Gassendi on Human Knowledge of the Mind 1

Gassendi on Human Knowledge of the Mind

by Antonia LoLordo (Charlottesville)

Abstract: Gassendi holds both that we only have ideas of material things and that we
know – by faith and, at least in later works, by reason as well – that the mind is im-
material. I examine the account of the mind provided in Gassendi’s Objections to the
Meditations and show how Gassendi’s two theses can be rendered compatible. In-
deed, the two theses, taken together, exemplify Gassendi’s account of the scope and
limits of human understanding.
Gassendi and Descartes had reason to feel sympathetic toward one
another when Gassendi first read the Meditations and composed his
Objections.1 Both were friends and correspondents of Mersenne; both
wanted to replace scholastic orthodoxy with a new system, albeit rad-
ically different new systems in the two cases; Gassendi admired Des-
cartes’ mathematics while Descartes admired Gassendi’s astronomy.
However, the tone of the Objections and Replies is rather less than
friendly, on both sides. And in his Counter-Objections, Gassendi ex-
presses his disappointment that a skilled mathematician like Descar-
tes, someone of whom he had had such high expectations, paraded
such spurious arguments as demonstrations (3.275b). One exemplary
case of this is the 6th Meditation argument that mind and body are
really distinct.2 Gassendi diagnoses the failure of the argument to lie
chiefly, though not exclusively, in Descartes’ mistaken identification of
the natures of mind and body as thought and extension.

1 The 5th Objections and the Counter-Objections together constitute the Disquisitio
Metaphysica. References to the 5th Objections are to the volume and page number
in Descartes 1973–78 (AT = Adam and Tannery), as are references to Descartes’
Meditations and Replies. References to other of Gassendi’s works are either to the
Disquisitio (volume 3 of Gassendi’s Opera Omnia) or the Syntagma (volumes 1
and 2), cited by volume, page and column number in the Opera.
2 Gassendi tells us that he is disappointed that the promises made in the Preface
are not fulfilled (3.275b). Now, the Preface and the title of the Meditations itself
allege to demonstrate three things: God’s existence; the immortality of the soul;
and the real distinction between mind and body. Gassendi takes all three argu-
ments to fail but concentrates on the last, since the other two claims, he thinks,
are true and wholly non-controversial.

Archiv f. Gesch. d. Philosophie 87. Bd., S. 1– 21

© Walter de Gruyter 2005
ISSN 0003-9101
2 Antonia LoLordo

I begin with Gassendi’s objections to Descartes’ argument for the na-

ture of body and then move on to worries about knowledge of the
mind’s nature. With this in place, we will be in a position to examine
Gassendi’s own account of our knowledge of the mind, an account
which lies beneath the surface of the Objections and Counter-Objections
and which is put forward in somewhat different form in his Syntagma
Philosophicum, the roughly Epicurean replacement for the scholastic
textbooks he found methodologically and ontologically unacceptable.
For this account is best seen as emerging by contrast with the Cartesian
account on one hand, and Gassendi’s own account of knowledge of
body on the other.
It seems, from a quick look at the Objections, that for Gassendi
knowledge of the mind would simply be knowledge of body. For he
makes quite clear there that we only have ideas of the material, so that
whatever cognition of the mind is possible for us would seem to have to
be knowledge of the mind as a material thing. But Gassendi is no ma-
terialist. He holds that we know by faith – and in later works by reason
too – that the mind is immaterial. It is sometimes thought that there is
an irreconcilable conflict between reason and faith within Gassendi’s
thought, or that the nod to faith is less than sincere or consistent.3
However, this is not the case, as my examination of Gassendi’s focus on
knowledge of the mind attempts to show. There is no inconsistency in
holding both that the mind is immaterial and that we must cognize it
as material for someone like Gassendi who holds that there are strict
limits to human understanding.

The Meditations, Objections, Replies and Counter-Objections

Let me begin with a brief overview of the debate over the mind and its relationship to
body. Gassendi objects to a number of theses he finds in the 2nd Meditation, but three
are particularly important for the current discussion. First, Gassendi objects that
Descartes has not established that the mind is an immaterial thing rather than, say, a
particularly subtle body, interspersed throughout the coarser matter of the human
body (AT 7.260–261). In particular, Descartes has not proven that the power of
thought cannot belong to any material body, although he appears to be relying on
that assumption (AT 7.262). Second, Descartes has not established that the nature of

3 This is the position of Bloch 1970, who argues that Gassendi’s philosophy in-
evitably points in the direction of materialism and atheism, and that Gassendi
himself manages to avoid acknowledging this tendency only by refusing to
systematize his philosophy and make it consistent.
 Gassendi on Human Knowledge of the Mind 3

