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By Root 3153 0

theories in considerable detail, and some of the working-out is interesting. Each atom, he said, was impenetrable and indivisible because it contained no void. When you use a knife to cut an apple, the knife has to find empty places where it can penetrate; if the apple contained no void, it would be infinitely hard and therefore physically indivisible. Each atom is internally unchanging, and in fact a Parmenidean One. The only things that atoms do are to move and hit each other, and sometimes to combine when they happen to have shapes that are capable of interlocking. They are of all sorts of shapes; fire is composed of small spherical atoms, and so is the soul. Atoms, by collision, produce vortices, which generate bodies and ultimately worlds.10 There are many worlds, some growing, some decaying; some may have no sun or moon, some several. Every world has a beginning and an end. A world may be destroyed by collision with a larger world. This cosmology may be summarized in Shelley's words:

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever

From creation to decay,

Like the bubbles on a river

Sparkling, bursting, borne away.

Life developed out of the primeval slime. There is some fire everywhere in a living body, but most in the brain or in the breast. (On this, authorities

differ.) Thought is a kind of motion, and is thus able to cause motion elsewhere. Perception and thought are physical processes. Perception is of two sorts, one of the senses, one of the understanding. Perceptions of the latter sort depend only on the things perceived, while those of the former sort depend also on our senses, and are therefore apt to be deceptive. Like Locke,

Democritus held that such qualities as warmth, taste, and colour are not really in the object, but are due to our sense-organs, while such qualities as weight, density, and hardness are really in the object. Democritus was a thorough-going materialist; for him, as we have seen, the soul was composed of atoms, and thought was a physical process. There was no purpose in the universe; there were only atoms governed by mechanical laws. He disbelieved in popular religion, and he argued against the nous of Anaxagoras. In ethics he considered cheerfulness the goal of life, and regarded moderation and culture as the best means to it. He disliked everything violent and passionate; he disapproved of sex, because, he said, it involved the overwhelming of consciousness by pleasure. He valued friendship, but thought ill of women, and did not desire children, because their education interferes with philosophy. In all this, he was very like Jeremy Bentham; he was equally so in his love of what the Greeks called democracy.11

Democritus—such, at least, is my opinion—is the last of the Greek philosophers to be free from a certain fault which vitiated all later ancient and medieval thought. All the philosophers we have been considering so far were engaged in a disinterested effort to understand the world. They thought it easier to understand than it is, but without this optimism they would not have had the courage to make a beginning. Their attitude, in the main, was genuinely scientific whenever it did not merely embody the prejudices of their age. But it was not only scientific; it was imaginative and vigorous and filled with the delight of adventure. They were interested in everything—meteors and eclipses, fishes and whirlwinds, religion and morality; with a penetrating intellect they combined the zest of children.

From this point onwards, there are first certain seeds of decay, in spite of previously unmatched achievement, and then a gradual decadence. What is amiss, even in the best philosophy after Democritus, is an undue emphasis on man as compared with the universe. First comes scepticism, with the Sophists, leading to a study of how we know rather than to the attempt to acquire fresh knowledge. Then comes, with Socrates, the emphasis on ethics; with Plato, the rejection of the world of sense in favour of the self-created world of pure thought; with Aristotle, the belief in purpose as the fundamental