David van Goorle

Who was David van Goorle?

David van Goorle was a Dutch theologian, and in the seventeenth century one of the first early modern atomists.

Van Goorle was born as the son of a Protestant refugee from Antwerp, who at the time was treasurer for the Count of Moers. His mother was a Frisian noblewoman, the daughter of Doeke van Martena, a freedom fighter and an admiral. Although he called himself Ultrajectinus after his birthplace Utrecht, he grew up with his maternal grandparents in their stins in the Frisian village of Cornjum. In 1606 he enrolled as a student in arts at the University of Franeker. From April 1611, Van Goorle studied theology at the University of Leiden, and expressed his theories regarding the theories of atoms in his Ideae Physicae, in which he disputes the theories of Aristotle and claims that there is something as a "smallest, undevidable, particle".

For the early seventeenth century these were revolutionary thoughts, and hence Van Goorle is regarded as one of the founders of the particle-atom theory, together with Daniel Sennert and Pierre Gassendi, to name just a few.