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Updated: June 21, 2025
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.
For he affirms that the statement of Democritus that the atoms are to the senses color by a certain human law or ordinance, that they are by the same law sweetness, and by the same law concretion is at war with our senses, and that he who uses this reason and persists in this opinion cannot himself imagine whether he is living or dead.
But it is well known he had been a pupil of Nausiphanes, the follower of Democritus; and since he could not deny it, he loaded him with insults in abundance. If he never heard a lecture on these Democritean principles, what lectures did he ever hear? What is there in Epicurus's physics that is not taken from Democritus?
As for our fancy of laughing while we weep, and of weeping while we laugh, as the divine Rabelais drank while he ate and ate while he drank; as for our humor, to put Heraclitus and Democritus on the same page and to discard style or premeditated phrase if any of the crew mutiny, overboard with the doting cranks, the infamous classicists, the dead and buried romanticists, and steer for the blue water!
The existence of the void space is proved by the fact that motion takes place, to which he adds the argument that it necessarily exists also to separate the atoms one from another. So far Epicurus and Democritus are agreed. To the Democritean doctrine, however, Epicurus made a curious addition, to which he himself is said to have attached much importance.
Thales and Democritus assign the cause of earthquakes to water. The Stoics say that it is a moist vapor contained in the earth, making an irruption into the air, that causes the earthquake. Anaximenes, that the dryness and rarity of the earth are the cause of earthquakes, the one of which is produced by extreme drought, the other by immoderate showers.
Now the question to be investigated becomes, What, then, is heat, redness, etc.? The ground essence and law of the natures consist in certain forms, which Bacon conceives in a Platonic way as concepts and substances, but phenomenal ones, and, at the same time, with Democritus, as the grouping or motion of minute material particles.
And the Athens of his day was the home of Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Anaxagoras, Zeno, Protagoras, Socrates, as well as Myron and Phidias; while there flourished at the same time, but elsewhere in Greece, Herodotus, Hippocrates, Pindar, Empedocles, and Democritus.
I need scarcely refer to the legendary stories related of Democritus, as that he put out his eyes with a burning-glass that he might no longer be deluded with their false indications, and more tranquilly exercise his reason a fiction bearing upon its face the contemptuous accusation of his antagonists, but, by the stolidity of subsequent ages, received as an actual fact instead of a sarcasm.
Subject to depression of spirits, he wrote as an antidote the singular book which has given him fame. The Anatomy of Melancholy, in which he appears under the name of Democritus Junior, was pub. in 1621, and had great popularity.
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