CHAPTER I
GASSENDI
I.
We have now passed in review all the main features of Gassendi’s thought: what are we to say of it as a whole?
Here and there in the literature of philosophy one finds references to Gassendi. As a rule they are patently second hand, and often accompanied by the remark that Gassendi has been unduly neglected, without however any clear indications of what is to be expected from the study of his works.[118] We are now in a position to consider the value of Gassendi’s writings and show the reasons why he was neglected and also why he deserves a better fate.
The first phase of modern philosophy as it is described by historians was marked by the revival of ancient systems and a tendency to revert to pre-Aristotelian doctrines, especially atomism. No one however attempted to reconstruct atomism as a system: the atomistic principles only affected certain phases of the teaching of contemporary philosophers: until at last Gassendi published his work. Unfortunately, it came too late to catch the general ear: already the keynote of modern thought had been struck and a new point of view adopted by speculative thinkers.[119] The direct objectivity of Gassendi could no longer find a responsive audience when every mind was busily developing the new notions of a subjective philosophy. Gassendi was ranked among the ancients, true descendant of Democritus and Epicurus: the world wanted no more of the ancients: we, they said, are the ancients, and in the history of thought the last is ripest and best. Not only was Gassendi thus hampered by his relations and discounted by being a disciple of Epicurus, he was also regarded as materialistic, not in the sense in which we might use the term now, but in opposition to the idealism which was daily gaining ground. Descartes had at least succeeded in dividing mind from matter, and so far laid the foundation of the subjective movement in philosophy; and for those who cherished this position Gassendi’s view of the universe could have no attractions. The all-absorbing question now was how to heal the wound that thought had inflicted on itself, how to bridge the gulf that these convulsions had made in the once solid world of Being. Given a dualism of this kind the central problem must be that of re-unification, and so, as a matter of history, it was, from Descartes down to Kant. On the very edge of this era stands Gassendi, as it were the last of the old school: after him comes the long period of restless searching, with its slow growth, through many abstractions to a new concreteness and fresh satisfaction in the discovery that after all _the_ world is _my_ world.
Across this sea of strife we look back to-day, and are surprised to see how near to us that last beacon seems: the longer way takes much time, and in the end we are further on, but not so far as we could wish, seeing how many toilsome years have elapsed. We have still with us the old problems, many of them not yet entirely obscured by the multiplicity of solutions: we have still the old antagonisms, and philosophers strive in vain to repudiate the titles with which the critics successfully label them. I am far enough from suggesting that man has not progressed in the sphere of thought just as undoubtedly as he has progressed in the sciences and in adaptation to his world; but as one reads the pages of Gassendi there grows the feeling that this was the ‘synthetic philosophy’ of its age: that Gassendi aimed to do what Herbert Spencer has aimed to do: that the difference of their material is a significant comment on what has been done; and their similarity an equally significant comment on what has not been achieved: while between Gassendi and his opponent lay just the kind of gulf that lies now between the Spencerian and the non-Spencerian.[120]
II.
In the list given by Ueberweg of those who revived ancient doctrines we find ‘Epicureanism by Gassendi.’ Further on we find a note on Gassendi which runs thus: ‘Gassendi sought to defend Epicureanism against unjustified attacks, and to show that it contained the best doctrine of physics, and at the same time to combine it with Christian theology. Gassendi’s atomism is less a doctrine of dead nature than is that of Epicurus.... From its relation to the investigation of nature in modern times, Gassendi’s revival of Epicureanism is of far greater historical importance than the renewal of any other system: not unjustly does F. A. Lange consider Gassendi as the one who may properly be styled the renewer in modern times of systematic materialism.’ These are cautious words, and obviously more of Lange than Gassendi: we may take them as our text, and see how far they are true.
The passage quoted gives us two descriptions of Gassendi: his philosophy is (1) Epicureanism modified and (2) systematic materialism. The former definition does not help us much unless we know more accurately how far the Epicureanism was modified, and in any case Epicureanism was never a term of very exact significance. We can leave this and take up the second title, materialist, a label generally affixed to the name of Gassendi and usually justified by a reference to Lange, who seems to have been more anxious to find a materialist in Gassendi than to find out whether Gassendi was a materialist.
