(1) Although, unlike most of his fashionable contemporaries and immediate successors, Descartes was not an atomist, he was, like the others, a mechanist about the properties of matter.(2) Newton was no mechanist and didn't see the universe as a smooth-running machine.(3) Huygens was the greatest mechanist of the seventeenth century.(4) It was as alien to the Greeks as it was commonplace to the mechanists that one should seek to interfere with nature.(5) But in the second half of the century both neoplatonists and mechanists usually promoted more practical projects.(6) For Descartes, and other mechanists who followed after him, the healthy body was nothing more than a well-functioning machine, soulless and subject to chemical and mechanical remedies.
