Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/265

 On a point in the Doctrine of the Ancient Atomists. 255 " They do not explain," he says, " whence their atoms have weight ; for they assert that those minima without parts which are conceived to belong to their atoms and to be their parts are without weight. But how can weight be produced from a union of things without weight ? " The very difficulty which Lucretius from the necessity of the case leaves unsolved. But Leucippus and Democritus were not, I believe, the first expounders of such niceties in the Atomic theory. The admira- tion of the latter for Pythagoras is well attested. Diogenes Laertius (ix. 45) tells us that Thrasylus arranged the works of Democritus in tetralogies, like those of Plato. For the ancients appear to have had as high an admiration for him, as Bacon has expressed in his writings ; and to have thought that his sagacity as a thinker and his elegance as a writer entitled him to take rank by the side of Plato and Aristotle ; although Schleierma- cher and Hitter are pleased to strike his name off the list of true philosophers and to assign him a place in their numerous class of Sophists. His treatise ilvdayoprjs rj irepi rfjs rov o-o(f)ov 8ta0(rio5 comes first in the first of these tetralogies ; and Diogenes (ix. 38) has these words : doicel 8e (A)7/xoKpiroy), (prjalv 6 Qpaavkos, ^Xcorjys yeyovevat Kai rav HvdayopiKav' da nai avrov rov HvOayopov p,ep.vr)rai, 6avp,da>v avrov ev tw opcovvpa o~vyypdpp.an. irdvra he ho/eel napa rovrov aj3e7v kcu avrov $' av dKr]Koevai, el pi) to. rav xp va>v ep-dx (T0 - "^dirrois p.evroi twv UvdayopiKav twos d.Kovcra.1 (pqcriv avrov TXclvkos 6 'Prjy7vos f Kara, toiis avrovs Xpovovs aura) ycyovcos* cprjal 8e *cal 'AiroWodapos 6 Kv&iajvos 3>tXoXaa> avrov avyyeyovevai. Now Thrasylus must have had good means of judg- ing of the connexion between Democritus and the Pythagoreans. But what was this bond of connexion ? Democritus perceived the philosophical necessity there was of supposing some un- changeable and indestructible substratum to lie at the bottom of all phenomena : hence his atomic theory ; while Pythagoras long before him appears to have been the first Greek thinker who saw the insufficiency of the theories of the earlier Ionic philoso- phers which derived all things from one or other variable ele- ment, and sought to supply their defects by his mysterious doc- trine of numbers. We derive our most trustworthy information have been presumed, assigned weight to tarch quoted by Brucker, (i. p. 1189). his atoms, and will outbalance the state- The doubt probably arose from not at- ments of Stobaeus quoted by Mullach tending to the distinction between atoms (Bern. p. 381), and of the Pseudo-Plu- and their parts.