To define this term materialist we shall have to work backwards. It means in common use a philosophy which starts from the object as something distinct from and opposed to the subject. ‘No object without subject’ is, according to Schopenhauer, the principle which for ever makes materialism impossible: from which it seems to follow that object without subject is the peculiar theme of the materialist. Certainly the materialist does not start from ‘notion’ or ego, and so far forth he is the antithesis of the idealist. But materialism implies far more than this: it implies a view of the universe as altogether objective, as all object and no subject, as a self-organising, self-subsisting whole, known only as it is reflected in a consciousness which is a byproduct of its activities. Whether we take materialist in the widest or the narrowest sense in which it can be used, one point is essential: mind must be a function of matter, and this alone justifies us in denying that Gassendi is properly a materialist. At the same time he is certainly not an idealist. But the necessity of dividing all philosophers into one or other of these classes is what we are prepared to dispute; and, finally, we may discover a more suitable title than materialist while clearing our minds on this point.
To begin with the historical aspect, Gassendi as related to the ancients might more suitably be called a physical than a materialist philosopher. After Kant, idealism takes as its motto, ‘no object without subject.’ Before that era of criticism there was idealism of another kind that retained many objects that were only partially, if at all, dependent on a subject. The Cartesian doctrine is rightly called idealism in so far as it laid stress on the mind as the centre of our universe of knowledge; but that world of knowledge lay in an ocean of Being that stretched beyond its limits, unknown and as yet unnamed. This idealism, the idealism that tells us our world is known only through the mediation of ideas, and so keeps asunder that world and the cosmos of ideas, is far different from critical or transcendental idealism, and its opposite is not materialism in the modern sense at all. How could it be, seeing that the idealism in question kept its matter a solid ‘adverse occupant of space’ and carried the reality of this matter up to the very threshold of thought, even there trying to retain its being for thought as the thought itself, and convert its grossness into thought by refining it to its subtlest forms?
History has done justice to Descartes, but hardly to Gassendi. Even as contemporaries they were mainly regarded as rival physicists, the one for atoms and the other for vortices: yet one cannot help thinking that if Gassendi had possessed the clearness and directness of Descartes’ or Hobbes’ style he might have commanded as much recognition as either. If we take Descartes as the typical figure of this period, and call his doctrine material idealism,[121] we shall have a point which may enable us to determine the bearings of Gassendi. The feature of that idealism is that it makes extra-mental reality uncertain, or, to put it more vigorously, draws the line of real and unreal at the boundary of one’s own skin. This Gassendi does _not_ do, so that title does not include him.
It appeared promising for a moment, since the ground of that distinction of inner and outer existents lies in the doctrine of representative ideas. This doctrine we have also in Gassendi in the form of symbolic brain movements, so that a similar result might have been expected: as it is not forthcoming we cannot say more, but go back and start again.
If we look once more we see another common point. In a sense Descartes and Gassendi both start from experience; both are in a way empirical. But Descartes begins with a prejudice for rationalism: the ‘cogito ergo sum’ may not have been the actual starting point of his system, but its final emergence has been declared in the verdict of history to guarantee rationalism as the tone of the system. As compared with this, Gassendi works with a pure experience.
Once more we digress to wrestle with our terminology. What is experience as a basis of philosophy? In the language of the philosophy of to-day it is to be taken as the most comprehensive of all terms, the name for reality as it lives and moves, not merely in us, or in thought, but in itself. From it, as derivatives, spring subject and object and all other antitheses, and the work of philosophy is the analysis of this experience. This brings us back to idealism as Schopenhauer defined it. This is the result of the Kantian standpoint and his analysis of the object. Before Kant the _object_ was the same as the _thing_, a given and not a product; and thought based on experience was called empirical, now become an opprobrious epithet. Empiricism then is the science of experience in this cruder form. But as a rule ‘empirical’ as a philosophical label means subjective in the sense that Locke’s psychological method is empirical. Philosophy rapidly took this psychological trend: it was the human understanding to which all attention was directed, and with that the question arose, ‘how can I know what I know?’ drawing the curiosity of man after it with irresistible attraction.
