  Throughout his lifetime Desgabets engaged in many theological and philosophical controversies with such distinguished seventeenth-century thinkers as Mabillon, Rapin, Foucher, Malebranche, Cordemoy, Arnauld and Poisson. One of his more famous interlocutors was the Cartesian Gérauld de Cordemoy (1626–1684). Despite his admiration for Cordemoy, Desgabets was shocked by the atomism in the Discernement du corps et de l’âme (1666), a copy of which had been sent to him by Clerselier. Desgabets subsequently wrote to Clerselier, opposing Cordemoy’s arguments in favor of the existence of the void and against the infinite divisibility of extension. According to Desgabets, the marriage of Cartesian and anti-Cartesian elements in this work formed an irreconcilable schism in the Cartesian philosophy. Although Desgabets himself was not one to adopt Cartesianism in its entirety, in his view his own criticisms perfected and maintained the integrity of the Cartesian principles, while Cordemoy’s adoption of atoms and the void was a direct affront to the Cartesian  metaphysics.[3]