the mind is thought, for reasons we will look at more fully later on. And third, Des-
cartes has not shown that the nature of the mind is better known than the nature of
body, even if we grant that the cogito establishes that the existence of the mind is
better known than the existence of body (AT 7.275). For knowledge of the existence
of something does not, on Gassendi’s view, imply knowledge of its essence. If we
want to know the essence of the mind, we cannot simply think about our idea of the
mind but should rather carry out something “like a chemical investigation of the
mind” (AT 7.277).
Descartes responds as follows. He denies that he has tried to prove, in the 2nd Medi-
tation, that the mind is simply a thinking thing; rather, all he has argued is that he is,
“insofar as [he] knows [himself …] nothing other than a thinking thing.” Similarly,
he denies having tried to establish in the 2nd Meditation that the mind is distinct from
body. The demonstration of this does not occur, he tells us, until the 6th Meditation
(AT 7.354–355). However, he does at the same time allow that he knows his nature to
be thought, as indeed the title of the 2nd Meditation suggests.4 Finally, Descartes
replies to the worry about existence and essence that “one thing cannot be demon-
strated without the other” (AT 7.359).
Mocking the call for a chemical investigation of the mind, Descartes writes that
he has
never thought that anything more is required to reveal a substance than its various
attributes; thus the more attributes of a given substance we know, the more per-
fectly we understand its nature (AT 7.360; cf. Principles 1.11 AT 8a.8).
Hence we understand the mind’s nature better than the body’s nature because when-
ever we come to know an attribute of body, we thereby also – in addition to the
knowledge derived from the cogito – know that the mind has the power to know that
attribute of body. Margaret Wilson has famously suggested that Descartes is not
really entitled to make this reply: knowing more attributes of particular extended
bodies does not, for Descartes, automatically give us more knowledge of their nature.
She suggests instead that a good Cartesian answer would involve developing the two
themes of the transparency of mental processes and the distinction between human
and animal or ‘mechanical’ thought processes – although there is in the end, she
adds, a tension between these two themes given the assumption that “our expla-
nations, and hence in an important sense our understanding, are limited to what can
be explained on mechanical models”5. We shall see that this is a Gassendian assump-
tion – one which, I have argued elsewhere, Descartes rejects. But Descartes’ rejection
of this assumption, like Gassendi’s acceptance of it, is closely tied to his account of
human cognition.
The major theme of Descartes’ reply is that Gassendi has illegitimately taken him
to task for not proving, in the 2nd Meditation, conclusions which he did not try to
prove until the 6th Meditation. However, it is clear from Gassendi’s objections to the

4 See Wilson 1978, 73f. on this point.

5 Wilson 1978, 99.
4 Antonia LoLordo

6th Meditation that this reply would not satisfy him. For instance, Gassendi objects
that the 6th Meditation claim that the nature of the mind is thought has received no
support beyond that given in the 2nd Meditation (AT 7.335). Similarly, he points out
that Descartes has not added anything to rule out the mind’s being a particular sort
of subtle body (AT 7.336–337). Thus he takes the real distinction argument to rely
entirely on the claims about the natures of mind and body he sees as developed in the
2nd Meditation. Gassendi adds to his worries about our knowledge of those natures
some difficulties he finds in the hypothesis that the mind is an immaterial substance
interacting with the body, objections which concern the nature of body as well as the
nature of mind. Thus before we can deal with the alleged unintelligibility of Descar-
tes’ conception of the mind, we need to see what Gassendi thinks is wrong with the
Cartesian accounts of the nature of body and mind, and what he would like to put in
their place.

The Nature of Body

Let us start with what Descartes’ and Gassendi’s accounts of the nature
of body have in common. For, although Descartes and Gassendi have
rather different conceptions of natures or essences, they still have
enough in common to engage with each other. First, for both of them
essences are only conceptually distinct from the substances whose es-
sences they are, so that an essence individuates a substance. Second, for
both of them modes or accidents of substances are understood as ways
of being of those substances, in contrast with more traditional Aristote-
lian ways of understanding accidents which were sometimes thought to
raise the specter of ‘real accidents’. From these two points follows a
common way of understanding what is involved in giving an account of
the essence of body: identifying that which is the same in all bodies such
that they can have the modes or accidents they do in fact have.
Now Gassendi argues that Descartes’ identification of the essence of
body as extension fails to do this successfully. For although Descartes
names a feature which all bodies have in common, this feature does not
by itself show how it is possible for bodies to have the modes or acci-
dents they have.6 The chief locus for this argument is the example of the

6 This may strike some contemporary readers as an odd objection. It is sometimes

thought that the kind of explanations of particular bodily phenomena given in
the later books of the Principles is somehow derived from the claim that the
essence of body is extension (although it is disputed exactly how such a deri-
vation could go, especially given the notorious role of extension in Descartes’
system). Gassendi does not seem to think of Descartes’ essence-claim as issuing
in particular explanations for particular bodies. Although I think this is a plau-
 Gassendi on Human Knowledge of the Mind 5

piece of wax from the 2nd Meditation. In response to this example and
the intellectualist conclusions Descartes draws from it, Gassendi says
that he agrees with the claim that we have intellectual perception of the
substance of the wax – so long as that claim just amounts to “what
everyone commonly asserts, viz. that the concept of the wax or its sub-
stance can be abstracted from the concept of its accidents”. However,
he goes on to ask,
does this really imply that the substance or nature of the wax is itself distinctly
conceived? Besides the color, the shape, the fact that it can melt, etc., we conceive
that there is something which is the subject of the accidents and changes we ob-
serve; but what this subject is, or what its nature is, we do not know. This always
eludes us; and it is only a kind of conjecture that leads us to think that there must
be something underneath the accidents. So I am amazed at how you can say that
once the forms have been stripped off like clothes, you perceive more perfectly and
evidently what the wax is. Admittedly, you perceive that the wax or its substance
must be something over and above such forms; but what this something is you do
not perceive (3.311a).
Rather than showing us what the substance of the wax is, Gassendi sug-
gests, Descartes’ mentis inspectio shows instead merely that it is part of
our concept of wax that it can melt, change colors in certain ways, and
so on. Instead of showing how it is possible for the wax to have the
power to undergo such changes – as natural philosophy should do –
Descartes has merely told us that the wax has such powers. And this,
Gassendi goes on, is something which we all already know:
I took exception on the grounds that this inspection of the wax – more imperfect
or more perfect, more confused or more distinct – pertained only to accidents and
changes of accidents but did not apply to the substance itself. Thus from these in-
spections we can conceive of and explain what is understood by the name wax.
However, we cannot conceive of and explain that nude substance, or rather, that
substance which always remains hidden, with the result that we never know what
the thing lying hidden under the accidents and subject to changes is (3.310a).
In exactly the same way, Gassendi will argue, the introspection of the
thinking I will tell us only what is involved in the concept of the mind,
without revealing anything about the underlying nature or substance of
the mind.
At this point, we must note a difference between the levels at which
Gassendi’s and Descartes’ respective explanations of the nature of body

