[E. Empedocles, Leucippus and Democritus.]
We shall take Leucippus and Democritus with Empedocles; in them there is manifested the ideality of the sensuous and also universal determinateness or a transition to the universal. Empedocles was a Pythagorean Italian, whose tendencies were Ionic; Leucippus and Democritus, who incline to the Italians, in that they carried on the Eleatic school, are more interesting. Both these philosophers belong to the same philosophic system; they must be taken together as regards their philosophic thought and considered thus.[68] Leucippus is the older, and Democritus perfected what the former began, but it is difficult to say what properly speaking belongs to him historically. It is certainly recorded that he developed Leucippus’ thought, and there is, too, some of his work preserved, but it is not worthy of quotation. In Empedocles we see the commencement of the determination and separation of principles. The becoming conscious of difference is an essential moment, but the principles here have in part the character of physical Being, and though partaking also of ideal Being, this form is not yet thought-form. On the other hand we find in Leucippus and Democritus the more ideal principles, the atom and the Nothing, and we also find thought-determination more immersed in the objective—that is, the beginning of a metaphysics of body; or pure Notions possess the significance of the material, and thus pass over thought into objective form. But the teaching is, on the whole, immature, and is incapable of giving satisfaction.
[1. Leucippus and Democritus.]
Nothing is accurately known of the circumstances of Leucippus’ life, not even where he was born. Some, like Diogenes Laertius (IX. 30), make him out to be an Eleatic; others to have belonged to Abdera (because he was with Democritus), or to Melos—Melos is an island not far from the Peloponnesian coast—or else, as is asserted by Simplicius in writing on Aristotle’s Physics (p. 7), to Miletus. It is definitely stated that he was a disciple and a friend of Zeno; yet he seems to have been almost contemporaneous with him as well as with Heraclitus.
It is less doubtful that Democritus belonged to Abdera in Thrace, on the Aegean Sea, a town that in later times became so notorious on account of foolish actions. He was born, it would appear, about the 80th Olympiad (460 B.C.), or Olympiad 77, 3 (470 B.C.); the first date is given by Apollodorus (Diog. Laert. IX. 41), the other by Thrasyllus; Tennemann (Vol. I. p. 415) makes his birth to fall about the 71st Olympiad (494 B.C.). According to Diogenes Laertius (IX. 34), he was forty years younger than Anaxagoras, lived to the time of Socrates, and was even younger than he—that is supposing him to have been born, not in Olympiad 71, but in Olympiad 80. His connection with the Abderites has been much discussed, and many bad anecdotes are told regarding it by Diogenes Laertius. That he was very rich, Valerius Maximus (VIII. 7, ext. 4) judges from the fact that his father entertained the whole of Xerxes’ army on its passage to Greece. Diogenes tells (IX. 35, 36) that he expended his means, which were considerable, on journeys to Egypt and in penetrating into the East, but this last is not authentic. His possessions are stated to have amounted to a hundred talents, and if an Attic talent was worth about from 1000 to 1200 thalers, he must undoubtedly have been able to get far enough with that. It is always said that he was a friend and disciple of Leucippus, as Aristotle relates (Met. I. 4), but where they met is not told. Diogenes (IX. 39) goes on: “After he returned from his journeys into his own country, he lived very quietly, for he had consumed all his substance, but he was supported by his brother and attained to high honour amongst his countrymen”—not through his philosophy, but—“by some prophetic utterances. According to the law, however, he who ran through his father’s means could not have a place in the paternal burial-place. To give no place to the calumniator or evil speaker”—as though he had spent his means through extravagance—“he read his work Διάκοσμος to the Abderites, and the latter gave him a present of 500 talents, had his statue publicly erected, and buried him with great pomp when, at 100 years old, he died.” That this was also an Abderite jest, those who left us this narrative, at least, did not see.
