 The second period dates from the moment when Gómez Pereira became the object of the attention of those who saw in him a precedent of the philosophy of Descartes. The great occasion for this ephemeral change arose from the French philosopher Pierre Bayle. Before him, Vossius had already spoken of Pereira as a precursor of animal mechanism (Vossius, De theologia gentili, 1641 [1700: vol. V, p. 345]). But when Bayle included Pereira in his Dictionnaire (Bayle 1730: vol. III, pp. 649–656), he gave rise to a debate about the true originality of Descartes before the unquestionable precedent contained in the Antoniana Margarita. Bayle did not discuss Pereira’s merit as the true author of a primitive version of animal mechanism, but he thought that the real originality should nevertheless be attributed to Descartes, because his mechanism derived from the firm principles of its philosophy, while Pereira had only an ingenious occurrence without the support of a true system of principles such as that of Descartes.