Die Stellung Gassendis zu Deskartes

Abstract

GASSENDI AND DESCARTES were contemporaries and fellow-countrymen, but the relation between them is mainly one of contrast. Gassendi was of peasant origin, a writer encyclopædic in his range, an Epicurus redivivus with all Epicurus's distrust of mathematics and all his belief in a material soul, a sceptic who was yet content to remain in the ranks of the Catholic priesthood, his face ever turned to the past whether in philosophy or religion. On the other side there is Descartes, a noble by birth, a student principally of the human understanding, something of a Platonist, with the Platonist's reverence for mathematics and numbers, a dualist who fixed a great gulf between mind and body and between man and the lower animals, an uncompromising doubter of everything but his own doubt and all that is implied by the capacity to doubt, the exponent of cogito, ergo sum—in a word, the representative of the distinctively modern tendencies, which mean in religion Protestantism, in science mathematical physics, in philosophy Kantianism new and old. Only in so far as modern thought inclines to atomism and materialism—and how much that is the author points out in his closing paragraph—do we find that its sympathies lie with Gassendi rather than with Descartes.

Die Stellung Gassendis zu Deskartes.

By Dr. Hermann Schneider. Pp. 67. (Leipzig: Dürr'sche Buchhandlung, 1904.) Price 1.50 marks.