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Democritus
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Democritus was an original thinker in ethical theory, setting high standards of personal integrity and social responsibility, without invoking supernatural sanctions. Indeed, it is probably the banishment of supernatural and non-material agencies by atomic theory that upset Plato so much and subsequently led to its neglect for over a thousand years. Democritus argued that one’s own consciousness of right and wrong should prevent one from doing anything shameful, not the fear of breaking the law or being vilified by public opinion. He thought that men fashioned an image of Chance as an excuse for their own stupidity, because chance rarely conflicts with intelligence and most things in life can be set in order by an intelligent farsightedness. With regard to aesthetics he is said to have remarked that there is no poetry without madness.
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Democritus was a philosopher and physicist, master of all the sciences and the founder of atomic physics. He was born in 460 BC in the Thracian city of Abdera, a place renowned for its wealth and its high intellectual level. His father, called either Hegesistratus or Athenocritus, was apparently a very wealthy man, and spent lavishly on his son's education. He is known to have studied with Leucippus, and Aristotle cites both teacher and student as founders of the atomic school: later, after the pupil had outstripped the master, his name stands alone as sole representative of the school. Democritus travelled widely, visiting Egypt, Babylon, Persia, possibly India, and Athens and exhausting his great wealth in the process; so that he returned to Abdera a poor man, but delighted with all he had seen and learned. At first his compatriots scorned him as a prodigal, but once they had recognised his wisdom they came to love and respect him.
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.Kahn makes the point that Democritus does not have a clear and consistent line on which aspects of the self are regarded as active and which as passive, especially with regard to the relation of reason and desires. But it seems clear that the soul is consistently regarded as active, indeed as the user of the body, which is cast as a tool for the soul to make use of.
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A few decades after Empedocles, Democritus, another Greek who lived from 460 b.c. to 370 b.c., developed a new theory of matter that attempted to overcome the problems of his predecessor. Democritus’s ideas were based on reasoning rather than science, and drew on the teachings of two Greek philosophers who came before him: Leucippus and Anaxagoras. Democritus knew that if you took a stone and cut it in half, each half had the same properties as the original stone. He reasoned that if you continued to cut the stone into smaller and smaller pieces, at some point you would reach a piece so tiny that it could no longer be divided. Democritus called these infinitesimally small pieces of matter atomos, meaning "indivisible." He suggested that atomos were eternal and could not be destroyed.
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The system of Democritus was altogether antitheistic. But, although he rejected the notion of a deity taking part in the creation or government of the universe, he yielded to popular prejudice so far as to admit the existence of a class of beings, of the same form as men, grander, composed of very subtle atoms, less liable to dissolution, but still mortal, dwelling in the upper regions of air. These beings ... manifested themselves to man by means of images in dreams, communicated with him, and sometimes gave him an insight into the future. Some of them were benevolent, others malignant. According to Plutarch, Democritus recognized one god under the form of a fiery sphere, the soul of the world, but this idea is probably of later origin. The popular belief in gods was attributed by Democritus to the desire to explain extraordinary phenomena (thunder, lightning, earthquakes) by reference to superhuman agency.
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Democritus was born in Abdera, Thrace. He wrote extensively, but only fragments of his works remain. According to his exposition of the atomic theory of matter, all things are composed of minute, invisible, indestructible particles of pure matter (atoma, “indivisibles”), which move about eternally in infinite empty space (kenon, “the void”). Although atoms are made up of precisely the same matter, they differ in shape, size, weight, sequence, and position. Qualitative differences in what the senses perceive and the birth, decay, and disappearance of things are the results not of characteristics inherent in atoms but of quantitative arrangements of atoms. Democritus viewed the creation of worlds as the natural consequence of the ceaseless whirling motion of atoms in space.
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Democritus