INTRODUCTION

As noted in Chapter 15, Aristotle and the Peripatetics held that local motion is primary with respect to all other kinds of motion or change. Proponents of the new natural philosophies of the seventeenth century, including neo-atomists and those of Stoic inspiration, would have accepted this view and, indeed, would not have spurned the way it was presented by some of the later Peripatetics. They would not have been out of sympathy with the Aristotelian Keckermann, whose teaching on this issue in the Danzig Gymnasium in 1607 was not far removed from the new understanding of the rôle of local motion: ‘According to the order of nature, local motion is the first among motions, partly because it is common to the totality of all natural bodies, partly also because the other motions arise from it as from a cause [tanquam à causa]’. Nor would they have been seriously at odds with Chasteigner de la Rochepozay: ‘All other motions are included in local motion as in a cause [ut in causa], on account of [its being] the primary motion, because it is the cause of every corporeal motion, and without it there cannot be any other motion’. Yet it is not clear whether the causality in these texts is real or analogical or, if real (assuming it to be efficient), whether proximate, partial, or productive efficient causality is intended. The causal rôle reserved for local motion by some early seventeenth-century scholastics is still not the special rôle reserved for it by the proponents of the mechanical philosophy.