What was the philosophical import of Gassendi's presentation of Epicurus' atomist principles in the form of a history of philosophy? In his presentation of these principles, he had endorsed two apparently incompatible methods of argument. On the one hand, he had held with Epicurus that atomist principles should be adopted in physics because only an atomist physics did not contradict the facts about ordinary bodies and motions which are evident in sense perception. He, too, espoused Epicurus' belief in the veracity of the senses. Nonetheless he had also seen the need to buttress Epicurus' proofs of various atomist principles not with further appeals to sense perception but with historical arguments by means of which he could show that Epicurus' arguments concerning indivisibles had been either exempt from or superior to those of his critics. Gassendi thus supplemented his own and Epicurus' physical and philosophical arguments with a historical account of the debates between the proponents of atomism and their opponents which was designed to show that, in those debates, atomism had been able both to defeat the objections raised against it and to develop crucial objections to opposing positions. He seems to have believed that a combination of empirical and historical arguments was necessary to advance his predecessor's conclusions. Even when he described his own appeals to experience during the testing of particular theoretical statements about atoms, he sometimes could not furnish adequate reasons for concluding that his observations confirmed the truth of the theoretical statement being tested.