Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

GASSENDI AND HOBBES 233
animal body. It accounts for body heat and provides the heat for digestion and
nutrition; it is sustained by the circulation of the blood. This animating principle
is present in humans as well as animals, but in humans it is present together with
a rational soul. The rational soul is infused by God in each human being
individually, presumably at the moment of conception; the non-rational soul is
transmitted by the processes of biological generation themselves. A letter of
1629 7 suggests that it was only to reconcile his position with Scripture, not with
biological evidence, that Gassendi departed from the simple hypothesis that a
single soul was derived by each person from its parents (Op. Omn. VI, 19).
Finally, in the Syntagma the relation of the rational soul to the human being in
whom it is infused is said to be rather like that of a substantial form to the matter
it informs, Gassendi suggests (Op. Omn. II, 466), lifting what is otherwise a total
ban on the invocation of substantial forms in the rest of the physics.
Gassendi’s account of the soul (Op. Omn. II, 237–59), and of its faculties of
phantasy (II, 398–424) and intellect (II, 425–68), is for the most part an account
of the biologically generated soul, not the divinely instilled one. It is the
biological soul that is the seat of the faculty of imagination or phantasy, and
most cognitive operations are varieties of operations on ideas in the imagination.
This is true in particular of the operations regulated by the canons of Gassendi’s
logic: forming ideas, reasoning, correcting for the deceptions of sense and so on.
The logic says that all our ideas come from the senses and are in the first place
ideas of individual things. The physics explains that corpuscles constituting the
sensible species enter channels in the eye, ear and so on, and make impacts on
tensed membranes, the vibrations from which are communicated to the brain by
nerves filled with animal spirits. The brain then interprets the vibrations and they
occur to the mind as conscious sensations. Episodes of the sensation leave traces
or vestiges in the brain, and these are the physical substrate of ideas. As for
operations on ideas, the physics relates each of these to vestiges of sense
understood as brainfolds (Op. Omn. II, 405). Habits of mind also have a material
basis. Finally, various forms of deception of the senses are possible because it is
possible for the same pattern of vibration reaching the brain to be produced in
different ways, or for it to be interpreted in different ways.
So much for the biological soul. A rational soul is needed to account for
capacities that surpass those of the imagination, such as the capacity of the soul
to know itself, to know the universal independently of abstracting from
particulars, and to know God. Not that it is incapable of forming, composing,
analysing and ratiocination: it can do what the non-rational soul can do: but it
can do more as well. On the other hand, it is dependent on the material of the
imagination: when it apprehends things it apprehends the same sort of ideas that
the imagination does, not intelligible species. In this sense intellection and
imagination are not really distinct (as for example Descartes had claimed in
Meditation VI). Apart from cognitive operations, the rational soul is called upon
to make sense of some practical capacities, specifically the ability to will the
Good rather than aim for pleasure.