qualities and their reduction to quantitative distinctions,[1] while he shares with him the belief in the typical character of mathematics and the mechanical theory of the world. The truth of geometrical propositions and demonstrations is as unconditionally certain for man as for God, only that man learns them by a discursive process, whereas God's intuitive understanding comprehends them with a glance and knows more of them than man. The book of the universe is written in mathematical characters; motion is the fundamental phenomenon in the world of matter; our knowledge reaches as far as phenomena are measurable; the qualitative nature of force, back of its quantitative determinations, remains unknown to us. When Galileo maintains that the Copernican theory is philosophically true and not merely astronomically useful, thus interpreting it as more than a hypothesis, he is guided by the conviction that the simplest explanation is the most probable one, that truth and beauty are one, as in general he concedes a guiding though not a controlling influence in scientific work to the aesthetic demand of the mind for order, harmony, and unity in nature, to correspond to the wisdom of the Creator.
One of the most noted and influential among the contemporaries, countrymen, and opponents of Descartes, was the priest and natural scientist, Petrus Gassendi,[2] from 1633 Provost of Digne, later for a short period professor of mathematics at Paris. His renewal of Epicureanism, to which he was impelled by temperament, by his reverence for Lucretius, and by the anti-Aristotelian tendency of his thinking, was of far more importance for modern thought than the attempts
- ↑ This doctrine is developed by Galileo in the controversial treatise against Padre Grassi, The Scales (Il Saggiatore, 1623, in the Florence edition of his collected works, 1842 seq., vol. iv. pp. 149-369; cf. Natorp, Descartes' Erkenntnisstheorie, 1882, chap. vi.). In substance, moreover, this doctrine is found, as Heussler remarks, Baco, p. 94, in Bacon himself, in Valerius Terminus (Works, Spedding, vol. iii. pp. 217-252.)
- ↑ Pierre Gassendi, 1592-1655: On the Life and Character of Epicurus, 1647; Notes on the Tenth Book of Diogenes Laërtius, with a Survey of the Doctrine of Epicurus, 1649. Works, Lyons, 1658, Florence, 1727. Cf. Lange, History of Materialism, book i. § 3, chap, 1; Natorp, Analekten, Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. xviii. 1882, p. 572 seq.
