[773] P. 446.
23. The mind, as long as it dwells in the body, seems to have no intelligible species, except phantasms derived from sense. These he takes for impressions on the brain, driven to and fro by the animal spirits till they reach the phantasia, or imaginative faculty, and cause it to imagine sensible things. The soul, in Gassendi’s theory, consists of an incorporeal part or intellect, and of a corporeal part, the phantasy or sensitive soul, which he conceives to be diffused throughout the body. The intellectual soul instantly perceives, by its union with the phantasy, the images impressed upon the latter, not by impulse of these sensible and material species, but by intuition of their images in the phantasy.[774] Thus, if I rightly apprehend his meaning, we are to distinguish, first, the species in the brain, derived from immediate sense or reminiscence; secondly, the image of these conceived by the phantasy; thirdly, the act of perception in the mind itself, by which it knows the phantasy to have imagined these species, and knows also the species themselves to have, or to have had, their external archetypes. This distinction of the animus, or reasonable, from the anima, or sensitive soul, he took, as he did a great part of his philosophy, from Epicurus.
[774] Eodem momento intellectus ob intimam sui præsentiam cohærentiamque cum phantasia rem eandem contuetur, p. 450.
24. The phantasy and intellect proceed together, so that they might appear at first to be the same faculty. Not only, however, are they different in their operation even as to objects which fall under the senses, and are represented to the mind, but the intellect has certain operations peculiar to itself. Such is the apprehensions of things which cannot be perceived by sense, as the Deity, whom, though we can only imagine as corporeal, we apprehend or understand to be otherwise.[775] He repeats a good deal of what he had before said on the distinctive province of the understanding, by which we reason on things incapable of being imagined; drawing several instances from the geometry of infinites, as in asymptotes, wherein, he says, something is always inferred by reasoning which we presume to be true, and yet cannot reach by any effort of imagination.[776]
[775] Hoc est autem præter phantasiæ cancellos, intellectûsque ipsius proprium, potestque adeo talis apprehensio non jam imaginatio, sed intelligentia vel intellectio dici. Non quod intellectus non accipiat ansam ab ipsa phantasia ratiocinandi esse aliquid ultra id, quod specie imagineve repræsentatur, neque non simul comitantem talem speciem vel imaginationem habeat; sed quod apprehendat, intelligatve aliquid, ad quod apprehendendum sive percipiendum assurgere phantasia non possit, ut quæ omnino terminetur ad corporum speciem, seu imaginem, ex qua illius operatio imaginatio appallatur. Ibid.
[776] In quibus semper aliquid argumentando colligitur, quod et verum esse intelligimus et imaginando non assequimur tamen.
His philosophy misunderstood by Stewart. 25. I have given a few extracts from Gassendi, in order to confirm what has been said, his writings being little read in England, and his philosophy not having been always represented in the same manner. De Gérando has claimed, on two occasions, the priority for Gassendi in that theory of the generation of ideas which has usually been ascribed to Locke.[777] But Stewart protests against this alledged similarity in the tenets of the French and English philosophers. “The remark,” he says, “is certainly just, if restrained to Locke’s doctrine as interpreted by the greater part of philosophers on the continent; but it is very wide of the truth, if applied to it as now explained and modified by the most intelligent of his disciples in this country. The main scope, indeed, of Gassendi’s argument against Descartes is to materialise that class of our ideas which the Lockists, as well as the Cartesians, consider as the exclusive objects of the power of reflection, and to show that these ideas are all ultimately resolvable into images or conceptions borrowed from things external. It is not, therefore, what is sound and valuable in this part of Locke’s system, but the errors grafted on it in the comments of some of his followers, that can justly be said to have been borrowed from Gassendi. Nor has Gassendi the merit of originality even in these errors; for scarcely a remark on the subject occurs in his works, but what is copied from the accounts transmitted to us of the Epicurean metaphysics.”[778]
[777] Histoire comparée des Systèmes (1804), vol. i., p. 301, and Biogr. Universelle, art. Gassendi. Yet in neither of these does M. de Gérando advert expressly to the peculiar resemblance between the system of Gassendi and Locke, in the account they give of ideas of reflection. He refers, however, to a more particular essay of his own, on the Gassendian philosophy, which I have not seen. As to Locke’s positive obligations to his predecessor, I should be, perhaps, inclined to doubt whether he, who was no great lover of large books, had read so unwieldy a work as the Syntagma Philosophicum; but the abridgment of Bernier would have sufficed.
[778] Preliminary Dissertation to Encyclopædia.
26. It will probably appear to those who consider what I have quoted from Gassendi, that in his latest writings he did not differ so much from Locke, and lead the way so much to the school of the French metaphysicians of the eighteenth century as Stewart has supposed. The resemblance to the Essay on the Human Understanding, in several points, especially in the important distinction of what Locke has called ideas of reflection from those of sense, is too evident to be denied. I am at the same time unable to account in a satisfactory manner for the apparent discrepancy between the language of Gassendi in the Syntagma Philosophicum, and that which we find in his objections to the Meditations of Descartes. No great interval of time had intervened between the two works; for the correspondence with Descartes bears date in 1641, and it appears by that with Louis, Count of Angoulême, in the succeeding year, that he was already employed on the first part of the Syntagma Philosophicum.[779] Whether he urged some of his objections against the Cartesian metaphysics with a regard to victory rather than truth, or, as would be the more candid, and perhaps more reasonable hypothesis, he was induced by the acuteness of his great antagonist, to review and reform his own opinions, I must leave to the philosophical reader.[780]