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Compte rendu de l'ouvrage de C.C.W. Taylor intitule «Les atomistes: Leucippe et Democrite: texte, traduction et commentaire» (1999), qui presente les principales theses atomistes concernant les principes de base de la generation, la theorie du vide et la perception, d'une part, et concernant la doctrine anthropologique des dieux et la responsabilite ethique de la communaute, d'autre part.

In chapter 1 the ultimate particles suggested by Leucippus and Democritus were called atoms, and their theory was called an atomic theory. Even though the Ancient Greek ‘atoms’ had little in common with atoms as conceived in the twentieth century, the name has become so familiar that it would be pedantic not to use it when introducing those early theories. However, in this chapter, and from now on, I shall use the Ancient Greek word atomos to refer to their particle theories so that we shall not confuse them with those that came later. We need to consider how particle theories of matter (corpuscular theories) and also other theories as to the nature of matter developed.

Now that we have spent many pages discussing the operation of chance in a variety of situations, the time has come to confront a difficult question that we have conveniently ignored up to now. Just what is chance? Cicero was ahead of his time when he characterized chance events as events that occurred or will occur in ways that are uncertain—events that may happen, may not happen, or may happen in some other way. Deborah Bennett, in her excellent little book Randomness, points out that the more widespread belief at the time was that what we call chance is merely ignorance of the determining cause of the event. According to Leucippus (circa 450 B.C.), the first atomist, “Nothing happens at random; everything happens out of reason and by necessity.”

The usual understanding of the ancient Greek atoms proposed by Leucippus and his disciple Democritus some 2440 years ago is that of indivisible objects of various forms and sizes that one may stick together like LEGO-pieces in an unlimited number of ways to form the material bodies. From this picture two conclusions are usually drawn: Some philosophers declare the Greek atomists to be the first materialists (Gex 1949), and some scientists say that “quantum mechanics also put an end to atomism” (Primas 1994). Personally I find both conclusions unfortunate. To me the Greek atomists were the first physicists. Contrary to the geometers, the Pythagoreans, Aristotle and, above all, Descartes who saw the world as a continuum, these physicists saw it in the light of the polarity between the full and the void. For them dividing a body meant to intercalate a void between two fulls which were one before. Since this process cannot be repeated indefinitely they realized that it is necessary for describing the material world to postulate the existence of a limit of divisibility. This, it seems to me, is the essence of the Greek atoms, and not the LEGO-folklore. Pauli (1994a, p. 140) characterizes this aspect as “a way out of the difficulties of the relation between unity and multiplicity”. And he also says: “It would not be correct to designate these thinkers as materialists in the modern sense.”

Turning now to the philosophers usually classed together under the name of the Milesian School (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes) and, in the next chapter, to some more or less connected with them (Heraclitus, Xenophanes), then to the atomists (Leucippus, Demo-critus), let me point out two things. First, the order in regard to the preceding chapter is not chronological; the floruit of the three Ionian ‘physiologoi’ (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes) is approximately dated at 585, 565, 545 B.C. respectively, as against Pythagoras 532 B.C. Secondly, I wish to point out the double role that this whole group plays in our present context. They are a group of definitely scientific outlook and aims, just as the Pythagoreans were, but opposed to them as regards the competition ‘Reason v. Senses’, explained in our second chapter. They take the world as given to us by our senses and try to explain it, not bothering about the precepts of reason any more than the man in the street does, from whose way of thinking theirs is a direct descendant. Indeed it frequently starts from problems or analogies of handicraft and serves practical applications in navigation, mapping, triangulation. On the other hand let me remind the reader about our main problem, which will be to find out the special and somewhat artificial features of present-day science that are supposed (Gomperz, Burnet) to originate from Greek philosophy.

The idea of mechanistic determinism had been conceived as long ago as the 5th century BC by the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus. Their idea was that everything is made up of invisible indestructible atoms moving around in otherwise empty space, and that all the changes in the world are nothing other than the movements of these atoms in relation to each other.1 Even people’s thoughts and feelings, they said, are nothing other than the coming together or moving apart of certain kinds of atoms. Here we have a stark picture of a mechanistic world. The notion of determinism was part of the picture because, the philosophers maintained, the atoms always move from necessity. The contemporary ideas about motion were still rudimentary, though, and until the seventeenth-century discovery of laws of motion mathematically statable using calculus the notion of mechanistic determinism could hardly be developed any further. Indeed, it might seem that the idea of a change being the necessary result of antecedent physical determinants cannot be fully expressed in terms of more elementary ideas. Nonetheless, some elucidation of the idea is possible, and in a book written in 1819 Laplace, a philosophically minded mathematician and astronomer, set out the idea of mechanistic determinism in a way that not only drew on the achievements of Newtonian physics but which could readily be extended to discoveries made in physics since Laplace’s day