Compared with these later enquirers (Berkeley and Hume) the position of Locke, and still more of Descartes, appears crude and uncritical. Yet there is an element of strength and comprehensiveness about them that is reassuring. This is due to their fresh simplicity in believing that what is actual must be possible, that what our experience gives us must be accepted even if it cannot be explained. Experience is then taken in the broadest possible way, and its truth accepted. Descartes, for example, finds his theory divides mind from matter: yet in experience they are one, and so they are again united: the critic pounces on the ‘inconsistency,’ but Descartes does better in bending theory to fact, as he knew it, than in distorting fact to save the theory. Modern philosophy has too much of the element that damned scholasticism when it casts the theory first and fits in the facts after. The shibboleth of theory plays in modern thought the part that authority played in scholasticism. We lay down for ourselves laws of what we _must_ have, and in the seclusion of the study we get it: outside the reality breaks loose, and we envy Hume, who found the problems that seemed to mock his efforts vanish when he stepped out into the sunshine.
Descartes stood for sincerity as well as he could. Gassendi too, barring graceful concessions to the dogmas he neglects, strikes us as sincere. For both, Experience was the last great fact, the first great synthesis that no theoretical analysis could destroy. For Gassendi experience is life, the life of thought and will and feeling, and the subject matter of philosophy. Hence his philosophy is grounded in experience; but it is an analysis of the experienced, not of experience itself: it is a mapping out, so far as may be an organisation, of the known, the felt and the willed: not a criticism of knowing or feeling or willing itself. As yet criticism is far off, looming in the horizon of the future: the darkness of the night is passing away, and in the day of freedom just beginning men rejoice in sorting out, arranging and setting in order the realities with which they feel themselves in living contact now that they no longer need to see the world through the veil of traditions.
Gassendi’s basis is this experience, to him at least not known as crude, and we may call him empirical, hoping that the term is sufficiently explained. Empiricism includes empirical idealism and empirical realism. The former ‘makes ideas into things,’ and gets rid of the world in the sense that Berkeley did.[122] With this Gassendi has nothing to do: he must therefore be classed as an empirical realist. But neither is this quite satisfactory. It is true we have the atoms, but atomism has more forms than one. It may be (1) pure physical atomism, such as we associate with the name of Democritus; or (2) pure idealistic atomism, such as Leibnitz attempted; or finally, (3) a mixed form combining the atomistic theory of the world with a non-materialistic view of the mind. This is the construction of things Gassendi gives us, and in this lies the great difficulty of properly understanding him. The difficulty can of course be overcome by saying that Gassendi was half-hearted or allowed his theory to be ruined by his orthodoxy. But is there any proof of this? None, I think, except that his construction does not work out as some have thought it ought to; does not present the unity we demand in modern works. But it is the prerogative of systems which start from consciousness to attain unity to a degree we never find in other systems; and the lack of unity is perhaps not so serious as appears at first, for if _matter_ does not carry us to the end we may find that our _principles_ do, and we at least remain faithful to our basis, experience.
The name atomism naturally allies itself with materialism. We are accustomed to atomic theories which belong to physical science, and therefore remain within the realm of matter. But if we reflect on atomism as a philosophical principle we see that it is essentially a method or principle, not a given matter, and therefore may be applied as a principle to any given. I do not say that it can rightly be applied; but only that it does not of itself necessitate matter being the only constituent principle. Just as evolution is a way of looking at things and does not tell us what that which evolves must be in other respects, so atomism merely lays down the law that a complex total must be composed of indivisible parts: whether the parts are material or spiritual is of no concern to atomism as such. This is clear if we think of Locke’s atomic psychology, of W. K. Clifford’s atomism, or of Leibnitz; and we need not fear the accusation of reversing history, for Giordano Bruno had grasped before Gassendi the significance for idealism of an atomistic doctrine, and rightly seen that the speculative aspect of atomism is simply the question of real minima.[123] The principle upon which atomism works is that the ultimate is an individuum, and this is not in any way touched by having a spiritual as well as a material order: whether there are to be more orders than one is a question that must be decided on its own merits, and Gassendi’s reason for having a soul that is not material is that he finds in his own life grounds for belief in an immaterial entity, in other words he takes it up from experience. For the present we are content to point out that there is this spiritual reality, and that it forms an integral part of the whole doctrine. We must therefore be careful to take our title ‘empirical realism’ strictly to mean that our ground is experience, and our world is real in the anti-idealistic sense that it is not made by mind.
