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It is significant that a man of such extensive attainments has said that "we should strive not after fulness of knowledge, but fulness of understanding;" 12 and where he speaks, with pardonable complacence, of his achievements, he dwells not upon the number and variety of his writings, but he boasts of his personal observation, of his intercourse with other learned men, and of his mathematical method. "Among all my contemporaries," he says, "I have travelled over the largest portion of the earth in search of things the most remote, and have seen the most climates and countries, heard the largest number of thinkers, and no one has excelled me in geometric construction and demonstration-not even the geometers of the Egyptians, with whom I spent in all five years as a guest." 13

Amongst the circumstances which have caused Demokritos to fall into oblivion, ought not to be left unmentioned his want of ambition and distaste for dialectic discussion. He is said to have been in Athens without making himself known to one of its philosophers. Amongst his moral aphorisms we find the following: "He who is fond of contradiction and makes many words is incapable of learning anything that is right."

Such a disposition suited little with the city of the Sophists, and certainly not with the acquaintance of a Sokrates or a Plato, whose whole philosophy was developed in dialectic word-play. Demokritos founded no school.

His words were, it appears, more eagerly copied from than copied out; and his whole philosophy was finally absorbed by Epikuros. Aristotle mentions him frequently

mark that it shows "that Demokritos in this respect had little to learn from foreigners," goes much too far. It is not even certain from Demokritos's observation that he was

Aristotelis. Atque haud scio an Stagirites illam qua reliquos philosophos superat eruditionem aliqua ex parte Democriti librorum lectioni debuerit." 12 Zeller, i. S. 746, Mullach, Fr. superior to the "Harpedonaptae Phil., p. 349, Fr. 140-142.

13 Fragm. Varii Arg. 6, in Mullach, Fragm. Phil., pp. 370 sqq.; comp. Zeller, i. 688, Anm., where the reVOL. I.

on his arrival in Egypt; but even if he were, he might, it is obvious, still learn much from them.

B

with respect; but he cites him, for the most part, only when he attacks him, and this he by no means always does with a fitting objectivity and fairness.14 How often he has borrowed from him without naming him we do not know. Plato speaks of him nowhere, though it is a matter of dispute whether, in some places, he has not controverted his opinions without mention of his name. Hence arose, it may be, the story that Plato in fanatical zeal would have liked to buy up and burn all the works of Demokritos.15

In modern times Ritter, in his "History of Philosophy," emptied much anti-materialistic rancour upon Demokritos's memory; and we may therefore rejoice the more at the quiet recognition of Brandis and the brilliant and convincing defence of Zeller; for Demokritos must, in truth, amongst the great thinkers of antiquity, be numbered with the very greatest.

As to the doctrines of Demokritos, we are, indeed, better informed than we are as to the views of many a philosopher whose writings have come to us in greater fulness. This may be ascribed to the clearness and consecutiveness of his theory of the world, which permits us to add with the greatest ease the smallest fragment to the whole. Its core is Atomism, which, though not of course invented by him, through him certainly first reached its full development. We shall prove in the course of our history of Materialism that the modern atomic theory has been gradually developed from the Atomism of Demokritos. We may consider the following propositions as the essential foundations of Demokritos's metaphysic.

14 Comp., e.g., the way in which Aristotle, De Anima, i. 3, attempts to render ridiculous the doctrine of De- . mokritos as to the movement of the body by the soul; further, the interpolation of chance as a cause of movement, which is gently censured by Zeller, i. 710, 711, with Anm. 1, and the statement that Demokritos had attributed truth to the sensible phe

nomenon
742 u. f.
15 However incredible such fanati-
cism may appear to us, it is quite con-
sonant with the character of Plato;
and as Diogenes' authority for this
statement is no less a person than
Aristoxenos, it may be that we have
here something more than a "story."
Cf. Ueberweg, i. 4 Aufl., S. 73, E. T. 68.

as such. See Zeller, L

I. Out of nothing arises nothing; nothing that is can be destroyed. All change is only combination and separation of atoms.16

This proposition, which contains in principle the two great doctrines of modern physics-the theory of the indestructibility of matter, and that of the persistence of force (the conservation of energy)-appears essentially in Kant as the first "analogy of experience:" "In all changes of phenomena matter is permanent, and the quantity thereof in nature is neither increased nor diminished." Kant finds that in all times, not merely the philosopher, but even common sense, has presupposed the permanence of matter. The doctrine claims an axiomatic validity as a necessary presupposition of any regulated experience at all, and yet it has its history! In reality, to the natural man, in whom fancy still overrides logical thought, nothing is more familiar than the idea of origin and disappearance, and the creation "out of nothing" in the Christian dogma is scarcely ever the first stumbling-block for awakening scepticism.