sible reading, I shall not defend it here. For in any case, Descartes’ replies to
Gassendi never suggest that particular explanations of bodily phenomena should
follow from the claim that the essence of body is extension.
6 Antonia LoLordo

primarily operate. For both men there is a legitimate question at the

level of bodies in general – the question which Descartes answers with
the claim that bodies are extended and Gassendi with the claim that
they are structures of atoms in the void. However, for Gassendi, the
general question is not the important one: what is more useful, he
thinks, is to explain the nature of bodies of a specific type. Thus his
physical explanations typically involve attempts to discern the particu-
lar corpuscular structure or contexture of a certain type of body – mag-
nets, gold, wine – and to see how these structures explain the manifest
features. Gassendi typically uses the terms ‘nature’ or ‘essence’ to refer
to such structures, although he sometimes uses those terms to refer to
the ideas produced in the mind instead.7
Unfortunately, Gassendi does not think we have as yet succeeded in
giving explanations which reach all the way down to structures of
atoms in the void: rather, as he tends to put it, the “secret or hidden es-
sences” lying behind the appearances remain obscure to us (3.352b).
However, we have met with some success in explaining manifest beha-
vior in terms of the behavior of insensible parts, and an example of such
success may be helpful:
We used to marvel when people pointed out that a small piece of rotten cheese,
strewn on a garment and brought near the skin, caused so much stinging to
the senses. The Microscope has demonstrated the reason, namely, that all those
grains [of cheese] are little animals who, among other things, push their little
beaks into the skin and bore through and damage it, just as they might bore
through and damage the surface of the earth, in order to seek their food
(3.463a–b).

Here we have explained a manifest operation of a thing in terms of the

behavior of its smaller parts, and this sort of explanation is the first step
on the way to a complete natural-philosophical account. In order to
complete the account, we should then go on to investigate the “little
animals” themselves, and so on. Thus – to use another of Gassendi’s
favorite examples – we would be giving a useful statement of an essence
if we could say that a magnet is a structure of atoms arranged in ways x,
y and z such that x, y and z together make possible the range of mani-
fest properties and powers of the magnet.

7 See e.g. 2.463a for a clear case of the first usage. The second usage generally comes
up when Gassendi is criticizing the views of those who, like Descartes and the
Aristotelians, understand essences as real, immaterial, mind-independent things;
it is in that context that Gassendi argues that such “essences” are simply ideas
(if indeed they are anything at all). See 3.373aff.
 Gassendi on Human Knowledge of the Mind 7

Now it is a little harder to give a programmatic explanation of what is

going on for Descartes when we explain the possible range of modes or
accidents of particular types of bodies. Descartes obviously does take
bodies as falling into different types (rainbows, eyes, fetuses) which are
explained in different ways – but the connection between this and the
general claim that the essence of body is extension is not direct. This is
very different from Gassendi’s case, where an account of the essences of
particular types of bodies is simply a specification of the account of the
essence of bodies in general.
We are now in a position to see why Gassendi takes the claim that the
essence of body is extension to be unhelpful. For it gives a general ac-
count of what bodies are without giving us any real help in figuring out
what individuates particular bodies and makes it possible for them to
have the modes or accidents they do. But Gassendi takes Descartes’
claim to have pernicious consequences as well, if taken seriously as a
starting-point for natural philosophy. Gassendi argues elsewhere that
the experienced fact of motion requires a void, so that Descartes’ es-
sence-claim cannot be right. While he grants that our concept of body
includes being extended, this does not on his view exhaust the nature of
body even as we know it: an adequate concept of body must also in-
clude impenetrability or resistance (1.55a).
As well as disagreeing with the Cartesian claim that the nature of
body is extension, Gassendi has worries about the methodology by
which it was arrived at. This worry begins with a point about knowl-
edge of existence and knowledge of essence:
the knowledge of the existence of a thing has no necessary connection with the
knowledge of its essence or inner nature, for otherwise we would know the nature,
essence and inner depths of anything that was obvious to the senses or whose
existence we knew of in any way at all (3.290a–b).

Knowledge of existence is easy, on Gassendi’s view, since simply by per-

ceiving a collection of accidents we naturally “conceive that there is
something that is the subject of the accidents” and thus come to know
that a certain thing exists, without acquiring a good idea of the thing
itself, i.e. its substance or nature. Knowledge of substance or nature is
rather more difficult to get and “requires a certain complete internal
examination”: “essence does not become known except by bringing to
light every inner depth” (3.311b–312a). Knowledge of existence does
not amount to knowledge of essence, then, because essence is not per-
ceived directly but rather is inferred from the perception of an existing
thing.
8 Antonia LoLordo

Descartes, of course, would not agree with the account of the acquisi-
tion of knowledge of essence which bases Gassendi’s distinction be-
tween knowledge of essence and knowledge of existence. Here Gassendi
simply objects that if Descartes’ equation of knowledge of essence and
knowledge of existence were sound, there would be no substantive
natural-philosophical questions left for us to answer:
If this method of philosophizing of yours were sound, what property and what na-
ture in the world would then remain hidden? And if anyone struggled to explore
and investigate the nature of the magnet, wouldn’t he be very silly since he should
consider himself satisfied by this little formula of yours, that the entire nature of
the magnet consists in the fact that it attracts iron and points toward the poles?
(3.306a–b).

This quite clearly relies on the previous point, that for Gassendi inter-
esting natural-philosophical questions are questions about the nature
of particular types of bodies.8 Gassendi will go on to argue that the case
of the mind parallels the magnet case closely.
Gassendi’s objection is not merely skeptical. Rather, it derives from an
alternative theory of cognition of essences – indeed, of imperceptible en-
tities in general. Since it is this account which in the end leads Gassendi
to the view that we only have an idea of the mind as a corporeal thing, let
us now turn to that alternative theory. It begins with the recognition that
what is evident to sense-perception is insufficient for constructing any
natural philosophy which appeals to insensible entities like atoms or
void. However, Gassendi holds that cognition of the insensible is para-
sitic on what is evident: it proceeds by analogy with the sensible, using
signs – in particular, indicative signs.9 Thus the theory of signs is in-
tended to explain the source and limits of knowledge of the insensible, as
well as the proper criteria for judging cognition of the insensible.

