Exercitationes philosophicæ quibus universa fere discutitur philosophia theoretica, et plurima ac præcipua Peripateticorum dogmata evertuntur … cum gemino indice.
[Leiden]: In bibliopolio Commeliniano, sumptibus viduæ Joannis Comelini, 1620. First edition — the only edition the work ever received — of one of the earliest systematic statements of modern atomism — the posthumous work of a theology student who died at twenty-one and never saw a page of it in print. David Gorlaeus (1591–1612) left two manuscripts at his death; once published, thisExercitationes philosophicaeand the shorterIdea physicae(Utrecht, 1651) made him, in the words of theDictionary of Scientific Biography, one of the founders of modern atomism and a contributor to the evolution of chemistry. The second of those descriptions has drawn the keener recent interest: Gorlaeus held that the qualities of a body follow from the kinds, proportions and arrangement of the atoms composing it rather than from any substantial form — a compound being a built-up aggregate of persisting particles, not a new substance with a new nature — and it is this, more than the bare assertion that atoms exist, that historians of chemistry have read as his place in the science’s prehistory, a generation before the corpuscular chemistry of Boyle. Because his identity was long unknown, readers made of him what they wished: seventeenth-century writers saw an anti-Aristotelian and a forerunner of Descartes, nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians an atomist, a natural scientist, even a chemist. Christoph Lüthy’sDavid Gorlæus (1591–1612): An Enigmatic Figure in the History of Philosophy and Science(Amsterdam, 2012), the first and still the only book devoted to him, set out what the man was: a beginning student of theology whose atomism was the conclusion of an ontology, and whose thought stands at the meeting point of philosophy, the nascent natural sciences, and Arminian theology. The book’s title states its aim — to overthrow the principal dogmas of the Peripatetics — and it pursues that aim by argument rather than experiment, dissolving the Aristotelian apparatus of substantial forms and real qualities into individuals and their accidental aggregates. No copy of either of Gorlaeus’s works has been traced in the auction records. A census of theExercitationeslocates only thirteen copies, all in institutions: five in Germany — the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek in Hannover, the university libraries of Jena and Rostock, and the Herzog August Bibliothek at Wolfenbüttel; two in Britain — the British Library and the Middle Temple; two in France — two copies in the Bibliothèque nationale at Paris; two in the Netherlands — the university library at Leiden and Tresoar at Leeuwarden; one in Switzerland, at Basel; and one in Romania, in the Academy Library at Cluj-Napoca. None has been located in the United States or anywhere outside Europe. The Dutch holdings are recent: as Henri Krop observed, no Dutch public library owned a copy until Leiden and Leeuwarden each acquired one after 1986. Gorlaeus was born in Utrecht on 15 January 1591 — theUltraiectinusof his title page — the son of a Protestant refugee from Antwerp who served as treasurer to the stadtholder Adolf van Nieuwenaar, and of a Frisian noblewoman, Swob van Martena, daughter of Doecke van Martena, lieutenant-admiral of Friesland. The antiquary Abraham Gorlaeus, whose illustratedDactyliothecaof engraved gems is a different and far commoner book often confused with David’s, was his uncle; the family kept alchemical interests, as the father’s correspondence shows. Raised among his mother’s family at Cornjum in Friesland, in the Martena stins — where his tomb survives, carved with the head of a youth — he matriculated in arts at Franeker in 1606 and studied there until 1610. There Henricus de Veno, who before reaching Franeker had spent more than a year in the prison of the Roman Inquisition, folded recent work in astronomy and meteorology into an otherwise Aristotelian course and shaped his pupil’s natural philosophy. By 1610 Gorlaeus had read the one modern author he cites with any frequency, Julius Caesar Scaliger, whoseExercitationes exotericae(1557) explained natural phenomena through corpuscles and interstitial voids and supplied both the title and the exercise form of Gorlaeus’s own book. Scaliger had written as an Aristotelian and an anti-atomist; Gorlaeus took his minimal bodies and recast them as indivisible atoms. He enrolled in the theological faculty at Leiden on 23 April 1611 and died on 27 April 1612, aged twenty-one — his father dead the same year, perhaps both of malaria. His atomism grew out of the theological crisis he entered at Leiden. The Arminian controversy over predestination was then at its height — a dispute that turned, beneath its politics, on divine and human causality, time and eternity, place and ubiquity, freedom and determinism. Conrad Vorstius, named to succeed the late