Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) lived in three civilizations in the span of one life-time: medieval ecclesiastic, Renaissance humanist and modern and he never cut himself loose from any of them. It is probably scientific; because he managed to be at home in all three that history has allocated to him a position somewhere on the fringe of the inner circle of genius in the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. While he was not a front-runner, Gassendi was nevertheless a pioneer of modern corpuscularianism and his influence on the development of empirical science was truly international. It is...