ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Gassendi’s “biological” ideas and their specificity in the general economy of his natural philosophy. It analyzes the philosopher’s reliance on corpuscular models to account for organic structures and functional processes, and his appeal to a concept of “material soul” to represent the active and regulative principle of all vital and animal functions. In particular, corpuscular mechanism is shown to be central to Gassendi’s theory of generation, which developed around a renewed interpretation of the concept of “seed” (semen) through the extension of a notion of “molecule” (molecula). Generated in an appropriate material matrix, the seed is presumed to possess a formative power which, in the more complex seminal aggregates, is identified with the embryo’s soul, and is held to be capable of developing the whole organism by successive accretions of similar particles. Elements of this system, duly revised, will find their way into later generation theories under both labels of “preformation” and “epigenesis.”
