was much the
more famous. [145] He lived to a great age. He himself refers to his
travels and studies thus: "Above all the men of my time I travelled
farthest, and extended my inquiries to places the most distant. I
visited the most varied climates and countries, heard the largest
number of learned men, nor has any one surpassed me in the gathering
together of writings and their interpretation, no, not even the most
learned of the Egyptians, with whom I spent five years." We {75} are
also informed that, through desire of learning, he visited Babylon and
Chaldaea, to visit the astrologers and the priests.

[146]

Democritus was not less prolific as a writer than he was voracious as a
student, and in him first the division of philosophy into certain great
sections, such as physical, mathematical, ethical, was clearly [147]
drawn. We are, however, mainly concerned with his teaching in its more
strictly philosophical aspects. His main doctrine was professedly
antithetical to that of the Eleatics, who, it will be remembered,
worked out on abstract lines a theory of one indivisible, eternal,
immovable Being. Democritus, on the contrary, declared for two
co-equal elements, the Full and the Empty, or Being and Nonentity. The
latter, he maintained, was as real as the former. As we should put it,
Body is unthinkable except by reference to space which that body does
not occupy, as well as to space which it does occupy; and conversely
Space is unthinkable except by reference to body actually or
potentially filling or defining it.

What Democritus hoped to get by this double or correlative system was a
means of accounting for or conceiving of _change_ in nature. The
difficulty with the Eleatics was, as we have seen, how to understand
whence or why the transition from that which absolutely is, to this
strange, at least apparent, system of eternal flux and transformation.
Democritus {76} hoped to get over this difficulty by starting as fully
with that which _is not_, in other words, with that which _wants_
change in order to have any recognisable being at all, as with that
which _is_, and which therefore might be conceived as seeking and
requiring only to be what it is.

[148]

Having got his principle of stability and his principle of change on an
equal footing, Democritus next laid it down that all the differences
visible in things were differences either of shape, of arrangement, or
of position; practically, that