We recall from chapter 1 that Kurd Lasswitz, whose detailed analysis of Gorlaeus’ natural philosophy of 1890 has provided the basis for all subsequent discussions, did not hide his perplexity at this author's idiosyncratic road to atomism. On the one hand, Gorlaeus’ Exercitationes philosophicae (1620) were published in roughly the same years as the first edition of Daniel Sennert's De chymicorum cum Aristotelicis consensu ac dissensu (1619); the second edition of Nicholas Hill's Philosophia epicurea (1619); Francis Bacon's Instauratio magna (1620); Sébastien Basson's Philosophia naturalis (1621); Jean d’Espagnet's Enchyridion physicae (1623); and Galileo Galilei's Saggiatore (1623) – all works that contained some corpuscular or atomist concepts. Lasswitz therefore spoke of those years as a time in which “the corpuscular theory had already found wide diffusion and many supporters.” And yet, the peculiarly theological and ontological angle from which Gorlaeus arrived at his own positions looked sufficiently distinct from those chosen by his atomist companions for Lasswitz to decide that he could not view Gorlaeus as a member of an overarching consensus. However, unable to find any reliable information concerning the author's life and circumstances, he prefaced his textual analysis with that call for additional historical research that we have quoted above: “A monograph on Gorlaeus and on this important decade would be most desirable.”

A good part of the missing biography was unearthed by the Dutch professor of chemistry and historian Frans Maurits Jaeger, who in a seminal article of 1918 presented the results of his research into Gorlaeus’ life and family background. Whereas Lasswitz had merely been able to discover that Gorlaeus had enrolled at Leiden's theological faculty in 1611, Jaeger managed to establish Gorlaeus’ dates of birth and death, traced his paternal and maternal families, intuited their Arminian link and capped his achievement with his rediscovery of Gorlaeus’ tomb under the wooden floor of the church of Cornjum.

Paradoxically enough, Jaeger's numerous discoveries rendered Gorlaeus’ philosophical works more mysterious, instead of explaining them. To begin with, knowledge of the exact date of his death permitted the dating of his writings to the period before April 1612; but that unexpectedly early date made our author appear even more original and atypical than Lasswitz had assumed.