8 The criticism of Descartes thus seems unfair: Descartes does not hold that full
understanding of the magnet is reached through its concept, but rather through
postulating a certain inner structure. Descartes would not, that is, say that we
have explained the modes of the magnet by saying that its nature is extension.
Gassendi generally tends to over-emphasize both the aprioricity of Descartes’
programme and the extent to which the Meditations is supposed to issue in sub-
stantive conclusions about bodies. Neither of these tendencies, however, are par-
ticularly worrying for the topic at hand, since Cartesian investigation of the
mind – unlike the magnet – is a priori and is supposed to issue in substantive con-
clusions about particular minds.
9 Gassendi distinguishes indicative from admonitory signs, where admonitory
signs signify things “hidden by circumstance” such as smoke signifying fire, lac-
tation pregnancy, and so on (1.79b).
 Gassendi on Human Knowledge of the Mind 9

Indicative signs signify things “hidden by nature”, i.e. never percep-

tible, such as God, the void, atoms, or unmodified substances. An in-
dicative sign signifies its object “because it is the sort of thing which, if
the object did not exist, could not itself exist, and therefore when it
exists, the object also exists necessarily” (1.81b). Thus, sweat is – or at
least was, before the invention of the microscope – an indicative sign of
pores in the skin, and the ‘wholly admirable works of nature’ indicate
God’s existence. And since that which is signified explains or makes in-
telligible the existence of the thing construed as a sign, the range of
manifest qualities and operations of a thing together indicate its sub-
stance or nature. When we think of the underlying substance or nature
of things whose manifest properties we perceive, we form a notion of
something which underlies the manifest properties (i.e. something
which fills a certain specified role) and then imagine it by analogy with
sensible things. Thus our cognition of objects cognized through signs
must in principle be like cognition of sensible objects. When we form an
idea of something by the use of signs, we must, on Gassendi’s account,
do so by analogy with things we already have ideas of, namely, things
evident to sense. Thus all our ideas must in the end represent things as
material. Even though we know that God is immaterial, for instance,
we do not have an idea which represents him as immaterial but merely
an idea formed by analogy with powerful men we have encountered in
the past.

The Nature of the Mind

Let us again start with what Gassendi and Descartes agree about. First,
they agree that we have knowledge of the modes or accidents of the
mind; this is given to us in experience. Second, they agree that these
modes or accidents should not be explained by recourse to scholastic
faculties or souls any more than the modes or accidents of bodies
should be explained by recourse to forms and qualities. And third, they
agree that some explanation of the possibility of the modes or accidents
of the mind is required. It would be insufficient for the natural philos-
opher to simply say that fire exists and can burn things, without giving
an explanation for how there can be something with those powers. In
the same way, it would be insufficient for the natural philosopher to say
simply that the mind exists and can take on a variety of modes or acci-
dents and perform a variety of operations, without explaining what
kind of thing the mind is such that it can have such modes or accidents.
10 Antonia LoLordo

Now Gassendi reads the Meditations expecting Descartes to show us

what kind of thing the mind is such that it can have the various
thoughts, sensations and operations we experience. Gassendi’s disap-
pointment stems here, just as it did in the case of body, from his judg-
ment that Descartes has not given any such explanation but merely told
us that there is some thing called the mind underlying that collection of
modes and accidents:
when you say that you are simply a thing that thinks you mention an operation
which everyone was already aware of – but you say nothing about the substance
carrying out this operation: what sort of substance it is, what it consists in, how it
organizes itself in order to carry out its various different functions in different
ways, and other issues of this sort, which we have not known about up till now
(3.300b).

Gassendi thus takes Descartes’ claim that the mind is a thinking thing
to simply pick out a certain entity – the unitary subject of the various
cognitive powers – without telling us what the underlying substance or
essence of that entity is, let alone demonstrating that it is distinct from
any body. For, he argues, if Descartes had really uncovered the nature of
the mind then a number of questions that are currently unanswered
would have clear answers, questions such as the following:
What sort of thing [the underlying principium of thought] is, how it exists, how it
holds together, how it acts, whether it has certain faculties and functions, whether
or not it has parts, and if it has any, what kind they are: if it does not have any and
is indivisible, how it arranges itself in so many different forms; how it performs so
many functions; by what means it deals with the body; by what means it goes
beyond it; how it lives without it; how it is affected by it (3.306b).

Since Descartes has failed to answer these questions, Gassendi takes

it that the claim that the mind is a thinking thing is merely a nominal
or, perhaps, accidental definition – one which describes the operation
or quality proprietary to the mind without making clear the essence
or substance from which that operation flows. And again, Gassendi
diagnoses the underlying problem with Descartes’ account as metho-
dological:
given that you are looking for knowledge of yourself which is superior to com-
mon knowledge […] it is certainly not enough for you to announce that you are a
thing that thinks and doubts and understands, etc. You should carefully scruti-
nize yourself and conduct something like a chemical investigation of yourself, if
you are to succeed in uncovering and explaining to us your internal substance
(3.311a).
 Gassendi on Human Knowledge of the Mind 11

