Abstract
With Marin Mersenne and Rene Descartes, Pierre Gassendi was eminent among generation of European thinkers who decisively discredited what previous century called the occult When Henry Cornelius Agrippa used that phrase in title of his famous book of 1510, he could take for granted a philosophical theory of natural magic as part of a larger system of natural philosophy. More than a hundred years later Gassendi and his colleagues shook foundations of natural magic by displacing its chief philosophical supports, replacing hylemorphic apparatus of matter and form, substance and accident as taught in Peripatetic school philosophy with new corpuscular and mechanical paradigms. 1 Just as these new theories had an empirical basis in actual or putative experience-when Descartes meditated on bouncing tennis balls or when Pascal's brother-in-law carried a tube of mercury up Puy-deDome-so was theory of natural magic instantiated by reference to a set of material objects, objects odd enough to count as magical and bearing properties that eluded matter-theory that prevailed in Europe from
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