Arminius, arrived in 1611 and was expelled almost at once for heresy, his conception of a God possessing quantity and occupying place traced to the metaphysics of the German physician Nicolaus Taurellus. The controversy, political as much as doctrinal, soon became a national and an international affair: the charges drew in King James I of England, who rebutted Vorstius in person and had hisTractatus de Deopublicly burned. Gorlaeus, a partisan of the Arminian cause, read both Vorstius and Taurellus closely, and his atomism is a radicalisation of the ontology he found in Taurellus. What later historians took for premature natural science was, in its first purpose, the metaphysical groundwork for the theology Gorlaeus supported — a theology in which it mattered greatly whether a given thing was one substance or a composite of several. The system begins with a definition. Philosophy, Gorlaeus writes in his first exercise, is the naked knowledge of beings, and is therefore ontology — a universal first philosophy, set against Aristotelian metaphysics and divided according to the kinds of being it treats: God, angels, and the natural beings that fall to physics. Everything follows from one distinction, between theens per se— self-subsisting, numerically one, fully actual, unchanging and indivisible — and theens per accidens, an aggregate whose components each keep their own essence. Only God, angels, souls and physical atoms areentia per se; water, a tree, any compound, and a human being are accidental composites. The atomism is therefore metaphysical before it is physical, the consequence of a nominalism that admits only individuals and denies universals and substantial forms: there are no real species or genera, only names, and with them goes the whole Aristotelian machinery of form. Following F. A. H. Peeters, Lüthy counts Gorlaeus invoking Ockham’s razor seventeen times in theExercitationes. The doctrine carried a theological charge that accounts for a divinity student’s interest in it: if man is an accidental being, then the soul, not the composite man, is the substance, with consequences for how the believer is united with Christ. The book runs to eighteenexercitationesdescending from the most general categories toward physics — being, distinction, the universal, accident, quantity, quality, relation, motion, place, time, the composite, atoms, matter and form, generation, the heavens, the elements — and closes, unfinished, on the soul. The twin index promised on the title page, of exercises and of matters, completes the volume. On this foundation Gorlaeus builds a detailed physics. Rejecting Aristotle’s place as the inner surface of a containing body, he sets his atoms in an absolute space that need not be filled; place is simply the quantity of space a body occupies, after Scaliger. Atoms have quantity and extension and come in two kinds, dry and wet — earth and water — into which all natural bodies resolve, a two-element scheme drawn from north-Italian readings of the fourth book of Aristotle’sMeteorology. Fire is not an element but the friction of densely packed atoms; air is a real, non-elementary substance that fills every pore, so that no actual void subsists, and conveys celestial heat downward without itself condensing or rarefying; rarefaction is air entering between the atoms. The physical and chemical qualities of bodies arise as atemperament— an Aristotelico-Galenic term given an atomistic sense — when the elementary characters wet and dry combine with the warm and cold carried by the ambient air. This account of compounds built up in hierarchies from a few kinds of atom, a mixed body being an arrangement of persisting atoms rather than a new substance with a new form, is what places Gorlaeus in the prehistory of chemistry. Where the scheme falls short he adds to it: heaviness is a divinely impressed downward force, and providence governs the gathering of atoms into complex bodies. Generation and corruption become the assembly and dispersal of atoms rather than the coming and going of forms. The cosmological consequence is drawn directly — there is no fifth element, and no division of a corruptible sublunary world from an incorruptible heaven; the stars move in a fluid sky, and he cites Tycho Brahe’s measurements of the comets, which had shown the heavens to contain no solid crystalline spheres. Composed before 1612, the work stands among the earliest systematic atomisms of the century: earlier than Sebastian Basso’sPhilosophiae naturalis adversus Aristotelem(1621), contemporary with the chemical atomism of Daniel Sennert, and preceded among comparable statements only by such isolated efforts as Nicholas Hill’sPhilosophia Epicurea(1601). Lüthy notes that there was no single revival of atomism but a series of separate efforts with different aims, and that Gorlaeus’s atoms were the conclusions of a theological metaphysics rather than the empirical particles the later corpuscularians would propose. He reached the indivisible atom