To this, Descartes responds that he does not see “what more [Gassendi]
expect[s] here, unless it is to be told what color or smell or taste the
human mind has, or the proportions of salt, sulphur and mercury from
which it is compounded” (AT 7.360–361). I shall return to this response
in a moment, but first let us see the particular explanatory problems
Gassendi sees for the conception of the mind as a thinking substance.
As a preliminary, Gassendi argues simply that Descartes has shed no
light on the traditional problems of explaining what sort of substance
can be capable of having sensations, performing abstract thought, and
the like. Whereas scholastic explanations failed because the forms and
faculties they appealed to were unacceptable, Descartes simply gives no
explanation apart from the bare claim that it is in the nature of the mind
to do these things. More importantly, however, Gassendi argues that
Descartes’ account has raised new explanatory problems, ones which
previous accounts of the mind did not need to deal with – namely, the
problem of body-mind causation and the problem of representation.
The problem of body-mind interaction is a familiar one. Descartes
sometimes explains interaction by positing the pineal gland as its locus,
but this, Gassendi says, is unsatisfactory. There is no place – whether a
part of extension or a mere point – at which material and immaterial
substances could be joined with the desired result (3.405a). As a result
of this, Gassendi says, we cannot make sense of the possibility of bodies
affecting an immaterial mind, for bodies act by contact and contact
with the immaterial is impossible. The mechanist powers of body can-
not explain bodies having actions which do not occur in any place;
indeed, mechanism, in either its Cartesian or Gassendian form, seems
to rule out this possibility.10
The problem of representation is less familiar and may strike the
reader as less worrying. It hinges on the claim that the immaterial mind
is simple and indivisible, that is, lacks parts. Gassendi asks:

10 Body-mind interaction is often described as a two-way problem. However, Gas-

sendi only seems worried about bodily causes having mental effects and not vice
versa. For Gassendi does not claim to grasp what a Cartesian mind would be like
well enough to say that such a mind could not have bodily effects; he can make
only the weaker objection that Descartes does not make clear how an immaterial
mind affects the body. Since Gassendi takes himself to lack any clear idea of an
immaterial mind, he cannot insist that its causal mechanisms preclude action in
the material world; and since he holds that God is immaterial and acts in the ma-
terial world, he would not want to suggest that our inability to understand how
the immaterial can affect the material is grounds for thinking that the immaterial
cannot affect the material.
12 Antonia LoLordo

how […] do you think that […] an unextended thing could receive the semblance
or idea of a body that is extended? […] if it lacks parts, how will it manage to rep-
resent parts? If it lacks extension, how will it represent an extended thing? […] If it
lacks all variation, how will it represent various colors and so on? (3.400b)
It is tempting to read this as a commitment to a naïve picture theory of
representation.11 But this is not Gassendi’s settled view: his account of
vision, for instance, holds that while the image imprinted on the retina
resembles the apparent object, the impression formed in the brain as a
result of the reception of the retinal image does not. Instead, I think,
Gassendi has in mind the deeper point that in order to represent struc-
ture and variation, the representing mind must itself possess structure
and variation.
Indeed, this is part of a larger problem about how any sort of expla-
nation can be given of the workings of a simple thing like a Cartesian
mind. The explanations we are familiar with – explaining pictorial rep-
resentation in terms of isomorphism; explaining the properties of the
wine in terms of its composition; etc – explain the operations or prop-
erties of a whole in terms of the interaction of smaller parts arranged in
some sort of structure. Descartes’ account of the mind precludes any
such explanation because he holds that the mind has no parts, physical
or otherwise, a claim which Gassendi seems to take as amounting to the
claim that Cartesian minds have no internal structure at all.12
Let me now return to Descartes’ reply to Gassendi’s call for “some-
thing like a chemical investigation of the mind”. Descartes responds
that he does not see “what more [Gassendi] expect[s] here, unless it is to
be told what color or smell or taste the human mind has” (AT 7.359).
To say this is in effect to claim that one should not expect an expla-

11 For instance, Arnauld 1990, 61, quotes from this or a very similar passage in an
attempt to show how “damnable” are the conclusions one is led to if one models
cognition on physical vision.
12 It is not entirely clear to me whether Descartes would grant that the simplicity of
the mind precludes its having structure. Although Descartes does not talk about
mental structure, it seems, as Wilson points out, that the doctrine of innate ideas
requires some underlying structure in the mind. Nor am I sure whether we ought
in general grant that a simple immaterial thing lacks structure: perhaps simplicity
could be preserved so long as the structure is not divisible into parts. But Gas-
sendi himself must think of the lack of structure of the immaterial mind as fol-
lowing from Descartes’ claim that it is simple, for – given his claim that we have
no real idea of an immaterial mind – he has no independent grounds for insisting
that the mind’s immateriality precludes its having structure. He could only make
the weaker claim that we cannot conceive of the immaterial mind as having struc-
ture.
 Gassendi on Human Knowledge of the Mind 13

nation of the mind parallel with physical explanations in terms of struc-

ture. The Gassendist response is simply to point out that Descartes
does not offer us any other sort of explanation, so that the Cartesian
theory of the mind not only fails to provide us with a science of the
mind but also seems to preclude the possibility of our developing one.
We have now seen why Gassendi rejects both the claim that the
essence of body is extension and the claim that the essence of mind is
thought. Because of this, together with the new explanatory problems
raised by the hypothesis of an immaterial thinking substance, Gassendi
dismisses Descartes’ claim that mind and body are two distinct sub-
stances. It is now time to turn to the account of the mind Gassendi can
suggest in its place.13

Human Knowledge of the Mind

On Gassendi’s account, it will turn out, our knowledge of the mind is

quite strictly limited. We know various modes or accidents of the mind
by reflective experience, but the mind itself – the inner substance or
nature which grounds and makes possible these modes or accidents – is
hidden from sensation and reflection. Thus acquiring an idea of the
substance of the mind can only be done through signs, by means of the
following process. First, I perceive my various thoughts and feelings by
reflection, and then construe those thoughts as signs of a hidden some-
thing which must exist in order for the existence of the thoughts to be
possible. I thereby form a notion of a role: being that whose existence
makes thoughts possible. Finally, I form an idea of the thing which fills
that role, by analogy with something I already know. But since every-
thing I know I originally knew through the senses, the basis of my anal-
ogy will always be a sensible, corporeal thing, so that my idea of the
mind will always be the idea of a thing analogous to some corporeal
thing. Here Gassendi favors the use of a ‘subtle body’ like wind or ether
as the basis of analogy:

