, according to this table of contents, contained a formal recommendation of the Epikurean theory of Morals.6

Gassendi was, moreover, one of those happy natures who can everywhere allow themselves a little more than other people. The precocious development of his mind had not with him, as with Pascal, led to an early satiety of knowledge and a melancholy existence. Light-hearted and amiable, he everywhere won himself friends, and, with all the modesty of his demeanour, he allowed himself gladly,

pictoris. Tu huc inserito utram vales, quando et non male altera, ut vides, refert alteram, et memini utramque congruere cum alia in amplissimo cimeliarcho Viri nobilis Casparis Monconisii Lierguii, propraetoris Lugdunensis, asservata."

6 Exercitationes Paradoxicae adver

sus Aristoteleos, Hagae Comitum. 1656, Praef.: "Uno verbo docet (b. vii.) Epicuri de voluptate sententiam: ostendendo videlicet, qua ratione summum bonum in voluptate constitutum sit, et quemadmodum laus virtutum actionumque humanarum ex hoc principio dependeat."

amongst those he could trust, to give the reins to his inexhaustible humour. In his anecdotes the traditional medicine came very badly off, and he has suffered bitterly enough from her retaliation. It is notable that amongst the authors who had influenced him in his early youth, and freed him from Aristotle, he mentions in the first line, not the witty scoffer Montaigne, but the pious sceptic Charron and the serious Luis Vives, who always unites a strong moral judgment with his logical acumen.

Like Descartes, so Gassendi, too, must renounce, in setting forth his philosophy, "the use of his own intellect," only it did not occur to him to push the process of accommodation to the doctrines of the Church further than was anywhere necessary. Whilst Descartes made a virtue of necessity, and veiled the Materialism of his natural philosophy in the broad mantle of an idealism dazzling by its novelty, Gassendi remained essentially a Materialist, and viewed the devices of him who had formerly shared his views with unconcealed dissatisfaction. In Descartes the mathematician has the upper hand; in him, the physicist : while the other, like Plato and Pythagoras in antiquity allowed himself to be seduced by the example of mathematics to overpass with his conclusions the field of all possible experience, he clung to empiricism, and except so far as ecclesiastical dogma seemed unconditionally to demand it, never forsook the borders of a speculation which ever framed its very boldest theories on the analogy of experience. Descartes soared aloft to a system which violently severs thought and sensuous intuition, and by this very means makes its way to the most hazardous assertions; Gassendi maintained with unshaken steadfastness the unity of thought and sensuous intuition.

In the year 1643 he published his "Disquisitiones Anticartesianae," a work justly distinguished as a model of controversy, as delicate and polite as it is thorough and witty. If Descartes began by doubting of everything, even of what was given in sense, Gassendi showed that it

is plainly impossible to realise an abstraction from all that was given in sense-that therefore the 'Cogito ergo sum' was anything rather than the highest first truth from which all others were deduced.

In fact, that Cartesian doubt which is taken up some fine morning ("semel in vita") in order to free the soul. from all the prejudices imbibed since childhood, is a mere frivolous playing with empty ideas. In a concrete psychical act thought can never be separated from sense elements; but in mere formulae (as, e.g., we reckon with √— 1, without being able to represent this magnitude to ourselves), we may amuse ourselves by rejecting in the same way the doubting subject, and even the act of doubt. We gain aothing by this, but we also lose nothing except-the time devoted to speculations of this kind.

Gassendi's most famous objection, that existence may just as well be inferred from any other action as from thinking,7 is so obvious, indeed, that it has often been repeated independently of Gassendi, and as often said to be superficial and unintelligible. Büchner declares that the argument is the same as if we were to say, “The dog barks, therefore he is." Buckle, on the contrary, declares such criticism to be short-sighted, since it is not a logical but a psychological process that is in question.

But, as against this well-meant defence, we must bear in mind the fact, as clear as sunshine, that it is Descartes, in fact, who confuses the logical and psychological processes, and that when we clearly discriminate them the whole argument collapses.

To begin with, this formal correctness of the objection is quite indisputably established in the words of the Principia" (i. 7), “Repugnat enim, ut putemus id quod cogitat, eo ipso tempore, quo cogitat, nihil esse." Here the purely logical argument is employed by himself, and

7 The example, 'I walk, therefore I am,' originates not with Gassendi, but with Descartes, who uses it in

his rejoinder, in other respects quite
agreeing with this objection.

Buckle, Hist. of Civilis, ii. 87 n.