Chapter 12 Chapter 9 The Atomists

The founders of atomic theory were Leucippus and Democritus.It is difficult to distinguish the two men, since they are usually compared, and apparently some of the works of Leucippus were later attributed to Democritus. Leucippus, whose heyday seems to have been around 440 BC, came from Miletus and inherited the philosophy of scientific rationalism associated with Miletus.He was greatly influenced by Parmenides and Zeno.So little is known about him that Epicurus (a later follower of Democritus) is thought to have categorically denied his existence, and some modern scholars have revived the theory.Yet there are so many references to him in Aristotle's writings that it seems implausible that so many references (including to the original) should occur if he were merely a myth up.

Democritus is a much more definite figure.He was from Abdera in Thrace; as for his date, he said that Anaxagoras was very young when he was old (about 432 B.C.), so people His heyday is thought to have been around 420 BC.He traveled extensively through many countries of the South and the East, in pursuit of knowledge; he probably spent a considerable amount of time in Egypt, and he must have been in Persia.Then he returned to Abdera, where he died.Zeller said that he "surpasses all ancient and contemporary philosophers in the profoundness of knowledge, and surpasses most philosophers in sharpness of thinking and logical correctness".

Democritus was a contemporary of Socrates and the Sophists, and should therefore be placed a little later in our history on purely chronological grounds, but the difficulty is that he is hardly wave apart.For this reason I shall consider him before Socrates and the Sophists, though part of his philosophy is meant to answer that of his fellow countryman and the most eminent of the Sophists, Protagoras.When Protagoras visited Athens, he received a warm welcome; on the other hand, Democritus said, "I have arrived in Athens, but no one knows me".His philosophy was for a long time neglected in Athens; Burnett says that "it is not clear that Plato knew anything about Democritus... Aristotle, on the other hand, knew Democritus very well." Mocritus, for he too was an Ionian from the north".He is never mentioned in Plato's dialogues, but according to Diogenes Laertius, Plato hated him so much that he wanted to burn all his writings.Heath held him in high esteem as a mathematician.

The basic ideas of the common philosophy of both Leucippus and Democritus are derived from Leucippus, but it is not possible to separate them as far as theory is concerned; and for us, There is no need to do so.Leucippus - if not Democritus - tried to reconcile the monism and pluralism represented by Parmenides and Empedocles respectively and went to atomism.Their views are very similar to those of modern science, and they avoid the common mistakes of most Greek speculations.They believe that everything is made of atoms, that atoms are physically - not geometrically - indivisible; that there is a void between atoms; that atoms are indestructible; that atoms have always been and will always be , in motion.The number of atoms is infinite, and even the kinds of atoms are infinite, differing only in shape and size.Aristotle says that, according to the atomists, atoms also differ in heat, the spherical atoms of which fire is the hottest; as in weight, he quotes Democritus: " The greater the predominance of anything indivisible, the greater the weight".However, the question of whether atoms have weight has always been a controversial issue in the atomist theory.

Atoms are in perpetual motion; but commentators differ as to the nature of the original motion.Some, notably Zeller, held that the atoms were supposed to be falling forever, and that the heavier atoms fell more rapidly; they overtook the lighter atoms, collided, and The atoms are refracted back like billiard balls.This must have been the view of Epicurus; Epicurus's theory was based in many respects on that of Democritus, while making an unsophisticated effort to accommodate Aristotle's criticism.But there is considerable reason to suppose that weight was not an intrinsic property of the atoms of Leucippus and Democritus.In their view, it seems more likely that the atoms were originally moving chaotically, as in the modern theory of the motion of gas molecules.Democritus said that in the infinite void there is neither up nor down, and he likened the movement of atoms in the soul to the movement of dust under a ray of sun in the absence of wind.This is a much wiser view than Epicurus', and I think we may assume that this is the view of Leucippus and Democritus.As a result of the collision, groups of atoms form vortices.The rest of the process is roughly the same as Anaxagoras said, but his mechanical explanation of the vortex instead of the action of the mind is an improvement.