13 Until this point, Gassendi’s objections to the Cartesian account of knowledge of

the mind or its nature may strike the reader as very similar to those later made by
Malebranche (save for Gassendi’s allowing that we could have a clear idea of a
thing without thereby knowing its nature). The chief difference, that for Gassendi
our idea of the mind must be the idea of a material thing even though we know
through other means that the mind is immaterial, will become clear in the next
section.
14 Antonia LoLordo

As for the ideas of allegedly immaterial things, such as those of God and an angel
and the human soul or mind, it is clear that even the ideas we have of these things
are corporeal or quasi-corporeal, since (as previously mentioned) the ideas are de-
rived from the human form and from other things which are very rarefied and
simple and very hard to perceive with the senses, such as air or ether (3.386a).
Now, it is notable that Gassendi does not claim that the idea of the
mind as some sort of subtle body is a terribly good idea. In fact, Gas-
sendi’s account makes it clear that the human idea of the mind is quite
a bad one. For one important criterion for ideas acquired through the
use of signs is this: they are good ideas to the extent that what the idea
represents really would make possible the manifest properties and
operations of the thing in question. That is, ideas acquired on the basis
of signs are good ideas only if they have some significant explanatory
power, since they are acquired by a sort of inference to the best expla-
nation – in fact, the only explanation – to begin with. Now, Gassendi
does not claim that his idea of the mind as a sort of subtle body actually
does any significant work in explaining the manifest properties and op-
erations of the mind. In fact, as we have seen from the argument against
Descartes, Gassendi thinks that we have no understanding of how these
properties and operations are possible.
Here, then, is the situation. Gassendi claims that we have some idea
of the mind, in that we can talk about it and we know some of its pos-
sible accidents and operations, but denies that our idea of the mind is
sufficiently good to count as revealing to us the inner substance or
nature of the mind. At the same time, Gassendi is quite harsh in criti-
cizing Descartes for claiming to know the nature of the mind when all
he really has is the vague and entirely non-explanatory conception of it
as some unknown thing that is not material. One might wonder at this
point if Gassendi’s criticism is fair: isn’t he in more or less the same
position as Descartes here?
I answer that he is not, for two reasons. First, Gassendi would say
that at least his account of the mind makes the idea of the mind an idea
we can have. We have no problem conceiving of a sort of subtle body in-
terspersed throughout the coarser matter of the brain but, Gassendi ar-
gues, Descartes’ “immaterial substance” is something we can conceive
of only to the extent of saying that it is like a material substance, only not
material. Gassendi has told us what the mind is, albeit not in any detail;
Descartes has only told us what the mind is not. And telling us that the
mind is not material gives us no help in conceiving of what an imma-
terial thing could be like (3.402b). Second, Gassendi himself never
claims to know or have an idea of the nature of the mind. To say that the
 Gassendi on Human Knowledge of the Mind 15

mind is some sort of subtle body is no more to claim to know the nature
of the mind than to say that a magnet is composed of atoms arranged in
the void in some way is to claim to know the nature of the magnet. Des-
cartes requires an idea of the mind which is good enough to reveal the
mind’s nature, for the real distinction argument to work: we need to
know the nature of the mind in order to be certain that what underlies
the range of modes or accidents we know from reflection is not a species
of body. This sets the bar for the idea of the mind pretty high – it has to
be such as to exhibit the nature of the mind to us, at least clearly enough
to distinguish it from body. But Gassendi does not attempt to derive
any dramatic ontological conclusions from his description of the mind,
and hence his idea need not fulfill any such stringent criteria. Indeed, as
we are about to see, Gassendi argues that no ontological conclusions at
all should be inferred from the idea of the mind.

Faith and the Human Soul

The reader might wonder, at this point, how a mid-seventeenth-century

priest could have believed, let alone stated for publication, that we must
conceive of the mind as material. Isn’t this, one might ask, dangerously
close to a commitment to materialism? Isn’t Gassendi in danger of vi-
olating the requirements set out in the condemnation of Pomponazzi,
for instance? However, Gassendi takes pains to point out that his claim
that we conceive of the mind as material is a claim about human cogni-
tion rather than an ontological claim. In matters of ontology, Gassendi
makes clear, he follows the dictates of faith:
I hold by Faith that the Mind is incorporeal. I hold that this issue appears too ob-
scure by the natural light for me to claim to know the nature of the Mind […] it is
not apparent how, while the Mind dwells in the body, it can represent or under-
stand any substance except under some corporeal species [and thus it is not appar-
ent] under what species the Mind might represent itself other than as some subtle
body (3.369a).
A number of conclusions are to be drawn from the claim that we know
by faith that the mind is material, even though the mind must represent
itself by means of a corporeal image and thus must represent itself as
corporeal. The first such conclusion is that our idea of the mind is
deeply misleading. But this seems to raise a problem of its own, in the
guise of a possible conflict between the deliverances of faith and rea-
son. Fortunately, however, Gassendi has the resources to avoid any such
conflict – resources which we have already seen. First, on Gassendi’s
16 Antonia LoLordo