III.
Having defined the scope of this philosophy a few remarks may be added on its main features: as our account of Gassendi is itself nothing but a summary, there is no need to add summary to summary, and nothing will be said here beyond what is necessary to indicate the view I take of the philosophy as a whole.
Gassendi’s philosophy is an analysis of our universe, attained by examining experience, and presented synthetically, or we might say syntactically (in a syntagma). As synthetic the presentation has a definite principle upon which it is worked out. This principle is the idea of ascending degrees of complexity. The unit is the atom: things are complexes of atoms: and each degree of complexity has its own peculiar attributes. We thus get a scale of Being as follows:
(_a_) The atomic scale.
(1) Primary complexes of atoms (kinds of earth). (2) Secondary complexes of atoms (metals, etc.). (3) Primary organic complexes: plants. (4) Secondary organic complexes: animals.
This does not by any means exhaust the content of reality: we have as well as (_a_) the atomic scale also,
(_b_) Time and Space. (_c_) The Soul. (_d_) God.
About Time and Space Gassendi has little to tell us: they were just the elements that could not be satisfactorily treated on the basis which he had chosen. But the difficulties which might have made it impossible for him to proceed were in a way solved by the method itself. If the world of nature is resolvable into units that are ultimate, impenetrable and irreducible, is there any objection to the universe also being regarded as a sum of irreducibles? Gassendi often speaks of the universe as a whole, and obviously thought of it as in some way one: the way that unity is to be conceived is an interesting question.
Must the whole be one? In some form or other philosophy has always answered yes. But there are three distinct phases to this answer. The last is that which is made possible by the subjective character of modern idealism, in which the unity is derived from the formative factor in knowledge. The first was the naïve unity which appears possible to a mind that can ask without qualification for a single material principle. These extremes have one point in common: they both regard the unity as necessarily belonging to the constitutive principle: they want to weave the universe of one stuff and relegate all differences to the pattern. The reason for this is the inequality of their categories: categories as such should all be equal, but in fact they are not: substance in the one case and spirit in the other have swallowed up all the other aspects of reality, and ceasing to be aspects have become the stuff itself. Now, when the crudeness of the primary standpoint has become clear, the natural tendency is to move towards the second; and this movement being as yet bound up with the progress of physical science, we find that the first phase of a doctrine that gives its rights to mind is the emphasis laid on law. To think of the law and the matter in such a way as to separate them is half-way toward making them collateral realities, and for a time produces satisfaction in minds that are dimly aware that all matter and no mind makes a dull world. At this point, and while we are as it were on tip-toe for the next development, the addition of a corollary to the original suggestion makes it into a useful basis for thought of one type, and then it is defended against progress as itself an ultimate standpoint. This phenomenon we observe in the history of philosophy more than once, namely the tendency for critical minds to fortify what was originally nothing but a halting ground, and sturdily refusing to go further, proclaim it the goal. The reason is not far to seek. Some minds require to know what they can have, others require to have what they desire: the latter are always too eager for the delicate poise of a mean position: they must fall one way or the other; but their more critical fellows fall neither way, and reserve their energies for rescuing their comrades and restoring once again the mean position. Not indeed quite the same, for the ardent souls ‘fall to rise, are baffled to fight better’; and the rescuer himself never quite gets back to the old footing, but to one sufficiently like it to be recognisable. The mean position has always got one characteristic, it has no constitutive unity. Monism demands a constitutive unity: whatever the stuff is, it must be one throughout. As to the righteousness of this demand I have nothing to say. I content myself with trying to make clear what the man in the mean position has to say for himself, for Gassendi is a type of that class.