With philosophy the axiom of the indestructibility of matter comes, of course, to the front, although at first it may be a little veiled. The "Infinite" (aπeipov) of Anaximander, from which everything proceeds, the divine primitive fire of Herakleitos, into which the changing world returns, to proceed from it anew, are incarnations of persistent matter. Parmenides of Elea was the first to deny all becoming and perishing. The really existent is to the Eleatics the only "All," a perfectly rounded sphere, in which there is no change nor motion; all alteration is only phenomenal. But here arose a contradiction between appearance and being, in face of which philosophy could not be maintained. The one-sided maintenance of the one axiom injured another: "Nothing is without cause." How, then, from such unchanging existence could the phenomenal arise? To this was added the

16 See the proofs in Zeller, i. 691, Anm. 2.

absurd denial of motion, which, of course, led to innumerable logomachies, and so furthered the development of Dialectic. Empedokles and Anaxagoras drop this absurdity, inasmuch as they refer all becoming and perishing to combination and separation. Only first by means of Atomism was this thought fully represented, and made the corner-stone of a strictly mechanical theory of the universe; and it was further necessary to bring into connection the axiom of the necessity of everything that happens.

II. "Nothing happens by chance, but everything through a cause and of necessity." 17

This proposition, already, according to a doubtful tradition, held by Leukippos, must be regarded as a decided negation of all teleology, for the "cause" cause" (λóyos) is nothing but the mathematico-mechanical law followed by the atoms in their motion through an unconditional necessity. Hence Aristotle complains repeatedly that Demokritos, leaving aside teleological causes, had explained everything by a necessity of nature. This is exactly what Bacon praises most strongly in his book on the "Advancement of Learning," in which, in other respects, he prudently manages to restrain his dislike of the Aristotelian system (lib. iii. c. 4).

This genuinely materialistic denial of final causes had thus, we see, led, in the case of Demokritos, to the same misunderstandings that, in our own day, Materialism finds almost everywhere predominant-to the reproach that he believed in a blind chance. Although no confusion is more common, nothing can be more completely opposite than chance and necessity; and the explanation lies in this, that the notion of necessity is entirely definite and absolute, while that of chance is relative and fluctuating.

When a tile falls upon a man's head while he is walking ἀλλὰ πάντα ἐκ λόγου τε καὶ ὑπ' ἀν άγκης.”

17 Fragm. Phys., 41, Mullach, p. 365: οὐδὲν χρῆμα μάτην γίνεται

down the street, this is regarded as an accident; and yet no one doubts that the direction of the wind, the law of gravitation, and other natural circumstances, fully determined the event, so that it followed from a physical necessity, and also from a physical necessity must, in fact, strike any head that at the particular moment happened to be on the particular spot.

This example clearly shows that the assumption of chance is only a partial denial of final cause. The falling of the stone, in our view, could have had no reasonable cause if we call it an accident.

If, however, we assume, with the philosophy of the Christian religion, an absolute predestination, we have as completely excluded chance as by the assumption of absolute causality. In this point the two most consequent theories entirely coincide, and both leave to the notion of chance only an arbitrary use, practically no use whatever. We call accidental anything the cause or object of which we do not know, merely for the sake of brevity, and therefore quite unphilosophically; or we start from a one-sided standpoint, and maintain, in the face of the teleologist, the accidental theory of events, in order to get rid of final causes, while we again quite abandon this same theory of chance so soon as we have to deal with the principle of sufficient reason.

And rightly, so far as physical investigation or any exact science is concerned; for it is only from the side of efficient causes that the phenomenal world is accessible to inquiry, and all infusion of final causes, which are by way of supplement placed above or beside the nature forces subject to necessity that is, those operating with the utmost regularity of ascertained laws-has no significance whatever, except as a partial negation of science, an arbitrary exclusion of a sphere not yet subjected to thorough investigation. 18

18 Of course, this is also true of the most recent and the boldest attempt

to set aside the fundamental principle of all scientific thought- the 'Philo

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