140 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



Democritus to be a man of weightier metal than either 

 Plato or Aristotle, though their philosophy ' was noised 

 and celebrated in the schools, amid the din and pomp 

 of professors.' It was not they, but Grenseric and 

 Attila and the barbarians, who destroyed the atomic 

 philosophy. ' For, at a time when all human learning 

 had suffered shipwreck, these planks of Aristotelian and 

 Platonic philosophy, as being of a lighter and more 

 inflated substance, were preserved and came down to 

 us, while things more solid sank and almost passed into 

 oblivion.' 



The son of a wealthy father, Democritus devoted 

 the whole of his inherited fortune to the culture of his 

 mind. He travelled everywhere ; visited Athens when 

 Socrates and Plato were there, but quitted the city 

 without making himself known. Indeed, the dialectic 

 strife in which Socrates so much delighted, had no 

 charm for Democritus, who held that ' the man who 

 readily contradicts, and uses many words, is unfit to 

 learn anything truly right.' He is said to have dis- 

 covered and educated Protagoras the Sophist, being 

 struck as much by the manner in which he, being a 

 hewer of wood, tied up his faggots, as by the sagacity 

 of his conversation. Democritus returned poor from 

 his travels, was supported by his brother, and at length 

 wrote his great work entitled ' Diakosmos,' which he 

 read publicly before the people of his native town. He 

 was honoured by his countrymen in various ways, and 

 died serenely at a great age. 



The principles enunciated by Democritus reveal his 

 uncompromising antagonism to those who deduced the 

 phenomena of nature from the caprices of the gods. 

 They are briefly these : 1 . From nothing comes nothing. 

 Nothing that exists can be destroyed. All changes are 

 due to the combination and separation of molecules. 



