THE ATOMISTS (_concluded_)
_The laughing philosopher--Atoms and void--No god and no truth_
[143]
III. LEUCIPPUS AND DEMOCRITUS.--Leucippus is variously called a native
of Elea, of Abdera, of Melos, of Miletus. He was a pupil of Zeno the
Eleatic. [144] Democritus was a native of Abdera. They seem to have
been almost contemporary with Socrates. The two are associated as
thorough-going teachers of the 'Atomic Philosophy,' but Democritus,
'the laughing philosopher,' as he was popularly called in later times,
in distinction from Heraclitus, 'the weeping philosopher,' was much the
more famous. [145] He lived to a great age. He himself refers to his
travels and studies thus: "Above all the men of my time I travelled
farthest, and extended my inquiries to places the most distant. I
visited the most varied climates and countries, heard the largest
number of learned men, nor has any one surpassed me in the gathering
together of writings and their interpretation, no, not even the most
learned of the Egyptians, with whom I spent five years." We {75} are
also informed that, through desire of learning, he visited Babylon and
Chaldaea, to visit the astrologers and the priests.
[146]
Democritus was not less prolific as a writer than he was voracious as a
student, and in him first the division of philosophy into certain great
sections, such as physical, mathematical, ethical, was clearly [147]
drawn. We are, however, mainly concerned with his teaching in its more
strictly philosophical aspects. His main doctrine was professedly
antithetical to that of the Eleatics, who, it will be remembered,
worked out on abstract lines a theory of one indivisible, eternal,
immovable Being. Democritus, on the contrary, declared for two
co-equal elements, the Full and the Empty, or Being and Nonentity. The
latter, he maintained, was as real as the former. As we should put it,
Body is unthinkable except by reference to space which that body does
not occupy, as well as to space which it does occupy; and conversely
Space is unthinkable except by reference to body actually or
potentially filling or defining it.
What Democritus hoped to get by this double or correlative system was a
means of accounting for or conceiving of _change_ in nature. The
difficulty with the Eleatics was, as we have seen, how to understand
whence or why the transition from that which absolutely is, to this
strange, at least apparent, system of eternal flux and transformation.
Democritus {76} hoped to get over this difficulty by starting as fully
with that which _is not_, in other words, with that which _wants_
change in order to have any recognisable being at all, as with that
which _is_, and which therefore might be conceived as seeking and
requiring only to be what it is.
[148]
Having got his principle of stability and his principle of change on an
equal footing, Democritus next laid it down that all the differences
visible in things were differences either of shape, of arrangement, or
of position; practically, that is, he considered that what seem, to us
to be qualitative differences in things, _e.g._ hot or cold, sweet or
sour, green or yellow, are only resulting impressions from different
shapes, or different arrangements, or different modes of presentation,
among the atoms of which things are composed.
Coming now to that which _is_, Democritus, as against the Eleatics,
maintained that this was not a unity, some one immovable, unchangeable
existence, but an innumerable number of atoms, invisible by reason of
their smallness, which career through empty space (that which _is
not_), and by their union bring objects into being, by their separation
bring these to destruction. The action of these atoms on each other
depended on the manner in which they were brought into contact; but in
any case the unity of any object was only an apparent unity, it being
really constituted of a multitude of interlaced and mutually related
{77} particles, and all growth or increase of the object being
conditioned by the introduction into the structure of additional atoms
from without.
[149]
For the motions of the atoms he had no anterior cause to offer, other
than necessity or fate. They existed, and necessarily and always had
existed, in a state of whirl; and for that which always had been he
maintained that no preceding cause could legitimately or reasonably be
demanded.
[150]
Nothing, then, could come out of nothing; all the visible structure of
the universe had its origin in the movements of the atoms that
constituted it, and conditioned its infinite changes. The atoms, by a
useful but perhaps too convenient metaphor, he called the _seeds_ of
all things. They were infinite in number, though not infinite in the
number, of their shapes. Many atoms were similar to each other, and
this similarity formed a basis of union among them, a warp, so to
speak, or solid foundation across which the woof of dissimilar atoms
played to constitute the differences of things.
