Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 297 attributes to God--omnipotence, omniscience, and so on? Watson simply observes that "we cannot comprehend these notions" (ibid.), but this seems much too swift. Descartes readily admits that infinity, for example, cannot be "grasped" (comprehendere) by the human intellect, while insisting, with some arguments to back his claim, that it is a term whose meaning we nevertheless "understand" (intellegere). Again, what of our innate mathematical notions? Admittedly these are highly general and abstract ("simplicissima generalia," as Descartes puts it in the Meditations) but this does not seem enough to show that they are contentless,as Watson's argument seems to require. Though Watson's arguments here and in the companion piece "Descartes Knows Nothing" seem to me to be less than secure, the two papers certainly make a vigorous endpiece for the book. The style, rather out of keeping with what has gone before, is blunt and provocative (and intended to be so); but I must confess to preferring the approach of the earlier Watson, in Downfall, where the pace is less furious, and the argument more historically oriented and more carefully fleshed out with textual analysis . Overall, then, the book contains much to inform, much to stimulate; any libraries or individual Cartesian scholars who do not already possess Downfall should certainly invest in Breakdown. JoHn COTTINGHAM University ofReading Lynn Sumida Joy. Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History m an Age of Science. Ideas in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. xiii + 311. NP. Over fifteen years ago, Edward Driscoll, speaking of current work on Gassendi, remarked on the "astonishing vacuum in seventeenth