view, the idea of the mind as a corporeal entity is not a very good idea
even by its own light. And second, we can see, again from the theory of
signs, that we would think of the mind as material regardless of whether
or not it actually is material. For the explanation of why we must con-
ceive of the mind as material makes no reference whatsoever to the ac-
tual nature of the mind but only to the nature of things evident to us
through sense. Thus reason itself makes us aware that our idea of the
mind as corporeal is unreliable.
But in what position are we left when we conclude that reason’s
dictates about the mind are systematically unreliable? Does this, for
instance, leave us with complete skepticism about the mind, or is there
still a reason to continue natural philosophical investigations of the
mental? Gassendi can, I suggest, maintain the latter option. For he
holds that empirical investigations like his investigations of the
formation of ideas in the brain as a result of the physiological pro-
cesses of vision give some further understanding of the mind. They do
not penetrate into the nature or substance of the mind (any more than
microscopic investigation of the cheese revealed its atomic structure),
but they do bring about some increase in understanding. That the
nature or substance of the mind is in principle concealed from reason
need not make us despair of getting further knowledge of the processes
underlying its manifest characteristics.
Indeed, Gassendi suggests, it is difficult if not impossible for us to at-
tain knowledge of the inner substance or nature of anything known by
observation. Given this, we need to recognize that the difficulty of
knowing natures or underlying substances provides insufficient reason
for skeptical despair. Granting that inner substances or natures are
hidden, we can still have full knowledge of the manifest characteristics
of things – and it is knowledge of those manifest characteristics that is
truly necessary for us. Making use of a distinction between essence and
appearance – a distinction that he tends to equate with the distinction
between hidden substance and manifest properties – Gassendi tells us
the following:
since the attribute or property is one thing and the substance or nature of which it
is [an attribute] or from which it emanates is another, so to know the attribute or
property or collection of properties is not thereby to know the substance or
nature itself. What we can know is this or that property of this substance or
nature when it lies open for the purpose of observation and is perspicuous by ex-
perience, and we do not thereby penetrate into the inner substance or nature –
just as when looking at bubbling spring water, we know that this water comes
from this source, but do not thereby strike the edge of our gaze on the interior
 Gassendi on Human Knowledge of the Mind 17

and establish the subterranean source. So, it seems, the good, all-powerful God
established when he founded nature and left it to our use. For whatever is neces-
sary for us to know about every thing, he made open for us by granting things
properties through which we might come to know them and by granting us vari-
ous senses through which we might apprehend them and an interior faculty
through which we might make judgments about them. But he willed that the
internal nature and, as it were, source be hidden, since knowledge of it is not
necessary for us (3.312b).14
Since God has allowed us to know what we need to know, by creating
things with manifest characteristics that correspond to our ability to
acquire sensory information and the power to reason about those mani-
fest characteristics, it would be unreasonable of us to complain that our
cognitive faculties were not terribly well fitted for the knowledge of the
hidden, underlying substance of things. It is unfortunate here that Gas-
sendi does not tell us what it is that our knowledge of the appearances is
necessary for, as Locke does in similar passages: but I take it that what
Gassendi has in mind here is simply the successful continuation of
everyday life.
The passage just quoted is importantly ambiguous: Gassendi may
mean that it is in keeping with how God arranged things that we do not
now know the nature of things, or that it is in keeping with how God
arranged things that we cannot in principle know the nature of things. It
is clear in the case of the mind that Gassendi thinks inner substance is
in principle ungraspable – but the mind is, as we have seen, a rather
special case. Considering the corporeal example Gassendi gives us –
“when looking at bubbling spring water, we know that this water comes
from this source, but do not thereby strike the edge of our gaze on the
interior” – may help us to figure out whether substance is unknowable
in principle or just unknown. I read Gassendi as saying here that when
we look at the spring water rising from the ground we take it as a sign of
a hidden spring. We do not know exactly what the hidden spring is like:
in particular, we have no direct idea of it. Rather, when we think of

14 Compare the following passage, made in the context of a suggestion that just as
the microscope has allowed us to explain some phenomena in terms of smaller
internal parts, we might be able to explain all the manifest properties of things if
we could see the smallest parts of things (that is, the atoms), a possibility whose
non-actuality Gassendi bemoans: “since we are destitute of vision of this sort
(that is, microscopic vision), and since there is no great hope of ever obtaining
such a splendid microscope […] should we, I ask, be content with those things for
the purpose of whose knowledge – as [that knowledge] alone is necessary for us –
our author has instructed us?” (2.463b).
18 Antonia LoLordo

the hidden spring we imagine something by analogy with springs we

have seen. Now, such an analogical idea can never be as certain or as
informative as a similar idea acquired through sense, on Gassendi’s
view: what is known by the use of indicative signs does not transcend
probability, whereas our knowledge of the manifest is, in the best cases,
entirely certain.
I take this to imply two things about knowledge of hidden, corporeal
substances, on Gassendi’s view. In practice, we do not know any of
them as completely as we could. And even in principle, we cannot have
knowledge of them which is as evident and certain as our knowledge of
what is directly sensed. For the only way we could have such knowledge
is if, per impossibile, we could literally perceive the inner substance
itself. One might wonder whether Gassendi thinks we will ever get even
this less certain kind of knowledge concerning the hidden substances of
corporeal things. I cannot claim with any confidence to know what
Gassendi really thinks here; he certainly does not commit himself one
way or another. Perhaps he does not want to venture a guess about
whether we will ever get far enough with the programme of corpuscu-
larian natural philosophy to get down to the level of the atoms or not.
Such a refusal to speculate would be entirely in keeping with his philo-
sophical temperament.
I have argued that Gassendi’s conceptual materialism about the mind
co-exists peacefully with his claim that we know, at least by faith, that
the mind is immaterial. Given the limitations his theory of the cogni-
tive faculties places on itself, we have no reason to see any principled
tension between the two claims, and hence no reason to think that his
submission to the dictates of faith is in any way philosophically prob-
lematic. Thus the reading I have offered opposes that of Olivier Bloch,
who takes the case of the nature of the mind as one of the strongest
examples for his overarching thesis that Gassendi fails to systematize
and make fully coherent his philosophy in order to avoid confronting
the tension between orthodox religion and the materialist philosophy
he was in the process of developing. Bloch grants that Gassendi may
well have been personally sincere, but holds that his philosophy has a
strongly materialist orientation15, an orientation that does not become
fully explicit because of the tension which would be created if it did.
Now Bloch’s reading relies on his understanding of such episodes as the
objections to Descartes as themselves requiring materialism. He does

15 Bloch 1970, 156f.

 Gassendi on Human Knowledge of the Mind 19

not seem really to consider the possibility that these claims should be
read as claims about our knowledge of the mind rather than about the
mind itself. And, so far as I can see, if he did not read the Disquisitio in
the way he does, he would not see any such tension between faith and
philosophy in Gassendi’s work. I have argued that a more nuanced
reading of the Disquisitio and Gassendi’s account of knowledge of the
mind shows that he is not committed by what he says there to ontologi-
cal materialism: quite the contrary. Hence I take myself to have dis-
solved the chief motivating factor for Bloch’s diagnosis.16 And since
there are strong, although not indefeasible, reasons to avoid ascribing
relatively blatant inconsistency to historical figures, I take that showing
that there is a coherent alternative to Bloch’s interpretation by itself
gives good reason to accept that alternative.

