GASSENDI, gft'sitic'de', or GASSEND, gas' SIN', PIERRE (1592-1655). An eminent French philosopher and mathematician. He was born at Champtercier, a little village of Provence, in the Department of the Lower Alps. His unusual powers of mind showed themselves at an early age; and at the age of sixteen he became in structor of rhetoric, then professor of theology, at Aix, and in 1616 professor of philosophy. He meanwhile applied himself with zeal to the study of the natural sciences that were taught in his day, and was especially interested in astronomy and anatomy. In philosophy he became dis gusted with scholasticism and undertook to main tain certain theses against the Aristotelians. His polemic appeared at Grenoble in 1624, and was entitled Exercitationes Paradoxicce adversus Aris toteleos. He drew a distinction between the Church and the scholastic philosophy, denying that the former must stand or fall by the latter. In 1623 he was appointed provost of the cathe dral at Digne, an office which enabled him to pursue without distraction his astronomical and philosophical studies. At the recommendation of the Archbishop of Lyons, a brother of Cardinal Richelieu, Gassendi was appointed in 1645 pro fessor of mathematics in the College Royal de France, at Paris, where he died, October 14, 1655. As a philosopher, Gassendi revived and maintained, with great learning and ingenuity, the doctrines of Epicurus, as he found the atomistic philosophy most easily brought into harmony with his own scientific acquirements and modes of thought. His Epicureanism, how
ever, was not allowed to interfere with his loy alty to the Catholic faith. He reconciled the two views by holding that God is the First Cause, who created matter in the form of atoms, and en dowed these with motion, which thus becomes their indefeasible characteristic. His great philo sophical opponent was Descartes (q.v.). His philosophy was in such repute that the savants of that time were divided into Cartesians and Gas sendists. The two chiefs themselves always enter tained the highest respect for each other, and were at one time on the friendliest terms. Gassendi ranked Kepler and Galileo among his friends, and was himself the instructor of .Moliere. His principal work is entitled De Vita, Moribus, et Placitis Epicuri (1641), to which the Syntagma Philosophise Epicuri (1649) properly belongs. It contains a complete view of the system of Epi curus. His Institutio Astronomic(' (1645) is a clear and connected representation of the state of the science in his own day; in a later work he gave the biography of Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, and other astronomers, and a history of astron omy down to his own time. His works were col lected and published in six volumes, at Leyden (1658) , and at Florence (1728). Consult : Thomas, La philosophie de Gassendi (Paris, 1889) ; Mar tin, Ilistoire de is vie et des dents de Gassendi (Paris, 1853) ; Kieft Gassendi's Erkenntnis theorie and seine Stellung .um Materialismu9 (Fulda, 1893).