At the beginning of this book we mentioned several scholars who declared that there are many — perhaps even innumerable worlds. In this group were Aristarchus, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Democritus, Epicurus, Metrodorus of Chios, Leucippus, Diogenes, and others (whom Theodoretus in Book I of his De Curando Graecorum Affectiones and D. Thomas, section 1, subsection 68, (ERRATUM read p.q. for p.g.), article 3, had mentioned. They expressed sorrow for Alexander the Great who complained that even though there were many worlds, he was not yet master of one.

That is a charming exchange of letters between the 1910 traveler Mr. Bacon and two modern geneticists in “Genes, genetics, and epigenetics: a correspondence” by C.-t. Wu and J. R. Morris (Viewpoint, special issue on Epigenetics, 10 Aug., p. [1103][1]). The authors might be correct about Waddington as the originator of the term epigenetics, but only in the modern sense of the origin of the phenotype from the genotype. The root term epigenesis goes back more than two millennia to Aristotle, as Waddington acknowledged, and was proposed in opposition to preformation, the concept favored by the Greek philosophers Democritus and Leucippus. In epigenesis, there were no preformed equivalents in the fertilized egg for later developing structures. Preformation maintained its hold in the popular mind for millennia, even capturing the attention of the great 17th-century anatomist Malpighi. The advent of the microscope and the discovery of the germ layers in the chick embryo by Pander, and their generalization by von Baer, settled the issue in favor of epigenesis in the 18th century. Of course, genetics was unknown as such until the 20th century; until then, “epigenetics” implied the workings of epigenesis, as studied by Roux and his school of experimental embryologists in the 19th century. Waddington's adaptation of the term epigenetics to modern genetic concepts was an advance in one sense, but has apparently allowed many to forget the root and original intent of the term. While we search for reactions that persist through mitosis, we forget that hierarchical structures maintain tissue stability. We might well contemplate as the starting point for a deeper understanding of epigenetics the insight of Sewall Wright, a founder of population genetics: “Persistence may be based on interactions among constituents which make the cell in each of its states of differentiation a self-regulatory system as a whole, in a sense, a single gene at a higher level of integrations than the chromosomal genes” ([1][2]). Such hierarchical thinking would help structure the many molecular interactions certain to accumulate under the current rubric of epigenetics and give them deeper biological significance. 1. [↵][3]1. S. Wright , Am. Nat. LXXIX, 289 (1945). [OpenUrl][4] # Response {#article-title-2} I agree with Rubin that, for many, the history of the term epigenetics has been lost and, with it, useful viewpoints. A colleague has further alerted me to an early discussion of “Development as an epigenetic process” by C. H. Waddington in his book An Introduction to Modern Genetics ([1][5]). This discussion is a forerunner to Waddington's 1942 paper ([2][6]) introducing “epigenetics” and has clarified for me how the author might have progressed from the original theory of epigenesis to “epigenetics.” In this earlier piece, Waddington explicitly mentioned epigenesis and preformation, putting each into the context of development. With respect to epigenesis, he said that as “the interaction of these constituents [of the fertilized egg] gives rise to new types of tissue and organ which were not present originally,…development must be considered as ‘epigenetic.’” Waddington then considered the manner in which tissues and organs are induced during development. He discussed the concepts of genotype and