SOURCE: “Gassendi's Account of the Nature of Things,” in French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire, Athlone Press, 1960, pp. 85-102.

In the excerpt below, Spink considers Gassendi's adaptations of Epicurus, comparing Gassendi's work with Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. The critic also examines Gassendi's Syntagma philosophicum, finding Gassendi singular among his French contemporaries as a proponent of atomism.

It is difficult to determine which of several possible reasons attracted Gassendi to Epicurus in the first place in 1626. He had just given up, or was in process of giving up his plan for publishing a series of direct attacks on the old school in continuation of his Exercitationes paradoxicae. Doubtless it was prudence which caused him to do so; not that he felt menaced by the campaign of his friend Mersenne against the sceptics and deists; more probably he realized that attempts of the type of the Exercitationes paradoxicae were neither...