In antiquity, the atomists were usually condemned for attributing everything to chance.On the contrary, atomists are strict determinists who believe that everything happens according to the laws of nature.Democritus explicitly denied that anything could happen by chance.Everyone knows that Leuquipo - although there is a question of whether this person exists - once said one thing: "Nothing can happen without a reason, everything has a reason, and it is necessary." Indeed he It does not explain why the world should have been the way it was in the first place, which may be attributed to chance.But so long as the world exists, its continued development is irrevocably determined by mechanical principles.Aristotle and others accused him and Democritus of not explaining the original motion of the atom, but on this point the atomists were much more scientific than their critics.Causation must begin with something, and wherever it begins, anticipation of the beginning cannot point to a cause.The world can be attributed to a Creator, but even then the Creator himself cannot be explained.In fact, the theory of the atomists is closer to that of modern science than to any other theory ever advanced in antiquity.

Unlike Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, atomists seek to explain the world without invoking the idea of ​​an end or an ultimate cause.The "ultimate cause" of one event is another future event for which the event happened.This concept applies to personnel.Why do bakers make bread?Because people will be hungry.Why build railways?Because people travel.In this case, things can be explained in terms of the purpose they serve.When we ask the "why" of an event, we can mean one of two things, we can mean: "What purpose does this event serve?" or we can mean : "What antecedent circumstances caused this event?" The answer to the former question is a teleological explanation, or an explanation in terms of final causes; the answer to the latter question is a mechanistic explanation .I don't see how it is possible to know in advance which of these two questions science should be asking?Or, should both be asked?But experience shows that mechanistic questions lead to scientific knowledge, whereas teleological questions do not.Atomists asked mechanistic questions and gave mechanistic answers.But their descendants, until the Renaissance era, were more interested in teleological problems, so they led science into a dead end.Regarding these two issues, there is a boundary that is often overlooked by people, whether it is in the thinking of ordinary people or in philosophy.Neither of the two questions can be used to ask the whole of reality (including God) with certainty, but they can only ask some parts of it.As for the teleological explanation, it usually always quickly reaches a creator, or at least a designer, whose purpose is embodied in the process of nature.But if a man's teleology is so stubborn that he must go on to ask what purpose the Creator serves, then it is quite obvious that his question is impious.Moreover, this is meaningless, because to make it meaningful, we must assume that the Creator was created by a Supreme Creator, and the Creator is for this Supreme Creator. serving the purpose of the Lord.Therefore, the concept of purpose can only be applied within the scope of reality, but not for the whole of reality.

A rather similar argument applies to the mechanistic explanation as well.One thing is the cause of another, which is the cause of a third, and so on.But if we demand that all also have a cause, we are obliged to return to the Creator, who himself must be without a cause.All causal explanations, therefore, must have an arbitrarily conceived beginning.That is why it is not a deficiency in the theory of the atomists to leave the original motion of the atoms unaccounted for. It should not be supposed that the reasons for the theory advanced by the atomists are entirely empirical.Atomic theory has been revived in modern times to explain chemical facts unknown to the Greeks.In ancient times there was no sharp distinction between empirical observation and logical argument.It is true that Parmenides was contemptuous of observed facts, but Empedocles and Anaxagoras combined most of their metaphysics with observations of the hourglass and the waterwheel.Until the age of the Sophists, no philosopher seems to have doubted that a complete set of metaphysics and cosmology can be established by a lot of reasoning combined with some observations.The atomists were very lucky to come up with a hypothesis for which some evidence was found more than 2,000 years later, but their beliefs lacked any firm foundation at the time.Like other philosophers of his day, Leucippus was bent on discovering a way of reconciling Parmenides' argument with the apparent facts of movement and change.As Aristotle said:

"While these views (Parmenides's) appear to proceed logically in a dialectical discussion, yet a consideration of the facts will show that to believe them would appear little more than madness. For there is hardly a single A madman can go so far as to conceive that fire and ice are one: no one is so mad that he cannot see the difference only between what is true and what habitually seems to be true. "However, Leucippo thought he had a theory compatible with sense-perception, which could neither abolish generation and destruction, nor the multiplicity of motion and things. He made these concessions to the facts in perception: On the one hand he concedes to the monists by admitting that there cannot be motion without void, and the result is a theory which he formulates as follows: void is a non-existence, and no part of being is non-existent; for being is In the strict sense of the term, it is an absolute fullness, but this fullness is not one; on the contrary it is a manyness, infinite in number and invisible because of its smallness. .moves in the void (for the void exists): so they produce generation by union, and destruction by separation. Moreover, as soon as they happen to come into contact (for here they are not one) they They act and are acted upon, and because they are aggregated and entangled with each other, they can multiply. On the other hand, from the true one, there can never be many, and from the true many, there can never be one: this is impossible."