phenotype but noted that they “are not adequate or appropriate for the consideration of the development of differences within a single organism.” That is, “the difference between an eye and a nose, for instance, is clearly neither genotypic nor phenotypic.” Instead, the difference “is due…to the different sets of developmental processes which have occurred in the two masses of tissue.” Waddington suggested that the terms epigenetic constitution or epigenotype be used to refer to the “set of organizers and organizing relations to which a certain piece of tissue will be subject during development.” These terms in hand, he then urged that we consider “the appearance of a particular organ [as] the product of the genotype and the epigenotype, reacting with the external environment.” Thus, in this manner, Waddington drew the original concept of epigenesis closer to those of genotype, phenotype, and development. With regard to the quotation from Wright that Rubin mentions, I would also agree. We must keep in mind the context in which a gene works and that, as we broaden our understanding of the gene, the boundary of the gene might become less obvious. By way of thanks, I append a quotation from a paper published by H. J. Muller in 1938. Its focus, the phenomenon of position effect, differs from the issue addressed by Wright, but its flavor seems reminiscent of Wright's message. > In the production of phaenotypic effects the gene must begin by interacting with cellular substances so as to produce a highly specific product or products, which must diffuse out from the locus of activity of the gene and in turn cause (or affect) further physio-chemical changes. In the course of one of these chains of reaction, that has its origin in an individual gene, there will be many opportunities for interaction with other chains of reaction present in the complicated mixture; thus, the reactions will really form a kind of multi-dimensional net, rather than a simple chain. The final phaenotypic manifestations lie at the ends of the net furthest removed from the inner gene ends, and their quality depends upon the character and strength (including speed) of all the intermediate reactions and interactions ([3][7], 1938, p. 588). 1. [↵][8]1. C. H. Waddington , An Introduction to Modern Genetics (Allen & Unwin, London, 1939), pp. 154-156. 2. [↵][9]1. C. H. Waddington , Endeavour 1, 18 (1942). [OpenUrl][10][CrossRef][11] 3. [↵][12]1. H. J. Muller , Proceedings of the 15th International Physiological Congress, Leningrad-Moscow, 1935 State Biological and Medical Press, 587-589 (1938) Reprinted in Studies in Genetics: The Selected Papers of H. J. Muller (Bloomington, IN, Indiana Univ. Press, 1962) 137–140. 4. I thank M. Green at the University of California, Davis, for alerting me to Waddington's 1939 discussion of epigentics. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.293.5532.1103 [2]: #ref-1 [3]: #xref-ref-1-1 "View reference 1 in text" [4]: {openurl}?query=rft.jtitle%253DAm.%2BNat.%26rft.volume%253DLXXIX%26rft.spage%253D289%26rft.atitle%253DAM%2BNAT%26rft.genre%253Darticle%26rft_val_fmt%253Dinfo%253Aofi%252Ffmt%253Akev%253Amtx%253Ajournal%26ctx_ver%253DZ39.88-2004%26url_ver%253DZ39.88-2004%26url_ctx_fmt%253Dinfo%253Aofi%252Ffmt%253Akev%253Amtx%253Actx [5]: #ref-2 [6]: #ref-3 [7]: #ref-4 [8]: #xref-ref-2-1 "View reference 1 in text" [9]: #xref-ref-3-1 "View reference 2 in text" [10]: {openurl}?query=rft.jtitle%253DEndeavour%26rft.volume%253D1%26rft.spage%253D18%26rft_id%253Dinfo%253Adoi%252F10.1016%252F0160-9327%252877%252990005-9%26rft.genre%253Darticle%26rft_val_fmt%253Dinfo%253Aofi%252Ffmt%253Akev%253Amtx%253Ajournal%26ctx_ver%253DZ39.88-2004%26url_ver%253DZ39.88-2004%26url_ctx_fmt%253Dinfo%253Aofi%252Ffmt%253Akev%253Amtx%253Actx [11]: /lookup/external-ref?access_num=10.1016/0160-9327(77)90005-9&link_type=DOI [12]: #xref-ref-4-1 "View reference 3 in text"

