The First Philosophers by Robin Waterfield

Author:Robin Waterfield
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Philosophy, Greece
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2000-09-06T23:00:00+00:00

Originating with the revered mind of great Democritus:

That the principles of body and soul are arranged alternately,

One matching one, and so knit the body together.

(Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe 3.370–3 Bailey)

T26 (DK 68A74; T 172c) Indeed, it seems to me that even Democritus, as great a man as ever lived, from whose springs Epicurus watered his own little gardens, faltered over the nature of the gods. At one point he holds that there are images endowed with divinity inherent in the world; at another he says that the elements of the mind, which are in this same world, are gods; at another that they are living images which may either help us or harm us; at another that they are certain enormous images, large enough to embrace the whole world from outside. All these ideas are more worthy of Democritus’ homeland than of Democritus himself.* I mean, who can understand what he means by these ‘images’? Who can revere them? Who can judge them worthy of worship or devotion? (Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 1.43 Plasberg)

T27 (DK 68B166; T 175b) Democritus says that there are certain images that are encountered by people, some of which are beneficent, others harmful. (That is why he prayed that he would meet propitious images.) These images, he said, are unusually large, and virtually, but not completely, indestructible; and they communicate the future to people when they are seen and by the sounds they make. When men in the old days, then, received an impression of these images, they took them to be a god, but the god, with his indestructibility, was in fact no more than these images. (Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors 9.19 Bury)

T28 (DK 68A75; T 173a) There are those who believe that our conception of the gods is due to the awesome things that happen in the world. Democritus seems to have been of this opinion, since he says that in ancient times men were frightened of celestial phenomena such as thunder, lightning, thunderbolts, conjunctions of heavenly bodies, and solar and lunar eclipses, and imagined that the gods were responsible for these things. (Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors 9.24 Bury)

T29 (DK 68A77; T 133a) But on this occasion Favorinus has taken down an ancient argument of Democritus, blackened with smoke, so to speak, and set about cleaning it and polishing it up. The basis of his argument was the familiar view of Democritus that images penetrate into our bodies through our bodily channels and, when they rise up, cause the visions we see when asleep. These images come to us from all over the place, since they are given off even by furniture and clothes and plants, but especially by living creatures, because of their constant restlessness and their warmth. They not only retain in outline the likenesses of the solid bodies which have been impressed upon them … but they also enlist and take along with them the reflections of a person’s mental impulses and desires, and of his qualities and emotions.

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