We can see that there is always agreement on one point, namely, that in filling there can be no motion.And on this point everyone is wrong.There can be circular movement in the fullness, so long as it is continually present.The idea is that a thing can only move to a place of emptiness, and that in fullness there is no place of emptiness.It may perhaps be argued very validly that motion can never begin within a fullness; but it is by no means validly said that motion cannot arise at all.To the Greeks, however, it seemed that one had to either accept the unchanging world of Parmenides, or acknowledge the void.

Parmenides' argument against "non-existence" seems logically equally irrefutable as applied against the void; and the discovery that there is air where there seems to be nothing is all the more convincing. Parmenides' argument (this is an example of the common confusion of logic with observation).We can express the Parmenidean position as follows: "You say there is a void; therefore the void is not nothing; therefore it is not void".We cannot say that the atomists have answered this argument; they merely declare that they think it should be omitted on the grounds that motion is an empirical fact, and therefore there must be a void, whatever it may be. How unimaginable it is. Let us examine the subsequent evolution of this problem.The first and most obvious way of avoiding this logical difficulty is to distinguish matter from space.On this view, space is not empty, but has the quality of a container; some part of it may or may not be filled with matter.Aristotle says (Physics, 208b): "The theory of the existence of the void implies the existence of a place, since one can define the void as the place after abstracting the body."This point of view was put forward by Newton in a very clear way. Newton affirmed the existence of absolute space, thus distinguishing absolute motion from relative motion.In the controversy over the Copernican theory, both sides (however unaware of it) accepted this view, because they believed that saying "the heavenly bodies rotate from east to west" is different from saying "the earth rotates from east to west". Turn west to east" These two statements are different.But if all motion is relative, then the two statements are merely different ways of saying the same thing, like saying "John is the father of James" and "James is the son of John."But if all motion is relative, and space is immaterial, then we are left with the Parmenidean argument against the void. Descartes' argument is exactly the same as that of the early Greek philosophers, saying that extension is the essence of matter, and therefore matter is everywhere.For Descartes, extension is an adjective, not a substantive; its substantive is matter, without which it cannot exist.Empty space is as absurd to him as saying happiness without a beneficiary of happiness.Leibniz's position is somewhat different. He also believes in plenum, but he thinks that space is only a system of relations.There was a famous dispute on this subject between him and Newton (represented by Clarke).The debate remained unresolved until Einstein's time, but Einstein's theory gave Leibniz the decisive victory. Modern physicists do not believe in empty space, although they still believe that matter is in some sense atomic.Even where there is no matter, there is still something, especially light waves.Matter no longer has the lofty place it has acquired in philosophy through the arguments of Parmenides.It is not an immutable entity, but merely a way of gathering events.Some events belong to clusters of things that we can think of as physical; others, such as light waves, do not.Only events are the stuff of the world, and each event is extremely brief.On this point, modern physics is on the side of Heraclitus against Parmenides.But before Einstein and quantum theory, it was always on the side of Parmenides. As for space, the modern view is that space is neither a substance, as Newton said, and as Leucippus and Democritus should have said, nor is it an adjective of a stretched body, like a flute. It is not, as Carl thought, but a system of relations, as Leibniz put it.It is not at all clear that this view is compatible with the existence of voids.Perhaps in terms of abstract logic, it can be reconciled with the void.We can say that there is always a certain greater or less distance between any two things, and this distance does not imply the existence of intermediate things.But such a view cannot be applied in modern physics.Since Einstein, distance exists only between events, not between things, and it includes both time and space.It is essentially a causal concept, and in modern physics, the effect will not be separated by a distance.All this, however, is based on empirical rather than logical reasons.Moreover, the modern view cannot be expressed except in terms of differential equations, so it was beyond the comprehension of ancient philosophers. The result of the logical development of the views of the atomists thus appeared to be Newton's theory of absolute