Leucippus Quotes

In January 1821, Thomas Jefferson wrote John Adams to “encourage a hope that the human mind will some day get back to the freedom it enjoyed 2000 years ago.” This wish for a return to the era of philosophy would put Jefferson in the same period as Titus Lucretius Carus, thanks to whose six-volume poem De Rerum Naturum (On the Nature of Things) we have a distillation of the work of the first true materialists: Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus. These men concluded that the world was composed of atoms in perpetual motion, and Epicurus, in particular, went on to argue that the gods, if they existed, played no part in human affairs. It followed that events like thunderstorms were natural and not supernatural, that ceremonies of worship and propitiation were a waste of time, and that there was nothing to be feared in death.

NOTHING OCCURS AT RANDOM, BUT EVERYTHING FOR A REASON AND BY NECESSITY.

But of one thing I am satisfied, that the reason for which a vacuum was introduced by Leucippus and Democritus (namely, that without it the same bodies could not embrace and fill sometimes larger and sometimes smaller spaces) is a false one. For matter is clearly capable of folding and unfolding itself in space, within certain limits, without the interposition of a vacuum; nor is there in air two thousand times as much of vacuity as there is in gold.

As regards space, the modern view is that it is neither a substance, as Newton maintained, and as Leucippus and Democritus ought to have said, nor an adjective of extended bodies, as Descartes thought, but a system of relations, as Leibniz held. It is not by any means clear whether this view is compatible with the existence of the void. Perhaps, as a matter of abstract logic, it can be reconciled with the void. We might say that, between any two things, there is a certain greater or smaller distance, and that distance does not imply the existence of intermediate things. Such a point of view, however, would be impossible to utilize in modern physics. Since Einstein, distance is between events, not between things, and involves time as well as space. It is essentially a causal conception, and in modern physics there is no action at a distance. All this, however, is based upon empirical rather than logical grounds. Moreover the modern view cannot be stated except in terms of differential equations, and would therefore be unintelligible to the philosophers of antiquity.

Not only Newton's classical physics but also wave mechanics ultimately originated in the tension between those eight minutes of arc - less than one-seventh of one degree - and Kepler's Pythagorean metaphysics. Like the theory of atoms, which began in its Greek form as metaphysics in the fifth century B.C. (Leucippus and Democritus) and acquired scientific status only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries A.D., Kepler's Harmony of the World acquired scientific status only with Louis de Broglie and Erwin Schrodinger. In fact, Schrodinger's wave mechanics takes the transition from geometric radial optics to wave optics and attempts to transpose it to the theory of matter, to the theory of elementary particles. Wave optics in turn takes its orientation from musical theory, from the theory of acoustic vibrations and waves, resonance and dissonance. But in this theory Kepler and his doctrine of harmony - hence Pythagoras in the end - plays a decisive role. Kepler, then, plays a role in the prehistory of Schrodinger's wave mechanics. But that is not all. Of all Schrodinger's precursors, Kepler is the only one who foresaw that harmony - resonance - holds the world together.

Greek atomists Leucippus, his pupil Democritus, and other metaphysicians knew that the world was not how people saw and perceived it. If they understood atoms even then, the indivisible particles, not modern new atoms, we must believe that they understood much more. If they knew that every sense and sensation is a convention, they could have understood that space and time are conventions, too. Regardless of not thoroughly understanding or elaborating on these concepts, they understood that the world must be something different from what is experienced by the senses or how the senses understand it. If Everything is by a convention of senses, then senses can represent things differently; that is why the eye watches, not the ear. If Everything is a convention, then Everything we experience by senses must be relative.

An idea was needed, a great idea, a grand vision, to grasp the hidden order of the world. Leucippus and Democritus came up with this idea. The idea of Democritus’s system is extremely simple: the entire universe is made up of a boundless space in which innumerable atoms run. Space is without limits; has neither an above nor a below; is without a center or a boundary. Atoms have no qualities at all, apart from their shape. They

Parmenides and Zeno became famous for arguments which apparently cannot be refuted but which reach conclusions impossible to accept. These arguments provoke a crisis in philosophical accounts of the world; responses to it can be found in the cosmologies of Anaxagoras, Empedocles and the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus.

The notion of atoms, which originated in the fifth century BCE with Leucippus of Abdera and his prize student Democritus, was only a dazzling speculation;

The notion of atoms, which originated in the fifth century BCE with Leucippus of Abdera and his prize student Democritus, was only a dazzling speculation; there was no way to get any empirical proof and wouldn’t be for more than two thousand years. Other philosophers had competing theories: the core matter of the universe, they argued, was fire or water or air or earth, or some combination of these.

The void is a not-being, and no part of what is is a not-being; for what is in the strict sense of the term is an absolute plenum. This plenum, however, is not one; on the contrary, it is a many infinite in number and invisible owing to the minuteness of their bulk. The many move in the void (for there is a void): and by coming together they produce comingto-be, while by separating they pro-duce passing-away. Moreover, they act and suffer action whenever they chance to be in contact (for there they are not one), and they generate by being put together and becoming intertwined. From the genuinely one, on the other hand, there could never have come to be a multiplicity, nor from the genuinely many a one: that is impossible.

No thing happens at random but all things as a result of a reason and by necessity.