138 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



that Bacon considered 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 Genseric 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 noth- 

 ing. Nothing that exists can be destroyed. All 

 changes are due to the combination and separation of 



