Page:Early Greek philosophy by John Burnet, 3rd edition, 1920.djvu/356

342 other hand, Aristotle distinctly says that Demokritos held the atoms were heavier "in proportion to their excess," and this seems to be explained by the statement of Theophrastos that, according to him, weight depended on magnitude. Even so, however, it is not represented as a primary property of the atoms in the same sense as magnitude.

It is impossible to solve this apparent contradiction without referring briefly to the history of Greek ideas about weight. It is clear that lightness and weight would be among the very first properties of body to be distinctly recognised as such. The necessity of lifting burdens must very soon have led men to distinguish them, though no doubt in a crude form. Both weight and lightness would be thought of as things that were in bodies. Now it is a remarkable feature of early Greek philosophy that from the first it was able to shake itself free from this idea. Weight is never called a "thing" as, for instance, warmth and cold are; and, so far as we can see, not one of the thinkers we have studied hitherto thought it necessary to give any explanation of it at all, or even to say anything about it. The motions and resistances which popular theory ascribes to weight are