What is remarkable about the history of atomism is the fact that it can be traced back to the very beginning of human reflection on nature. It is needless to recall the Pythagorean monadism and the names of Leucippus, Democritus and Lucretius: atomism is clearly as old as the first scientific and even proto-scientific explanations of nature. What is even more remarkable is that human thought was able so early and without the aid of microscope and measuring devices to anticipate one of the main findings of modern science. The significance of this anticipation is not diminished by the fact that only the most general features of modern atomism were present in the thought of its ancient ancestors: it was still quite an achievement in the fifth century B.C. to hold the view that space is infinite, that matter is homogeneous and discontinuous in its structure and that all diversity and all changes in nature are reducible to the configurations and displacements of homogeneous, permanent units. The question why and how such a successful anticipation of modern physical science occurred, has been and still is largely ignored; and when it is not ignored, the explanations suggested are hardly satisfactory. These explanations fall roughly into two distinct groups.

W HAT IS IN A NAME? In literature a proper name has the potential to reflect what a character does or suffers, and hence may be a privileged vehicle of meaning. As Gianna Petrone observes, "a name can assume and concentrate in itself a network of metaphoric and symbolic meanings, social connotations, literary allusions, and, above all, references to the text in which it is located."1 No author is more aware of the signifying power of names than Ovid, whose major poems, the Fasti and Metamorphoses, are well stocked with etymological lore.2 In the Metamorphoses, Greek proper names frequently prefigure the form into which a character will be changed (Lycaon becomes a wolf, Daphne a laurel tree, Syrinx a shepherd's pipe, etc.). In these instances, Ovid works with the inherited material of aetiologizing myth which explains the origins of things in anthropomorphic terms. Occasionally, however, he gives new names to characters in his sources with the intention of punning and playing on them.3 This is the case in the tale of Iphis' sexual transformation from girl to boy in Metamorphoses 9.666-797. Here Ovid apparently draws upon the Hellenistic story of Leucippus, a prose summary of which survives in the collection of transformation tales compiled by Antoninus Liberalis (17).4 In Antoninus Liberalis' version, which takes place in the Cretan city of Phaestus, Galataea disguises her newborn daughter as a boy named Leucippus because the father, Lamprus, cannot afford to bring up a girl. All goes well until the girl's beauty threatens to reveal her true gender, whereupon the worried mother supplicates Leto to change the sex of her daughter. Although Ovid's tale

IN BOOK 4 of the Physics, Aristotle argues forcefully against the existence of a void. Although he briefly mentions a void external to the cosmos (213bl-2), his discussion is directed to the possibility of a void within it, among the objects of our experience. Aristotle's principal targets are Leucippus and Democritus, although the Pythagorean use of void as a separation of the OvTEas (numbers) gets a passing nod (213b22-27). In chapter 6 Aristotle displays impatience with his predecessors who attempted to disprove the existence of void. They confused the serious problem of genuine void with the elementary one of the corporeality of air, a merely apparent void. "These people, then, did not tackle the question properly," he says (213b2-3), whereas the atomistic thesis at least comes to grips with a philosophically important notion. Before beginning his formidable dialectical attack, Aristotle reviews what he considers to be the chief "physical" arguments for void: it is necessary for local motion; it is needed to explain the condensation and rarefaction of matter; it is needed to account for the phenomenon of growth (aro-s) and for some particular examples of mixture and combination. Aristotle passes quickly over the "ontological" problem of void as not-being (213bl2-14), having settled his own approach to the paradox of the existence of not-being elsewhere. The definition of void as ro A' 6z', or as oi'}a>, was indeed characteristic of the early atomists (Democr. D.-K. A 37, 38, 40, 44, 45, 49), but Aristotle was reasonably just in his presentation of the atomistic arguments for void. The definition of it as not-being was not an argument for void as much as a response to Parmenides' monistic ontology, a declaration of a metaphysical approach rather than an arguable point about physical principles.' In Aristotle's report of the atomists' arguments in Physics 4. 6, only one distortion is introduced. At 213al5-19 and at 213a31-b2 he interprets the Democritean not-being in terms of his own conception of place. This is not a fair representation of the atomists' notion of void (see n. 5) and forms the basis for Aristotle's main refutation of it (214al6-19). F. Solmsen has argued that Epicurus' concepts of void and place were strongly influenced by Aristotle's discussion of these notions in Physics 4,2 and this seems correct. My purpose is to strengthen his claim by a closer look at Epicurus' physical principles and at the argument Aristotle advanced against the earlier atomistic conception of void. These were not the

Parmenides formulated a formal ontology, to which various additions and alternatives were proposed by Melissus, Gorgias, Leucippus and Democritus. These systems are here interpreted as modifications of a minimal Leśniewskian ontology.

Nature did not equip any of its creatures with wheels, but that means of locomotion was discovered anyway; an even swifter vehicle for the mind has been found in the atom-that irreducible unit which by virtue of its ubiquity provides reason with immediate access to alien objects, naturalizes nature, and urges an essential likeness beneath appearances so diverse that only an improbable imagination would even have placed them in a single world. The goal of atomism is to find one entity, a building block which then in multiples constitutes the structures of reality and appearance. All that is needed, given this once and future One, is a set of transformational rules-and everything comes to life that has been dreamed of in the topologies of geometry, physics, history, even of metaphysics: a full representation of the world as it has been, is, will be. The ideology of atomism includes the assumption that, for structures distinguishable into parts and wholes, the parts precede the whole, temporally and logically. For the atomist, all structures can be analyzed in this way; that, in fact, turns out to be his definition of structure. This premise is already evident in the building-block universe first depicted by Democritus and Leucippus; it is no less present in the heady days of twentieth-century physics (although by now the proliferation of quarks and the thirty-odd other particles might cause the most ardent atomist to long for an unatomic whole that exerted some prior restraint). It is slightly more pliable in latter-day atomists like Claude Levi-Strauss and