space, which encountered the difficulty of having to attribute reality to "non-existence."There is no logical objection to this theory.The main objection is that absolute space is absolutely unknowable and therefore cannot be a necessary assumption in empirical science.A more practical objection is that physics can go forward without it.But the world of the atomists is still logically possible, and comes closer to the actual world than the world of any other ancient philosopher. Democritus has done his theoretical work in considerable detail, and some of it is very interesting.He said that every atom is impermeable and indivisible because there is no void in it.When you cut an apple with a knife, the knife has to find a void into which it can go; if there were no void in the apple, it would be infinitely hard and thus physically indivisible.The inside of each atom is unchanging, in fact the atom is a Parmenidean "one".The only thing the atoms do is move and bump into each other, and sometimes, when they happen to have the shape to clamp into each other, bond together.Atoms come in all shapes and sizes; fire is made of little balls of atoms, and so is the soul.Atoms form vortices by collision, and vortices produce bodies and finally worlds.There are many worlds, some growing and some dying; some may have no sun and moon, and some may have several.Every world has a beginning and an end.A world can be destroyed by colliding with another, larger world.This cosmology can be summed up in Shelley's poem: Worlds are forever and ever rolling from their creation to their destruction, like the bubbles in a river flickering, bursting, and finally disappearing.Life developed from the primitive soil.A living body has some fire everywhere, but most in the brain or in the chest. (On this point the authorities are divided.) Thought is also a movement and can cause movements elsewhere.Perception and thought are both biological processes.There are two kinds of perception, one is perceptual and the other is understanding.The latter kind of perception depends only on the thing perceived, while the former depends also on our sense organs, so it is easy to deceive us.Democritus, like Locke, believed that some qualities such as warmth, taste and color were not actually in the object but were due to the action of our sense organs, but that some qualities such as weight, density and hardness were actually in the object. within the object. Democritus was a thorough materialist; we have seen that for him the soul was composed of atoms and thought a physical process.There is no purpose in the universe; there are only atoms governed by mechanical laws.He did not believe in popular religion, and he refuted Anaxagoras' nous (heart, reason).In terms of ethics, he believes that happiness is the purpose of life, and that temperance and self-cultivation are the best means to obtain happiness.He disliked anything violently passionate; he disapproved of being in love, because he said it involved the possible inversion of consciousness by joy.He valued friendship, but thought badly of women, and hated having children, whose education would disturb philosophy.In all these respects he was very much like Jerome Bentham; and he had the same taste for what the Greeks called democracy.Democritus--at least in my opinion--was the last philosopher to avoid the error which later marred all ancient and medieval thought.All the philosophers we have considered so far have devoted themselves to an inactive effort to understand the world.They imagine that understanding the world is easier than it is, but without this optimism they would not have the courage to make a start.Their attitudes were, on the whole, genuinely scientific, so long as they did not reflect merely the prejudices of their time.But it's not just scientific; it's imaginative, lifelike, and full of adventurous fun.They are interested in all things—shooting stars and eclipses, fish and whirlwinds, religion and morality; they combine deep wit with childlike devotion. Since then, in spite of unparalleled success, there have been some first germs of decline, followed by gradual decline.What goes wrong with philosophy after Democritus—even the best philosophy—is that it places an undue emphasis on man in contrast to the universe.Skepticism, which first appeared with the wise men, is to lead people to investigate how we know rather than to strive to acquire new knowledge.Then with Socrates came the emphasis on ethics; with Plato came the denial of the sensible world in favor of the self-created world of pure thought; with Aristotle came the belief in purpose, Treat purpose as a fundamental idea in science.Notwithstanding the genius of Plato and Aristotle, their thinking had flaws that proved to be infinitely harmful.Since their time, life has shrunk, and popular superstitions have gradually arisen.As a result of the triumph of Catholic orthodoxy, a partial new look arose; but it was not until the Renaissance that philosophy regained that life and independence which had characterized Socrates' predecessors.