The Demise of Occult Qualities

In his Parhelia of 1629, the French mechanical philosopher Pierre Gassendi proclaimed, “For me, undoubtedly, there is nothing that is not a magnet or a remora; for this reason, even the smallest animal of any kind, the smallest plant, the tiniest pebble, when I truly study it, astonishes me.” ¹ He opposed this ideology to that of the Aristotelians, who pretended to “see things from the inside” with their hylomorphic doctrine of form and matter but who, according to Gassendi, were unable to describe so much as the essence of a flea. There is a certain irony here, for almost four centuries earlier Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), one of the greatest proponents of Aristotle in the Middle Ages, had admitted that “our cognition is so feeble that no philosopher has ever been able to investigate completely the nature of a fly.” ² Aquinas was concerned with the inherent limits of human understanding, circumscribed by the gross material of our bodies and but a frail shadow of the knowledge lost in humanity’s original fall from grace. Gassendi, however, was exulting in a science of mechanism that had abandoned any claims to the demonstration of essences; our knowledge stops at “the bark of things,” he argued, and anything beneath that bark would remain a mystery. Gassendi’s advocate in England, Walter Charleton, echoed this sentiment when he wrote, “To Ourselves all the Operations of Nature are meer Secrets.” ³