ABSTRACT
We recall from chapter 1 that Kurd Lasswitz, whose detailed analysis of Gorlaeus’ natural philosophy of 1890 has provided the basis for all subsequent discussions, did not hide his perplexity at this author’s idiosyncratic road to atomism. On the one hand, Gorlaeus’ Exercitationes philosophicae (1620) were published in roughly the same years as the first edition of Daniel Sennert’s De chymicorum cum Aristotelicis consensu ac dissensu (1619); the second edition of Nicholas Hill’s Philosophia epicurea (1619); Francis Bacon’s Instauratio magna (1620); Sébastien Basson’s Philosophia naturalis (1621); Jean d’Espagnet’s Enchyridion physicae (1623); and Galileo Galilei’s Saggiatore (1623) – all works that contained some corpuscular or atomist concepts. Lasswitz therefore spoke of those years as a time in which “the corpuscular theory had already found wide diffusion and many supporters.” 1 And yet, the peculiarly theological and ontological angle from which Gorlaeus arrived at his own positions looked sufficiently distinct from those chosen by his atomist companions for Lasswitz to decide that he could not view Gorlaeus as a member of an overarching consensus. However, unable to find any reliable information concerning the author’s life and circumstances, he prefaced his textual analysis with that call for additional historical research that we have quoted above: “A monograph on Gorlaeus and on this important decade would be most desirable.” 2
