The Scientific Revolution

Lesson 5: The New Philosophers

Atomism

Cartesianism wasn’t the only mechanical philosophy going. Its chief rival was atomism, the theory that the world was composed of tiny, indivisible, impenetrable bits of matter – atoms – surrounded by empty space. Atomism was first put forward by Greek philosophers, notably Democritus and Epicurus.

The principal source for ancient atomism in the Scientific Revolution was the Roman Epicurean Lucretius’s epic poem Of the Nature of Things. Classical atomism explained the physical properties of various substances by differences in their atoms – solid substances had atoms that held together with hooks; liquid ones had round atoms that easily slid past each other.

Atomists had bad religious reputations, dating back to the pre-Christian Epicurus, who had denied that the Gods were to be worshipped. Epicurus believed that humans were purely material beings, lacking souls or anything that lived on after death. This bad reputation carried over into the Christian world. Atomism in the sixteenth century attracted attention mostly from fringe figures.

The Italian priest Giordano Bruno, burned for heresy in 1600, believed in an atomism in which the atoms were divinely endowed with a tendency toward organization. Paracelsians interested in the emergence of matter from seeds came close to an atomism which viewed the atoms as individually active.

Although it has been argued that the real reason for the trial of Galileo was atomism rather than Copernicanism (the evidence for this is slim) the man who put atomism on the agenda for seventeenth-century scientists was the French priest Pierre Gassendi. His program of restoring the good name of Epicureanism led to his presentation of an atomistic theory in terms of mechanical philosophy, unlike Bruno’s and the Paracelsians’s theories which seemed to endow the atoms with personality and goals.

Gassendi also argued that atoms aggregated to form other small bodies called molecules. His Christianity led him to reject specific features of Epicurean atomism, such as the belief in the eternity of atoms and their infinite number. Gassendi’s atomism was still suspect in Catholic countries where the Church continued to exert power over intellectual life, such as post-Galilean Italy. In Catholic, but more liberal France, it was defeated by Cartesianism.

Oster’s document 4.3 shows the dangers of atomism as seen by one Italian Inquisitor. In addition to the association of atomism with atheism, Gassendi suffered from the handicap of expressing himself in ponderous Latin tomes while his intellectual rival Descartes expressed himself in polished, elegant French.

Differences between Cartesianism and atomism include the difference that Cartesians believed that matter was infinitely divisible – any given piece of matter could always be divided into smaller pieces. Atomists believed that atoms (from the Greek a-tomos, uncuttable) could not be further divided. Another difference was that atomists believed in empty space, which Cartesians (and Aristotelians) denied.

The existence of a "void," what we now call a vacuum, was keenly disputed in the seventeenth century. The air-pump was developed in part to test this question, and in England, where air-pumps were widely used, atomism had more influence than on the European continent.

  1  2  3  4  5  6  7