CONCEPT OF AN ATOMIC UNIVERSE 135 



Remember that he came four hundred years before Cicero, 

 a full hundred before Aristotle, a century and a half before the 

 founding of Alexandria. He was the contemporary of Pericles, 

 of Phidias, and of that Socrates who said of astronomy that it 

 was " impossible to understand and madness to investigate." 

 Apparently he did not have the idea of a rotund earth, a fact 

 that is the more astonishing in the face of all his other cosmical 

 views, and because he was the friend of that Philolaus of 

 Crotona, who may have been the first in Greece to proclaim 

 the motion of our globe. 



Not over laden, then, is the glowing phrase wherein M. 

 Martha remarks of the ideas of " this great philosophical 

 geometer, who by the sole intuition of a penetrating genius, 

 and without the resource of those instruments which chance 

 has subsequently given to modern science, had penetrated many 

 mysteries of the heavens." He appears clearly to have antici- 

 pated Aristarchus ; he taught, for example, " that the sun is 

 not the small disk such as we see, but is of immense size ; that 

 the Milky Way is an assemblage of stars, which from their 

 distance elude our sight, and which by reason of being so thickly 

 sown in space, illuminate each other ; and that the shapes one 

 sees in the moon are to be attributed to the heights of its 

 mountains and the depths of its valleys." 1 He held, moreover, 

 to the idea of the infinity of worlds, their slow but incessant 

 destruction and reformation ; for him as for us the stars were 

 suns. Amazing previsions, that the advance of knowledge has 

 so strikingly confirmed ! 



Here was enough, no doubt, to lift Democritus far out of the 

 tribe of quibbling pedants who passed for philosophers in those 

 opulent days. He was no mere shriftsteller ; no superficial 

 Aristotle, no shallow, empty and pretentious Bacon. We have 

 now to see how, by the sheer force of his reasoning, he could 

 rise to a world conception which, in its main features, is still 

 the most tenable we possess. 



Democritus, like John Dal ton, was evidently a weather 

 sharp ; it was the success of his predictions in meteorology 

 which gained him so great a vogue among the Abderites. We 

 may picture him watching, like Dalton, the water in a stone 

 crock disappear in the sunshine, wondering how it could be 

 taken up into the air, as so it must have been. He had heard, 



1 Martha, Le Poeme de Lucrtce, 239. 