[151]
Out of this idea of an eternal eddy or whirl Democritus developed a
cosmogony. The lighter atoms he imagined flew to the outmost rim of
the eddy, there constituting the heavenly fires and the heavenly
aether. The heavier atoms gathered at the centre, forming successively
air and water and the solid earth. Not that there was only one such
{78} system or world, but rather multitudes of them, all varying one
from the other; some without sun or moon, others with greater
luminaries than those of our system, others with a greater number.
All, however, had necessarily a centre; all as systems were necessarily
spherical.
[152]
As regards the atoms he conceived that when they differed in weight
this must be in respect of a difference in their essential size. In
this he was no doubt combating the notion that the atoms say of lead or
gold were in their substance, taking equal quantities, of greater
weight than atoms of water or air. The difference of weight in objects
depended on the proportion which the atoms in them bore to the amount
of empty space which was interlaced with them. On the other hand, a
piece of iron was lighter yet harder than a piece of lead of equal
size, because of the special way in which the atoms in it were linked
together. There were fewer atoms in it, but they were, in consequence
of their structure and arrangement, more tightly strung.
[153]
In all this Democritus was with great resolution working out what we
may call a strictly mechanical theory of the universe. Even the soul
or life-principle in living creatures was simply a structure of the
finest and roundest (and therefore most nimble) atoms, with which he
compared the extremely attenuated dust particles visible in their
never-ending {79} dance in a beam of light passed into a darkened room.
This structure of exceeding tenuity and nimbleness was the source of
the motion characteristic of living creatures, and provided that
elastic counteracting force to the inward-pressing nimble air, whereby
were produced the phenomena of respiration. Every object, in fact,
whether living or not, kept its form and distinctive existence by its
possession in degree of a kind of soul or spirit of resistance in its
structure, adequate to counteract the pressure of external forces upon
its particles.
[155]
Sensation and perception were forms in which these external forces
acted upon the more nimble and lively existences, more particularly on
living creatures. For every body was continually sending forth
emanations or images resembling itself sufficiently in form and
structure to affect perceptive bodies with an apprehension of that form
and structure. These images travelled by a process of successive
transmission, similar to that by which wave-motions are propagated in
water. They were, in other words, not movements of the _particles_ of
the objects, which latter must otherwise in time grow less and fade
away, but a modification in the arrangement of the particles
immediately next the object, which modification reproduced itself in
the next following, and so on right through the medium to the
perceptive body.
{80}
[156]
These images tended by extension in all directions to reach vast
dimensions at times, and to influence the minds of men in sleep and on
other occasions in strange ways. Hence men imagined gods, and
attributed those mighty phenomena of nature--earthquakes, tempests,
lightning and thunder, and dire eclipses of sun and moon, to the
vaguely visible powers which they imagined they saw. There was indeed
a soul or spirit of the universe, as there was a soul or spirit of
every individual thing that constituted it. But this was only a finer
system of atoms after all. All else is convention or dream; the only
realities are Atoms and Emptiness, Matter and Space.
[157]
Of absolute verity through the senses we know nothing; our perceptions
are only conventional interpretations of we know not what. For to
other living creatures these same sensations have other meanings than
they have to us, and even the same person is not always affected alike
by the same thing; which then is the true of two differing perceptions
we cannot say. And therefore either there is no such thing as truth,
or, at all events, we know through the senses nothing of it. The only
genuine knowledge is that which transcends appearances, and reasons out
what is, irrespective of appearances,--in other words, the only genuine
knowledge is that of the (atomic) philosopher. And his knowledge is
{81} the result of the happy mixture of his atoms whereby all is in
equal balance, neither too hot nor too cold. Such a man seeing in the
mind's eye the whole universe a tissue of whirling and interlacing
atoms, with no real mystery or terror before or after, will live a life
of cheerful fearlessness, undisturbed by terrors of a world to come or
of powers unseen. His happiness is not in feastings or in gold, but in
a mind at peace. And three human perfections he will seek to attain:
to reason rightly, to speak graciously, to do his duty.
{82}