by asking what could count as a true unity and answering that only what is one and indivisible truly exists — a path through ontology that sets his book apart from Hill’s Epicureanism, from Sennert’s chemistry, and from the mechanical philosophy that followed. Both works were written in Gorlaeus’s student years, between the spring of 1610 and his death; the earlier bound is fixed by their reference to Galileo’sSidereus nunciusof March 1610, whose author Gorlaeus names only as a certain mathematician of Padua. Lüthy argues that the shorterIdea physicaewas written first and theExercitationessecond and left incomplete: its eighteenth exercise, on the soul, abandons the book’s method to paraphrase a recent Leiden disputation on the origin of the soul and then stops mid-argument. The book printed in 1620 has almost no front matter and names no editor: F. M. Jaeger’s candidate, the Arminian theologian Petrus Bertius, rests on a mistaken premise, and Lüthy raises instead the possibility of Gorlaeus’s cousin Carel van Gelder, executor of his father’s will. The editor’s anonymity, and the discretion of the whole undertaking, suit the book’s matter: to any reader who grasped its argument it was plainly tied to the Remonstrant cause, which the Synod of Dort had condemned only the year before it appeared. Set from an unpolished manuscript, its text drew heavy correction from early readers, the copy at Basel being annotated throughout. The title page states the posthumous condition outright — issued after the author’s death, with a twin index — and carries a laurel-wreath device enclosing the motto FABRICANDO FABRI FIMVS, by making we become makers, which Lüthy found on no other publication of the period. The imprint carries a complication. The standard title, carried by this copy, names the Commelin bookshop and the widow of Jan Commelin — Trijn Jansdr. Valckenier, who ran her late husband’s Amsterdam firm from his death in 1615 until her own in 1621 — with no place of printing stated. This house is not the earlier Heidelberg scholar-printer Hieronymus Commelinus, with which it is often confused; the two Commelinian firms ran at once, the Heidelberg Officina under Commelinus’s heirs still printing in 1620. Almost every copy carries the widow’s imprint; one alone — the British Library’s — instead names the Leiden printers Jan Ganne and Harman van Westerhuyzen, the only copy to record where the book was actually made; the two worked at the lower end of the Leiden trade as junior partners in an enterprise the widow largely financed, their names surviving on this single copy, Lüthy suggests, because their small share entitled them to no more than a fraction of the print run. The companionIdea physicaeappeared at Utrecht only in 1651, thirty-one years after theExercitationesthough written first; it gives the same physics without the metaphysical preface and appends an anonymous letter on the motion of the earth that Reijer Hooykaas attributed in 1984 to Rheticus, Copernicus’s pupil — an attribution since contested, most directly by Shannon Higgins, who in 2013 argued for an early-seventeenth-century Catholic author. Of that book no Dutch public collection owns a copy at all. The book’s afterlife turned on a single doctrine. Marin Mersenne listed Gorlaeus among the impious he set out to refute in hisL’Impiété des Déistes(1624), beside Bruno, Campanella and Vanini — and beside Basso and Hill, two of the very atomists with whom historians would later group him; a generation later Adriaan Heereboord at Leiden numbered him among the renovators of philosophy. The thread that ties him to Descartes is the claim, taken from Taurellus, that man is anens per accidens, the union of soul and body accidental rather than essential. In December 1641 a disputation under Descartes’s Utrecht ally Henricus Regius defended that thesis; challenged, Regius said he had only used Gorlaeus’s terms, and hisFundamenta physices(1646) cite theExercitationes. The episode opened the Utrecht Querelle, the first open conflict between Cartesianism and the Aristotelian university, which ended in the city’s 1642 condemnation of the new philosophy; Gisbertus Voetius built from it a genealogy — Taurellus to Gorlaeus to Regius to Descartes — that Pierre Bayle later carried into hisDictionnaire. How far the line reaches Descartes himself is disputed. Descartes reproved Regius for the formula and said he had never heard of Taurellus or Gorlaeus; Helen Hattab argues for a real conceptual link, with Gorlaeus anticipating the rejection of hylomorphism and a substance-and-mode metaphysics, his works circulating among Descartes’s Dutch associates; Christoph Lüthy holds that only the chain as far as Regius is documented. The firmest later debt is to the Utrecht Cartesian Johannes de Bruyn, who, as Erik-Jan Bos has shown, drew at times almost word for word on theExercitationes, in Utrecht disputations of 1653 and 1655, for his theory of place and of absolute space as an infinite three-dimensional