rms, traversing in turn the
many toilsome paths of existence. Him the aetherial wrath hurries
onward to the deep, and the deep spews him forth on to the threshold of
earth, and unworn earth casts him up to the fires of the sun, and again
the aether hurls him into the eddies. One receives him, and then
another, but detested is he of them all. Of such am I also one, an
exile and a wanderer from God, a slave to strife and its madness."

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Thus to his mighty conception the life of all creation, and not of man
only, was a great expiation, an eternal round of punishment for sin;
and in the unending flux of life each creature rose or fell in the
scale of existence according to the deeds of good or ill done in each
successive life; rising sometimes to the state of men, or among men to
the high functions of physicians and prophets and kings, or among
beasts to the dignity of the lion, or among trees to the beauty of the
laurel; or, on the contrary, sinking through sin to lowest forms of
bestial or vegetable life. Till at the last they who through obedience
and right-doing have expiated their wrong, are endowed by the blessed
gods with endless honour, to dwell for ever with them and share their
banquets, untouched any more with human care and sorrow and pain.

[143]

The slaying of any living creature, therefore, Empedocles, like
Pythagoras, abhorred, for all were kin. All foul acts were forms of
worse than suicide; life should be a long act of worship, of expiation,
of purification. And in the dim past he pictured a vision of a golden
age, in which men worshipped not many gods, but Love only, and not with
sacrifices of blood, but with pious images, and cunningly odorous
incense, and offerings of fragrant myrrh. With abstinence also, and
above all with that noblest abstinence, the abstinence from vice and
wrong.

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CHAPTER VIII

THE ATOMISTS (_concluded_)

_The laughing philosopher--Atoms and void--No god and no truth_

[143]

III. LEUCIPPUS AND DEMOCRITUS.--Leucippus is variously called a native
of Elea, of Abdera, of Melos, of Miletus. He was a pupil of Zeno the
Eleatic. [144] Democritus was a native of Abdera. They seem to have
been almost contemporary with Socrates. The two are associated as
thorough-going teachers of the 'Atomic Philosophy,' but Democritus,
'the laughing philosopher,' as he was popularly called in later times,
in distinction from Heraclitus, 'the weeping philosopher,'