Mechanism

Time is substantival, infinite, one-dimensional, continuous, linear, and uni-directional, in keeping with the Newtonian and Cartesian frameworks that mechanism took for granted. The mechanist universe runs by deterministic laws: given the complete configuration at any moment, all later states are in principle fixed, which is exactly Laplace's demon avant la lettre. Conservation principles for motion, and later for energy, structure the temporal evolution of the world. The texture of subjective time is acknowledged but consigned to the psychological side of the machine.

Space is substantival, infinite, three-dimensional, and locally Euclidean — the absolute space that Newton would later formalise and that Cartesians had already conceived as a geometric plenum. Curvature is flat as a matter of principle, locality holds because all genuine causal interaction proceeds by contact between bodies, and the mathematics of geometry is taken to be straightforwardly true of physical extension. Space is the stage on which the great mechanical drama is enacted.

Matter is substantival, infinite in extent, three-dimensional, conserved, and local. It consists of corpuscles or extended particles whose only intrinsic properties are geometric and kinetic: size, shape, position, and motion. The mechanist explicitly rejects the substantial forms and occult qualities of the older scholastic tradition and insists that every observable property of bodies must be reducible to the arrangement and movement of insensible parts. The success of this reductive programme in early chemistry, hydrostatics, and astronomy was its principal advertisement.

The mechanist observer is an embodied physical system situated at a single point in space and time, whose perceptions and thoughts are themselves motions of matter governed by the same laws as everything else. Knowledge is mediated through sensory mechanisms that translate external motions into internal ones, and what each finite observer retains is partial, since memory and attention are limited capacities of a corruptible body. Agency is rated as Passive in the strict metaphysical sense, because in a world of matter in motion the apparent initiations of action are themselves caused by prior states, leaving no room for an uncaused mover within the observer. Observers are plural — there are many such embodied systems — but each is a node in the universal mechanical order rather than a privileged origin of activity.

Energy is substantival and infinite — the mechanical philosophy treats matter-in-motion as the universal currency of natural change, and the universe as a vast clockwork in which motion is conserved by the impacts and pressures of material parts. Conservation is exact: the early mechanists' formulations vary (Descartes's quantity of motion, Leibniz's vis viva), but all converge on the idea that nothing is created or destroyed in the play of bodies. Dispersibility is reversible at the fundamental level: an idealised mechanical universe is time-symmetric, and the apparent irreversibility of friction and heat is an artefact of coarse-graining over invisible micro-motions. La Mettrie's man-machine and Laplace's demon both follow from this commitment — given the energy budget of the world and its initial configuration, everything else is determined.

Information for the mechanist is borne by the discrete configurations of corpuscles and the discrete states of the systems built from them: positions, velocities, arrangements of parts. It is substantival because these material configurations are real features of the world and conserved because the laws of motion preserve the relevant quantities under transformation. Granularity is discrete, in keeping with the corpuscularian commitment to ultimate particles. The framework distinguishes scales: cosmic information is conserved in the laws of nature themselves, while personal-identity information is non-conserved because the patterns that constitute a particular person dissipate when their bodily machine breaks down.