destroyed by collision with a larger world. This cosmology may be summarized in Shelley's
words:
Worlds on worlds are rolling ever From creation to decay, Like the bubbles on a river
Sparkling, bursting, borne away.Life developed out of the primeval slime. There is some fire everywhere in a living body, but
most in the brain or in the breast. (On this, authorities differ.) Thought is a kind of motion, and
is thus able to cause motion elsewhere. Perception and thought are physical processes.
Perception is of two sorts, one of the senses, one of the understanding. Perceptions of the latter
sort depend only on the things perceived, while those of the former sort depend also on our
senses, and are therefore apt to be deceptive. Like Locke, Democritus held that such qualities as
warmth, taste, and colour are not really in the object, but are due to our sense-organs, while
such qualities as weight, density, and hardness are really in the object.
Democritus was a thorough-going materialist; for him, as we have seen, the soul was composed
of atoms, and thought was a physical process. There was no purpose in the universe; there were
only atoms governed by mechanical laws. He disbelieved in popular religion, and he argued
against the nous of Anaxagoras. In ethics he considered cheerfulness the goal of life, and
regarded moderation and culture as the best means to it. He disliked everything violent and
passionate; he disapproved of sex, because, he said, it involved the overwhelming of
consciousness by pleasure. He valued friendship, but thought ill of women, and did not desire
children, because their education interferes with philosophy. In all this, he was very like Jeremy
Bentham; he was equally so in his love of what the Greeks called democracy. *
Democritus--such, at least, is my opinion-is the last of the Greek philosophers to be free from a
certain fault which vitiated all later ancient and medieval thought. All the philosophers we have
been considering so far were engaged in a disinterested effort to understand the world. They
thought it easier to understand than it is, but without this optimism they would not have had the
courage to make a
* "Poverty in a democracy is as much to be preferred to what is called prosperity under
despots as freedom is to slavery," he says.