The constitutive unity, we can imagine him saying, is an ideal, and no better than other ideals: if it will not work it must be given up. The fact that it appears to be the best ideal cannot help it if we find that it is useless in practice. Further, it may not be the best ideal if we think again, for that the world should be One Being is no great advantage to us, seeing that our interest does not lie in its being but in its doing. What we want then is only a world that is not One Being but one in its being, one in its doing, in all its dealings with me, single and not double. Its being is its being related to me, and all I want is that the entities should be capable of some sort of order, should be thinkable by me as system.[124]
It is at this point that the ardent soul runs ahead of the man in the mean position. He hears his cue in the word ‘thinkable,’ and at once declares that the thinkable is Thought, and therefore the objective is ‘ultimately’ Thought, and possibly even its objectivity is due to our having cast it from us, ‘ejected’ it in that carelessness of youth which can be retrieved only by again taking it back into ourselves. But this was exactly what was not meant: we did not want this assimilation of natures: on the contrary, we find it far easier to think of the reciprocal action of things different in nature. We do not say that the iron must really be a magnet or that the soul must be a body, but only that they must have the required affinities. And what are those affinities? Why, the affinities they have as a matter of fact got! Is this philosophy? The ardent soul thinks not. Yet what is the difference? The one wants to make the related factors one in nature, the other makes them different; but both want a relation, and ultimately care nothing so long as there is a relation and the possibility of relations.
We may by now seem to have rather wandered from Gassendi, but the object of these more abstract remarks is to suggest the outline of a position which is none too easy to grasp, and is indeed not so explicit in Gassendi as the above comparisons might suggest. But a few data briefly recalled will bring us back to our bearings. In Gassendi there are three substances—corporeal, non-corporeal, and mixed. There are more than three irreducibles, namely God, Time, Space, the atom, and the Soul.
This is therefore pluralism. Numerical plurality is not the point: else we should have to say there were as many universes as there were atoms. It is in qualitative plurality that we find the real irreducibleness of the factors in our universe. But if quality is the ground of plurality, where are we to stop? Everything that is different from anything else is qualitatively different, and in respect of the quality is irreducible. The universe is therefore a collection of irreducibles: it falls to pieces in our hands: where is its unity? Just here, in the fact that, before we meddled with it, it succeeded well enough: that if you give up meddling with it now it will go on just as it did before:[125] its unity is the bald and simple fact that it holds together, and the philosopher’s business is simply to formulate the ways in which that unity is in fact achieved.
The crudity of this is apparent, but we are not concerned at present with the question is this a good kind of philosophy, but rather is this a good specimen of the kind. To gain further light on this we shall examine three other points in detail, namely (_a_) the place of motion in the system, (_b_) the use of categories, and (_c_) the relation of quantity to quality.
(_a_) Any view of the universe that starts with matter and mind as separate, relies largely on motion to enable it to deal with the inert mass. But the inertia of the matter is itself only a consequence of the attempt to keep a bare entity as the type of all things external: it is, in other words, a multiplication of entities which only leads us into difficulties by driving us to separate in existence the things to which we have given distinction. If we revert to experience we find no such thing as motion in rerum natura, only moving things. We are thus compelled to unite in the unity of common life that which thought divided. For a philosophy like that of Gassendi motion is fundamental and at the same time fraught with temptations. There is always the tendency to use motion as a means of transition from one aspect of reality to another. Taken abstractly, motion is a common denominator: it is one and the same in all things, being nothing but change of place of atoms. But in order to get this common denominator we must pursue the abstraction of matter to such a degree as to make the motion a pure motion, a motion of nothing, and finally nothing at all. If this reduction to non-entity is recognised, motion remains distinct from the moving, and we get another factor which by its ill-defined nature is able to work miracles for us. Activity is then thrust forward as the essential quality of spirit: the quality is thought of as a thing, activity, and material activity being also a kind of activity, it seems clear that activity is the link between mind and matter, and if we can refine the material activity sufficiently we shall have got across the everlasting gulf. If we condemn this as mere abstraction in the interests of either mind or matter, the ‘tu quoque’ is ready: for if the activity is neither the matter nor the mind, it is yet no worse than matter which does not mentalise or mind that will not materialise.
This pitfall Gassendi avoids by making motion, in the primary sense of inner motion, one with matter. The formula is materia actuosa, not matter et actio; and this is possible because he refuses to reduce the ultimate to a mere imaginary entity.