Gassendi’s Later View

Gassendi’s later work contains what at first looks like a dramatic change of opinion
for him: a set of arguments alleged to show that the mind is immaterial.17 He provides
three examples of operations performed by the mind which in principle could not be
performed by a material thing. First, the mind or intellect can understand itself and
its functions, while no material thing can act on itself directly.18 Second, the mind can
apprehend certain notions lacking imagistic content (such as the notion of an imma-
terial substance, formed by way of negation) (2.440b). Third, the intellect can have
some grasp of universals although genuine universals cannot be apprehended by
sense or derived from sensory apprehension (2.441b). These are traditional argu-
ments, and it is interesting to note that Gassendi often ran them in reverse in his ear-
lier work, arguing, for instance, that we cannot entertain genuine universals because
we lack the immaterial intellect needed to do so.
What matters for present purposes, however, is what these arguments for the im-
materiality of the mind imply. They are supposed to be probable arguments, based on
reason, to the effect that the human soul cannot be corporeal. Thus they are not in-
tended to show, as Descartes’ argument is intended to show, that the human soul is a
substance individuated by something we grasp which rules out corporeality. Gas-
sendi neither says anything that seems intended to establish that the incorporeal

16 More recent English secondary literature has not tended to endorse Bloch’s read-
ing: see Michael and Michael 1988, Osler 1994 and Sarasohn 1996.
17 For a full account of this, see Michael and Michael 1988, 483f.
18 2.441a. It is odd that Gassendi here runs together the mind’s capacity to reflect
on itself directly – which Gassendi explicitly denies in the Disquisitio – and its
capacity to notice its functions – which Gassendi allows in the Disquisitio but
does not seem to think requires incorporeality.
20 Antonia LoLordo

mind is a substance,19 nor anything suggesting that we have some positive grasp on
the nature of the incorporeal mind. Although the claim that the intellect can reflect
on itself directly seems as if it should imply that we can form a positive conception of
our own minds, Gassendi does not offer any description of such a conception, but
rather holds that our idea of the mind is formed by negation. Our idea of the incor-
poreal mind is the idea representing some thing, different in kind from the corporeal
things we experience because incorporeal, which can perform these three operations.
This idea is barely, if at all, more informative than the earlier idea of the mind as a
corporeal subtle body. Certainly it gives us no more resources for further investi-
gation of the mind. Indeed, it is remarkable that when Gassendi makes this shift to
the claim that we know by reason that the mind is immaterial, nothing else in his
account of the mind changes. The claim that the mind is incorporeal neither rules out
the physiology of impression-formation in the brain nor provides us with any new ex-
planation of the states and operations of the mind. Gassendi’s switch in views brings
together the ontologies suggested by faith and natural philosophy without making
any impact on natural-philosophical accounts of the mind.
We should have expected this. Recall Gassendi’s objection to Descartes that postu-
lating a simple, indivisible, immaterial mind rules out any explanatory resources.
Now, while Gassendi does not explicitly assert that the incorporeal mind is simple
and indivisible, he does not think that our idea of it depicts it as having any parts or
structure, and hence it is no more useful for explanatory purposes than an idea rep-
resenting a simple, indivisible, incorporeal thing. Thus on Gassendi’s view, whether
or not we have an idea of reason of the mind which is in keeping with the dictate of
faith that the mind is immaterial, the immaterial mind whose existence we accept has
nothing to do with the natural philosophy of the mind. I take this to be a straight-
forward expression of Gassendi’s commitment to discovering the limits as well as the
extent of human knowledge.20

19 It seems most natural to think that Gassendi’s incorporeal mind is a thing, but he
does not really tell us so. For all he says, the incorporeal mind might as well be a
form. Although he argues elsewhere that explanation in terms of forms is vacu-
ous and unhelpful, this does not rule out the possibility of saying that there is
a form in a case where he has already said that full explanation cannot be given.
Indeed, he does not rule out the Lockean view that the mind may be an imma-
terial power, although there is no evidence that he thinks this and, indeed, does
not much trade in the language of powers.
20 Part of the research for and writing of this paper was supported by a fellowship
from the Huntington Library. I would like to thank the Huntington for its gen-
erous support. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees for this journal
for helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.
 Gassendi on Human Knowledge of the Mind 21

Arnauld, A. 1990. On True and False Ideas. Transl. Stephen Gaukroger. Manchester.
Bloch, O. 1970. La Philosophie de Gassendi. The Hague.
Descartes, R. 1973–1978. Œuvres de Descartes. Ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery.
Paris.
Gassendi, P. 1658. Opera Omnia in sex tomos divisa. Lyon (reprint: Stuttgart-Bad
Cannstatt 1964).
Michael, E. and Michael, F. 1988. “Gassendi on Sensation and Reflection: A Non-
Cartesian Dualism”. History of European Ideas 9.5: 483–495.
Osler, M. 1994. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy. Cambridge.
Sarasohn, L. 1996. Gassendi’s Ethics. Ithaca, NY.
Wilson, M. 1978. Descartes. Boston.