the knowledge of natural causes; and he was thus led to
adopt the hypothesis of indivisible and moving corpuscles,
in order to account for the universal law of motion.
"Several other philosophers[1] had, before their time, con-
sidered matter as divisible into indefinitely small particles,
but as they were the first who taught that these particles
were originally destitute of all qualities except figure and
motion, they may well be regarded as the founders of the
atomic system of philosophy." Democritus[2] maintained
that nothing can ever be produced from nothing, and that
"indivisible atoms (elementary corpuscles, that is) consti-
tute the essence of bodies." He adopted, as elements, the
plenum and vacuum, making the former, in contradistinc-
tion to the latter, to be entity, and the two to be, as
matter, the causes of things; he maintained too, that they
are equally distributed through all bodies. He agreed
with Anaxagoras in believing that throughout all nature
there is a principle of combination; and with his master
Leucippus, in regarding form arrangement and position of
particles, as causes of elementary distinctions among bodies.
But in some of this reasoning he was mistaken, Aristotle
observes, from not distinguishing the condition of poten-
tiality from reality, since the same object may simultane-
ously, when in potentiality, be and not be, although this
cannot hold good of the same when in reality. Democritus
also thought that, owing to the difference of sensation
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CH. II.]
NOTES.
211