There are three critical points of transition, namely from inorganic to organic, from non-sentient to sentient, from unthinking to thinking. Extremists say these are the same; but not so Gassendi, whose scale is
Inorganic, } Organic, } non sentient, } sentient, } non-intellectual, intellectual.
Gassendi realises that there is some difficulty in this. He lays emphasis on the distinctness of animus, but when he comes to it, the distinctness is dissolved away. Is it any greater jump from non-intellectual to intellectual than it was from insensile to sensile? Whatever we do with our scale, it must fall to pieces if we try to look for _real_ bonds: mind is not joined to body by any gluten or hooks:[126] it is a question of the other aspect, the quality, the what-it-is in its actual being. Through the material sphere we get our transitions mediated objectively by the idea of movement and co-ordination. In the sphere of sensation we have the non-sensile affinities (magnet and iron) leading up to the sensile affinities, which again have endless degrees as we rise from lowest (oyster, _e.g._) to highest. Complexity is the medium by which we graduate this scale and ‘most complex’ is the formula for what we call highest. But the fact of being graduated does not mar the reality of the degrees: they remain realities which we graduate but do not fuse. For Gassendi the real difficulty of dealing with mind comes in the fact that it implies a kind of movement which is not in line with the others, a movement which returns upon itself as no motion does in the physical sphere; but that is not regarded as a reason for rejecting it, but as a necessity compelling us to recognise that there is more than one kind of motion in the universe, and a kind of reality which is not subject to appulse: there is just the same reason why there _should_ be a reality so superior to sense as is the mind, as there is for the eagle with its superiority over the oyster. In both cases the ‘should be’ is the point we cannot deal with: we have them as facts. The reality of the graduated as actual things, in opposition to the graduation, we shall discuss in section (_c_).
(_b_) Gassendi’s exposition of his philosophy is often made more difficult for the reader by the fact that many of the discussions are dialectical disputes about categories. The categories in question are simply recognised headings, and when disputing with some scholastic author or current theory, Gassendi employs the categories as rules of formal disputation.
The prime category is that of substance. Under this fall all corporeal entities without dispute; but trouble arises when a reality is given which is not corporeal, and yet cannot be simply denied. The case then stands exactly as it did with Leucippus. The reality being not-not-ens must be ens, and therefore substance. But this seems to leave us with no protection against hypostatising any concept into a substance. To a certain extent this is guarded against by the use which Gassendi makes of the idea of function. This idea enables us to retain as realities much that cannot be accurately defined in regard to its being: for we substitute for the being of the thing its doing. In spite of the objective existence which Gassendi gives to things, he adopts the somewhat idealistic method of defining them, and even formulating them from the point of view of their relation to us. Believing that things are what they seem, in all normal cases, we can consistently define the ultimate reality from the experience of it, the manifestation of reality being its own definition. Thus space and time are real, because in experience things and events have spatial and temporal order. The atom, the void, and the soul are real on the same principles. Taking substance in this sense, it equals reality, and reality is for Gassendi a category. Quantity and quality are also categories, of which more later. The other category is that of relation. This is identical with place in the system, and as such it is the final determination of the existent. When we have shown _that_ a thing is, _what_ it is, and _where_ it is, we have done all that man can toward the production of an ordered system of things. It is a noticeable fact that Gassendi makes no use of potentiality as a category, though it was commonly so used: he criticises the particular applications of the idea, but does not state his reasons for rejecting it. It may be surmised, but it is only a surmise, that he considered it a confusion between the categories of relation and substance. In any case it certainly amounted to that, for it made what was only a relation between the parts of a process into an actual property, and left it uncertain whether a thing was what it was or was what it was going to be. Gassendi was quite scholastic enough to argue that the statement, ‘the acorn is the oak,’ involved a false use of the verb ‘to be,’ whether you added ‘potentially’ or not: he was also philosopher enough to see that it either meant nothing or it implied the unreality of all process, or what he would call the unreality of degrees of being. This was in direct opposition to his own ideas about quantity and quality and their relations.
