10. About Leucippus.
But Leucippus, a companion of Zeno, did not keep to the same opinion (as Parmenides), but says that all things are boundless and ever-moving and that birth and change are unceasing. And he says that fulness and the void are elements. And he says also that the ordered worlds came into being thus: when many bodies were crowded together p. 27. and flowed from the ambient[86] into a great void, on coming into contact with one another, those of like fashion and similar form coalesced, and from their intertwining yet others were generated and increased and diminished by a certain necessity. But what that necessity may be he did not define.
11. About Democritus.
But Democritus was an acquaintance of Leucippus. This was Democritus of Abdera, son of Damasippus,[87] who met with many Gymnosophists among the Indians and with priests and astrologers[88] in Egypt and with Magi in Babylon. But he speaks like Leucippus about elements, to wit, fulness and void, saying that the full is that which is but the void that which is not, and he said this because things are ever moving in the void. He said also that the ordered worlds are boundless and differ in size, and that in some there is neither sun nor moon, but that in others both are greater than with us, and in yet others more in number. p. 28. And that the intervals between the ordered worlds are unequal, here more and there less, and that some increase, others flourish and others decay, and here they come into being and there they are eclipsed.[89] But that they are destroyed by colliding with one another. And that some ordered worlds are bare of animals and plants and of all water. And that in our cosmos the earth came into being first of the stars and that the moon is the lowest of the stars, and then comes the sun and then the fixed stars: but that the planets are not all at the same height. And he laughed at everything, as if all things among men deserved laughter.
12. About Xenophanes.
But Xenophanes of Colophon was the son of Orthomenes.[90] He survived until the time of Cyrus. He first declared the incomprehensibility of all things,[91] saying thus:
Although anyone should speak most definitely
He nevertheless does not know, and it is a guess[92] which occurs about all things.
p. 29.But he says that nothing is generated, or perishes or is moved, and that the universe which is one is beyond change. But he says that God is eternal, and one and alike on every side, and finite and spherical in form, and conscious[93] in all His parts. And that the sun is born every day from the gathering together of small particles of fire and that the earth is boundless and surrounded neither by air nor by heaven. And that there are boundless (innumerable) suns and moons and that all things are from the earth. He said that the sea is salt because of the many compounds which together flow into it. But Metrodorus said it was thanks to its trickling through the earth that the sea becomes salt. And Xenophanes opines that there was once a mixture of earth with the sea, and that in time it was freed from moisture, asserting in proof of this that shells are found in the centre of the land and on mountains, and that in the stone-quarries of Syracuse were found the impress of a fish and of seals, and in Paros the cast of an anchor below the surface of the rock[94] and in Malta layers of all sea-things. And he says that these came when all things were of old time buried in mud, and that the impress of them dried in the mud; but p. 30. that all men were destroyed when the earth being cast into the sea became mud, and that it again began to bring forth and that this catastrophe happened to all the ordered worlds.[95]