Ru B EN S 'S Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus confronts its viewers with an interpretative dilemma (fig. 1).' Painted about 1615 to 1618, the life-size composition illustrates the story recounted by Theocritus and Ovid of how the twin brothers, Castor and Pollux (called the Dioscuri), forcibly abducted and later married the daughters of King Leucippus.2 Rubens's depiction of the abduction is marked by some striking ambiguities: an equivocation between violence and solicitude in the demeanor of the brothers, and an equivocation between resistance and gratification in the response of the sisters. The spirited ebullience and sensual appeal of the group work to override our darker reflections about the coercive nature of the abduction. For these reasons many viewers have wanted to discount the predatory violence of the brothers' act and to interpret the painting in a benign spirit, perhaps as a neoplatonic allegory of the progress of the soul toward heaven, or as an allegory of marriage.3 Although I agree that a reference to marriage may be at play here, I also believe that any interpretation of the painting is inadequate that does not attempt to come to terms with it as a celebratory depiction of sexual violence and of the forcible subjugation of women by men. Intimations of violence are embedded in the composition of the painting, which is modeled on an earlier drawing Rubens made after Leonardo da Vinci's Battle of Anghiari (fig. 2).4 Rubens appropriates Leonardo's device of the parallel bodies of horses in the battle scene to align the women's bodies along parallel axes in the abduction, and Rubens inverts Leonardo's arrangement of facing warriors placed above converging horses' heads by placing matched horses' heads above converging human heads in the Leucippus. Rubens even takes up the lozenge design of Leonardo's group, though drawing it now into a more tightly packed equilateral diamond. Rubens's interlocking figures are patterned after the Battle of Anghiari in such a way as to charge the erotic action with the clashing energies of Leonardo's battle scene, even though the warriors' grimaces of rage and horror are replaced in the later canvas by a register of more tender expressions. The effect is to suggest to the viewer the violence and the pleasurability of rape at the same time. The pleasures of sexual violence had long been championed in Ovid's Art of Loving, where indeed this particular rape-by the Dioscuri of the sisters Phoebe and Hilaira-was cited as an example of how a lover might conquer the object of his desire by using force

In the fifth century before our era the atomic age was founded in Greece by Leucippus of Abdera and his renowned pupil Democritus. It reached its tragic and sensational climax on August 6, 1945 when the atomic bomb of questionable fame obliterated in a moment the Japanese city of Hiroshima with its doomed inhabitants. The beginning of the theory was publicly unnoticed; its appalling culmination in action has alarmed the world.

In the Classical Quarterly N.S. Vol. 13 (May 1963) W. I. Matson discusses Democritus ? 156 x) ?? ?????? t? de? ? t? ??d?? e??a?. The fragment is attributed to Democritus by Plutarch. Close approximations to it are found elsewhere. ????? ?????? t? ?? t?? ?? ??t?? e??a? is attributed by Aristotle 2) to Leucippus and Democritus, ??d?? ?????? t? ?? ? t? ?? d? ?p???e?? by Theophrastus 3) to Leucippus. These versions of Aristotle and Theophrastus, Matson believes, may safely be taken simply as paraphrases of ? 156. The traditional view of ? 156 is that its purpose was to assert the reality of void, d?? and ??d?? being synonyms for "substance" and "void" respectively. Such is the meaning given to the fragment by Plutarch. Such also is clearly the meaning of the versions of Aristotle and Theophrastus.4) It may be plausibly assumed5) with Matson that Democritus' statement was a reply to Melissus ? ? ??d? ?e?e?? ?st?? ??d?? t? ?a? ?e?e?? ??d?? ?st?? ??? a? ??? e?? t? ?e ??d??, ??d? ???e?ta?? ?p?????sa? ?a? ??? ??e? ??da??, ???a p???? est??. The traditional interpretation of ? 156 is regarded by Matson as unsatisfactory on two grounds, (a) d??, being a made-up word and, on the traditional interpretation, a synonym for "atom", was a technical term within the atomic theory. "To say that a certain disputed entity, required by one's theory, is just as real as some other entity peculiar to the same theory, is of no force to recommend the theory, or any of its entities, to a candid world." (b) Matson draws our attention to the fact that what Democritus actually