(_c_) As a rule the category of relation _was_ made substantive: that is to say, the being in an order is made to be a reality for the thing as well as for the ordering mind; and the _whole_ order is therefore significant for the individual at any individual stage. Hence _A_ is said to be potentially _B_. This means that _A_ to _B_ is a process which we view as a series of states; but so is lowest to highest in any case: relation is a category for all, and only per accidens a special category for some. The relating as such being the same for all, why should it be more easy to say that the acorn is potentially an oak, than to say mud is potentially a man? Yet it is easier (for Gassendi and his contemporaries at least), because there are real, and, as it were, closed circles. Within the species we can understand growth, because it is nutrition and assimilation of the like. Hence, in the closed circle relation is expressible as potentiality. But the definition of the circles comes from experience. Potentiality is therefore not a universal solvent. This seems arbitrary, because the expansion of the given circles is not limited: why should we stop short at any but the most universal terms, say matter, and make everything potentially everything else? It seems, indeed, that we ought not to stop anywhere short of the mutually exclusive realities, mind and matter. But Gassendi is opposed to the whole frame of mind implied in this, and so far from working up to this irrational stop at the difference of mind from matter, he works down from it to a totally different conclusion. He does not admit that the step from matter to mind is unique: he does not admit that the difference between two substances is really greater than the difference between radical forms of one substance: in any composite there is an unanalysable addition, the form, the being-what-it-is which is revealed only synthetically in the function, the being of the whole as whole. Now mind, he says, is nothing apart from matter: hence mind plus matter is a functional unit. Where is the marvel? _This_ complex produces _this_ result, and why should there not be this complex, and with it this result? If you say it is unique, so is every other qualitative phenomenon qua qualitative.
This is, I think, the crucial point of Gassendi’s thought, and he cannot be understood unless it is grasped. It is exemplified in his whole treatment of the universe of things. It is, moreover, an idea capable of much expansion, but the expansion is what it did not get at the hands of Gassendi. He is doubtless right in keeping quantity and quality apart, right in realising the limits of mechanism, and yet not suppressing the quantitative aspect. It is this grasp of qualitative distinctions that saves him from materialism, it saves him from trying to compromise between mind and matter. But after all quantity and quality are only categories, both alike objective, ways in which the world of objects can be thought of, formulae for its analysis. There we find the weak point, right at the heart of the whole scheme: so long as the object remains unanalysed and mind and matter are equally objective, so long as the categories are applied to a world of crude objects such that mind and matter are both _equally_ objective, we reach the limit; and our opinion on the value of this point decides our estimate of Gassendi. Criticism, aided by the development of philosophy can find flaws only too easily, so much so that it is not worth while to suggest any: yet there are still many who will doubtless find that they can read Gassendi with sympathy and, with all his faults, recognise that he combined, with a vast knowledge of facts, a truly philosophical attempt to reach the truth that is in them.
The philosophical writings of Gassendi perpetually recall to our minds the works of Leibnitz and Lotze both in regard to matter and form. We have already shown that Gassendi is not to be passed over lightly as a mere materialist, a supporter of what Lotze calls ‘evil materialism’: we now require to see how our author is related to the later Realists and how far he may be regarded as anticipating their work.
Before entering into the details of this subject a word or two must be said with regard to its dangers. A moment’s reflection will show that Leibnitz and Lotze can hardly fail to differ one from the other in their whole outlook with that difference which Kant brought into philosophical work of every kind. If we speak of Realism as though it were a line of thought maintaining itself through an unbroken succession of writers and uninfluenced by other lines of thought, it will soon be apparent that the terms we use are almost the only permanent elements; the letter abides but the spirit changes, and the line of progress which thought follows under one name is often the slow fulfilment of a circle that places it at last adverse to its own starting point. Whole passages in Leibnitz breathe the sentiments of Gassendi: the _Mikrokosmus_ is planned with the same comprehensiveness and in the same spirit as the _Physics_ of the _Syntagma_: the reader leaves them both with a strong sense of their likeness to Gassendi. In following out the relations and the differences of these writers I shall work with a view chiefly to elucidate Gassendi and limit my remarks to that scope, diverging into some general remarks on the character of the periods under consideration only so far as that purpose requires.