Leucippus is the originator of the famous atomic system which, as recently revived, is held to be the principle of rational science. If we take this system on its own account, it is certainly very barren, and there is not much to be looked for in it; but it must be allowed that we are greatly indebted to Leucippus, because, as it is expressed in our ordinary physics, he separated the universal and the sensuous, or the primary and the secondary, or the essential and the nonessential qualities of body. The universal quality means, in speculative language, the fact that the corporeal is really universally determined through the Notion or the principle of body: Leucippus understood the determinate nature of Being, not in a superficial manner, but in a speculative. When it is said that body has those universal qualities, such as form, impenetrability and weight, we think that the indeterminate conception of body is the essence, and that its essence is something other than these qualities. But speculatively, essential existence is just universal determinations; they are existent in themselves, or the abstract content and the reality of existence. To body as such, there is nothing left for the determination of reality but pure singularity; but it is the unity of opposites, and the unity of these predicates constitutes its reality.
Let us recollect that in the Eleatic philosophy Being and non-being were looked at as in opposition; that only Being is, and non-being, in which category we find motion, change, &c., is not. Being is not as yet the unity turning back, and turned back into itself, like Heraclitus’ motion and the universal. It may be said of the point of view that difference, change, motion, &c., fall within sensuous, immediate perception, that the assertion that only Being is, is as contradictory to appearances as to thought; for the nothing, that which the Eleatics abolished, is. Or within the Heraclitean Idea, Being and non-being are the same; Being is, but non-being, since it is one with Being, is as well, or Being is both the predicate of Being and of non-being. But Being and non-being are both expressed as having the qualities of objectivity, or as they are for sensuous perception, and hence they are the opposition of full and empty. Leucippus says this; he expresses as existent what was really present to the Eleatics. Aristotle says (Met. I. 4): “Leucippus and his friend Democritus maintain that the full and the empty are the elements, and they call the one the existent, and the other the non-existent; that is, the full and solid are the existent, the empty and rare, the non-existent. Hence they also say that Being is no more than non-being because the empty is as well as the bodily; and these form the material sources of everything.” The full has the atom as its principle. The Absolute, what exists in and for itself, is thus the atom and the empty (τὰ ἄτομα καὶ τὸ κενόν): this is an important, if at the same time, an insufficient explanation. It is not atoms as we should speak of them, such, for example, as we represent to ourselves as floating in the air, that are alone the principle, for the intervening nothing is just as essential. Thus here we have the first appearance of the atomic system. We must now give the further signification and determination of this principle.
[a. The Logical Principle]
The principal point of consideration is the One, existent for itself: this determination is a great principle and one which we have not hitherto had. Parmenides establishes Being or the abstract universal; Heraclitus, process; the determination of being-for-self belongs to Leucippus. Parmenides says that the nothing does not exist at all; with Heraclitus Becoming existed only as the transition of Being into nothing where each is negated; but the view that each is simply at home with itself, the positive as the self-existent one and the negative as empty, is what came to consciousness in Leucippus, and became the absolute determination. The atomic principle in this manner has not passed away, for it must from this point of view always exist; the being-for-self must in every logical philosophy[69] be an essential moment and yet it must not be put forward as ultimate. In the logical progression from Being and Becoming to this thought-determination, Being as existent here and now[70] certainly first appears, but this last belongs to the sphere of finality and hence cannot be the principle of Philosophy. Thus, though the development of Philosophy in history must correspond to the development of logical philosophy, there will still be passages in it which are absent in historical development. For instance, if we wished to make Being as existent here the principle, it would be what we have in consciousness—there are things, these things are finite and bear a relation to one another—but this is the category of our unthinking knowledge, of appearance. Being-for-self, on the other hand, is, as Being, simple relation to itself, but through negation of the other-Being. If I say I am for myself, I not only am, but I negate in me all else, exclude it from me, in so far as it seems to me to be external. As negation of other being, which is just negation in relation to me, being-for-self is the negation of negation and thus affirmation; and this is, as I call it, absolute negativity in which mediation indeed is present, but a mediation which is just as really taken away.