The recurrence of horse-imagery in Alcman's Partheneion (47 ff., 50, 58-59, 92) suggested to Bowra that the chorus may have been the guild of priestesses called Leucippides, who seem from a mysterious gloss in Hesychius to have been known as It is true that the comparison of girls with fillies is common enough in Greek, but the appearance of Helen as of girls like at Ar. Lys. 1308–15 seems, as Bowra says, ‘to hide a ritual use of ’. The existence of this guild of priestesses appears to be established from Paus. 3. 16. 1 and 3. 13. 7. In the latter passage they join with the in offering sacrifice to Dionysus and the unnamed hero who first guided him to Sparta, but it seems reasonable to assume that their principal concern was with the cult of the goddesses Phoebe and Hilaeira, the daughters of Leucippus, from whom, as Pausanias explicitly says (3. 13. 7), they took their name.

… But there was yet another objection to which this theory of the existence of matter in the form of infinite discrete particles was liable. If they are discrete, there must be something to separate them (διάστŋμα): if they are to move — and without motion they cannot combine to form things or shift their position so as to change things — there must be something external to them for them to move in. What is this something? The Pythagoreans, who with their doctrine of the infinitely divisible had been confronted with this problem, had thought of air as lying between the particles of matter, but since the theory of Empedocles had shown that air was an element, as corporeal in substance as earth or fire or water, this answer was no longer possible. Parmenides had seen that the only answer could be ‘empty space’, but, profoundly convinced as he was that the only existence was that of body, he had denied the existence of empty space altogether: it was ‘nothing’ (oὑδέν). The world was a corporeal plenum, there was no division between parts of matter but all was a continuous whole, neither was there any possibility of motion.

This essay is a commentary on Physics I, with special reference to the account of change in chapter 7. It is argued: (i) that Aristotle is mistaken when he attempts in the earlier chapters to present his account as the natural development of various Pre-Socratic views ‘on nature’; (ii) that as a result the main theme of his chapter 5 is a clear error; and (iii) that this raises an important question over how we should understand the apparent claims of chapter 6. All of this leads to the problem: How should we explain his remark at the end of chapter 7 that it is not yet clear whether the underlying thing, the thing that persists through change, is substance?

The physics of Plato’s Timaeus appears to be closely related to the physics of Leucippus and Democritus.1 The role which they attribute to non-being, to nothing-at-all, to the void (τoμη oν, τ o κɛνoν), Plato attributes to what he calls space (η χώρα).2

The classification of depressive disorders is far from settled. The categories I present differ from those of others because, at present, agreement does not exist as to how depressive disorders should be classified. I hope that the next few years will provide clear, final, and definitive biochemical indices to the biological classification of depression. Such a classification would enable us finally and clearly to separate the subtypes of depression and to prescribe specific therapies for each. Some 2000 years ago, Leucippus authored a very pertinent statement. He said,“Where there is ignorance, theories abound.” One hopes that this volume will help reduce the number of such theories.

The first consistent mechanical theory of nature was formulated by the Greek atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, and developed by their later followers, Epicurus and Lucretius. In their opinion, human and animal bodies are composed of atoms, and all life manifestations are only the results of complicated, but strictly determined, motions of these elementary particles. The heavy atoms of the body are moved by the soul. Yet this Epicurean “soul” is not a spiritual principle, but a collection of very light and small atoms. Mind is an ensemble of extremely small atoms. Sensations are born from movements and soul provokes all body motions in a strictly mechanical way.

De Ley Herman. Democritus and Leucippus. Two Notes on Ancient Atomism. In: L'antiquité classique, Tome 37, fasc. 2, 1968. pp. 620-633.

In the ancient Greece, the atomists Leucippus (fifth century BC) and Democritus (460– 370 BC) described the nature in terms of atoms moving chaotically in the empty space, a vision surprisingly close to the actual one. They reached this result following the line of mechanism, which seeks to explain the occurrence of natural phenomena by an antecedent cause. In the same period Socrates (469–399 BC), Plato (427–347 BC) and Aristotle (384– 322 BC) adopted the teleological view accounting for the natural processes by a final cause, assuming that all things are designed for, or directed toward, a final result. Nowadays, we know that only the mechanism is fruitful in describing the natural phenomena. Unfortunately for science, however, after Aristotle the teleological attitude prevailed. Its finalism was naturally incorporated into the Christian dogma. Unlike the corruptible Earth