Sébastien Basson[1] was a French physician and natural philosopher of the early seventeenth century. He was an early theorist of a matter theory based both on atoms and compounds. To the modern reader, his natural philosophy looks eclectic, as it draws on several currents of thought, including Italian Renaissance naturalism, alchemy and Calvinist theology.[2] Together with Isaac Beeckman he is sometimes considered the inventor of molecular theory.[3]
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Basson was born in the area of Metz in Lorraine around 1573 and studied at the Jesuit college of Pont-à-Mousson, where he took philosophy courses under Petrus Sinsonius. Where he obtained his doctorate in medicine is unknown. At some stage, but before 1610, he converted to Calvinism and got married in Lausanne, Switzerland. From 1611 to 1625, he taught rhetoric at the small Calvinist academy at Die-en-Dauphiné. In 1620, he had to appear before the board of theologians at Geneva in order to defend his anti-Aristotelian treatise, whose printing the censors had stopped. After tensions with the academic senate at Die had been rising for some years, he left the town in anger in 1625. Where he went and when he died is unknown. [4]
His Philosophiae naturalis adversus Aristotelem libri XII of 1621, was, as its title suggests, strongly against the conception of natural philosophy as based on Aristotle; it attacked in particular the concept of continuous magnitude.[5] Leclerc considers this work the fullest expression of the “new conception of nature” that had arisen in Europe by the 1620s, at the hands of Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, David van Goorle, and Daniel Sennert.[6]
For Basson, atoms may combine as mixta, but they are not in a void, but rather in an ether. They are moved by it; in this suggestion Basso contradicts the teleology of the Jesuit view of causation. The theory of his time on the classical elements tended towards a version with five principles, but Basso rejected earth and water in his book, leaving his elemental theory as three Paracelsian principles.[7][8] He opposed, though, the theory of "compounds", as admitted by Sennert, in the sense of mixtures having properties that were not properties of their atomistic constituents.[9]