A RATIONAL WORLD CONCEPTION 219 



in which he had revealed his adherence to the Coppernican 

 doctrine. Of Kepler he seems to have known little. His vast 

 system of tourbillons or vortices is of interest to-day scarcely 

 more than as a philosophical curiosity. It bears just the shade 

 of a resemblance to the vortex-ring theory of Helmholtz and 

 Lord Kelvin. Some day it may be rejuvenated ; but for its 

 own time it was a seduction. With the incoming of the simpler 

 ideas of Newton, firm grounded upon experimentally demon- 

 strated facts, it was forgotten. 



Nevertheless, and in spite of the ultimate downfall of the 

 vast house of cards which he had reared, to Descartes belongs 

 a distinction that is unique, and that places him among the 

 highest of those who have reflected upon the construction and 

 march of the bewildering theatre upon which we are born. 

 Not forgetting the chance phrase of Coppernicus nor the brilliant 

 conjectures of Kepler, it is fairly certain that Descartes was 

 the first concretely to picture this world as a mechanism, the 

 first to explain^its phenomena upon a mechanical basis, the 

 first to analyse the universe into terms of matter and motion. 

 This he did, not as pure astronomer, not simply as regards the 

 sun and planets ; but through the tides and winds, through 

 physiology and all the phenomena of life, and down to the last 

 flutter of an eyelid. 



Descartes found a militant adversary, the Coppernican system 

 a suave but insistent defender, in Pierre Gassendi, the worthy 

 abbe of Digne ; he is scarcely remembered now outside the 

 musty pages of the history of philosophy. Gassendi bore an 

 unmistakably important role not merely in French thought in 

 the seventeenth century, but in that of Europe as well. He 

 was the first conspicuous defender of the Coppernican ideas in 

 France after the fugitive propaganda of Bruno ; he was its 

 first expositor at the College de France. It was Gassendi, more- 

 over, who dug out and gave new life to the ideas and doctrines 

 of Epicurus that is to say, to the physical and atomic theories 

 of Democritus. 



The result was a curious alignment. The ideas of Descartes 

 and the whole bent of his mind were mechanical ; and the first 

 worked-out theory which distinctly presented a mechanical 

 world conception was the system of Coppernicus. Descartes 

 did not reject the system ; but even in the writings published 



