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Updated: June 9, 2025
Descartes attempted what Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, and their followers thought to be impossible. He made the fall of terrestrial bodies depend upon the action of a vortex of very subtle matter circulating around the earth.
Indeed, we may say that it almost invariably played its part whenever man began to reflect on the whence and the how of the actual world around him. In the philosophical systems of Leucippus and Democritus and Epicurus it lies fully developed before us.
For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity. Nay, even that school which is most accused of atheism doth most demonstrate religion; that is, the school of Leucippus and Democritus and Epicurus.
If we are not to be misled by mere word-jugglery, we shall recognize the founder of the atomic theory of matter in Anaxagoras; its expositors along slightly different lines in Leucippus and Democritus; its re-discoverer of the nineteenth century in Dalton.
Leucippus gives the reason of it to the alteration or diversity of parts, according to which the man hath a yard, the female the matrix; as to any other reason he is silent. Democritus, that the parts common to both sexes are engendered indifferently; but the peculiar parts by the one that is more powerful.
Here again Epicurus found refuge in the old Ionian theory of Atoms and the Void, which is supposed to have originated with Democritus and Leucippus, a century before. But Epicurus seems to have worked out the Atomic Theory more in detail, as we have it expounded in Lucretius' magnificent poem.
It has all the colour, character, and vitality of his best work. Some of his other pictures are: "Coronation of Marie de Medicis," "The Kirmesse," "Slaughter of the Innocents," "Susanna's Bath," "Capture of Samson," "A Lion Hunt" and "The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus." American and Foreign Schools 1856-1926 Pupil of Carolus Durand
But it is a common and general error of the uninitiated to bring the following accusations against philosophers. Some of them think that those who explore the origins and elements of material things are irreligious, and assert that they deny the existence of the gods. Take, for instance, the cases of Anaxagoras, Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, and other natural philosophers.
But we must not leave this alluring field of speculation as to the nature of matter without referring to another scientific guess, which soon followed that of Anaxagoras and was destined to gain even wider fame, and which in modern times has been somewhat unjustly held to eclipse the glory of the other achievement. We mean, of course, the atomic theory of Leucippus and Democritus.
Atomistic ideas also have undergone evolution, and this slow evolution has been considerably quickened under the influence of modern discoveries. These reach back to the most remote antiquity, and to follow their development we should have to write the history of human thought which they have always accompanied since the time of Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius.
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