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DEMOCRITUS, known as "the laughing philosopher," was born at Abdera, in Thrace, a few years after the birth of Socrates. He stands conspicuous among men, not rare in early Greece, whom neither the possession of wealth nor the promise of power could lead away from the pursuit of Truth: men who represent the real spiritual life of their time. Impelled by the desire for a wider knowledge than the isolation of the Greek city could offer, Democritus passed many years in travel, having intercourse, as he tells us, with the most learned and the wisest men wherever he went. Their influence may, perhaps, be traced in his astronomy, which, in the close observation of Nature that it reveals, places him beyond his predecessors. The names of his lost writings, wherein he treated of almost every form of knowledge, suggest a mind which in its all-embracing width was like the greater mind of Aristotle. But none of his other speculations has the fame, or has the importance, which belongs to his development of the theory of Atoms.
Matter is divisible into parts, and such part again into smaller parts. How far can this process be carried? Not to an infinite extent; for that is inconceivable. Our reason, which not less than our senses did Democritus hold to be a source of knowledge, requires us to believe that it has a limit. Ultimately, therefore, we reach particles of matter which are simple and indivisible. These particles or "atoms", must, as Democritus imagined, differ from one another in size and form. [EDITOR'S NOTE: We now know, of course, that what we call "atoms" can, indeed, be split.] They must be in constant motion, for we have no ground for supposing that motion is not as old as matter itself; whence it follows that there must be space to move in, space unfilled by atoms. The unresting atoms combine, yet they never actually come into contact. They are separated from one another by intervals of space, whose varying minuteness we express by saying that one thing is more dense than another. As there is no contact, so even in their combined form does the motion of the atoms never cease. Thus Democritus explained the universe and its changes.
The theory was revived a century later by Epicurus, from whom Lucretius received it received it and gave it poetic form. Its importance is to be measured from the fact that it is in substance the hypothesis of Leibnitz and of the other principal physicists of the nineteenth century.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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