emptiness. Modern recognition came slowly. Kurd Lasswitz rediscovered Gorlaeus in hisGeschichte der Atomistikof 1890 and, finding his atomist to be a theology student, called a monograph on him a desideratum; F. M. Jaeger recovered the biography in 1918; E. J. Dijksterhuis cast him as a precursor of Galileo, J. R. Partington praised his atomism as scientific, A. Sassen called him a lonely figure in 1959, and Tullio Gregory gave him a first sustained Italian treatment in 1966. Lüthy’s 2001 essay reframed him, and his 2012 monograph completed the work; the book, in the series History of Science and Scholarship in the Netherlands, is freely available in open access, and reviews by Henri Krop, by Alan Gabbey inIsisand by Anthony DeSantis inHOPOSregistered the change. The decade since has produced a steady body of new work, much of it from the Nijmegen circle and its interlocutors: Hattab on his treatment of universals (2016), Kuni Sakamoto on his finite God and infinite space (2022), Bos on his Cartesian afterlife (2023), and the collective volume on Renaissance atomism that Lüthy edited with Elena Nicoli. His name is now read across the histories of philosophy, of science and of theology; the Gorlaeus Laboratories at Leiden University carry it, and Louis Andriessen set passages of theIdea physicaein his 1989 operaDe Materie. The present copy is the standard widow-of-Commelin issue, complete and clean. It carries at the foot of the title an early shelf-mark, ‘H. II’, the mark of an unidentified early collection, and is bound with, as binder’s waste at the front, a leaf carrying a woodcut world map of the classical, three-continent type — Europe, Asia and Africa (here lettered Lybia) ringed by a single circumfluent ocean, with no New World — of the kind printed in the mid-sixteenth century to illustrate editions of the ancient geographer Pomponius Mela. Gorlaeus reduced nature to atoms in empty space a generation before Pierre Gassendi’sSyntagma Philosophicum(1658) made the Epicurean atom respectable for the new science, and before the corpuscular programme of Boyle and Newton; he arrived there not by experiment but from a metaphysics worked out, and left unfinished, by a student of theology aged twenty-one. References: Dictionary of Scientific Biography/New DSB, s.v. ‘Gorlaeus’ (C. Lüthy) — Christoph Lüthy,David Gorlæus (1591–1612): An Enigmatic Figure in the History of Philosophy and Science(Amsterdam, 2012) — Lüthy, ‘David Gorlaeus’ Atomism, or: The Marriage of Protestant Metaphysics with Italian Natural Philosophy,’ inLate Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories(Leiden, 2001), 245–290 — Lüthy, ‘The Metaphysical Roots of Physics…,’ in Antoine-Mahut & Roux (eds.),Physics and Metaphysics in Descartes and in his Reception(Routledge, 2019), 85–116 — Helen Hattab, ‘Aristotelianism and Atomism Combined: Gorlaeus on Knowledge of Universals,’Perspectives on Science24:3 (2016), 285–304; andDescartes on Forms and Mechanisms(Cambridge, 2009) — Erik-Jan Bos, ‘Atomism and Cartesianism: Gassendi and Gorlaeus (and More) in Utrecht Disputations in the 1650s,’Erudition and the Republic of Letters8:4 (2023) — Kuni Sakamoto, ‘Finite God and Infinite Space: Conrad Vorstius and David Gorlaeus,’ inAtoms, Corpuscles and Minima in the Renaissance(Leiden, 2022), 227–246 — Theo Verbeek, ‘Ens per accidens: le origini della Querelle di Utrecht,’Giornale critico della filosofia italiana71 (1992), 276–288 — Lüthy & Spruit, ‘The Doctrine and Trial of Henricus de Veno,’Renaissance Quarterly56 (2003), 1112–1151 — R. Hooykaas,G. J. Rheticus’ Treatise on Holy Scripture and the Motion of the Earth(Amsterdam, 1984); Shannon Higgins,G. J. Rheticus and the Authorship of the AnonymousEpistola de terrae motu (MA thesis, Dalhousie, 2013) — Henri Krop, review of Lüthy,BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review128:3 (2013) — F. M. Jaeger, ‘Over David van Goorle als atomist,’Oud-Holland36 (1918), 205–242 — Kurd Lasswitz,Geschichte der Atomistik vom Mittelalter bis Newton(Hamburg, 1890), I, 333–335, 455–463 — A. E. C. Simoni,Catalogue of Books from the Low Countries 1601–1621 in the British Library(London, 1990), p. 244. 8vo (154 × 89 mm), pp. [xxviii], 352. Contemporary paste boards covered in vellum, the manuscript title ‘Gorlæi Philos. Exercit.’ lettered on the spine; the boards lightly soiled, worn and chipped at the corners exposing the board layers, some worming to the head and foot of the spine; internally fine and clean. Title-page with the laurel-wreath device and motto FABRICANDO FABRI FIMVS, and an early shelf-mark ‘H. II’ lettered at the foot. Bound in at the front, as binder’s waste, a leaf from a mid-sixteenth-century edition of an ancient geographer, bearing a woodcut world map of the classical three-continent type (the continents lettered Europa, Asia and Lybia, between Septentrio and Meridies, the whole ringed by a single ocean and showing no New World — of the kind made to illustrate Pomponius Mela).
Item #6716
Price: $38,000.00
