Quotes About Atomism

Now where there are no parts, there neither extension, nor shape, nor divisibility is possible. And these monads are the true atoms of nature and, in a word, the elements of things.

The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects.

The atomic doctrine with Democritus' thoroughgoing undertaking to substitute a quantitative185 for a qualitative conception of matter with the location of the qualitative aspects of the world in the experience of the soul appealed only to the Epicurean who used the theory as an exorcism to drive out of the universe the spirits which disturbed the calm of the philosopher.

The ambivalent nature of light points if anything to a continuous underlying substance, what traditional cosmology calls the ether, which also exhibits a discontinuous aspect by virtue of its being indistinct. The debate in this domain today, if one glances at the principles involved, is not very much different from that of the followers of hylomorphism and atomism in the Middle Ages and in Antiquity.

The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects.

An authoritative and highly readable history of atomism is Bernard Pullman's The Atom in the History of Human Thought, translated by Axel Reisinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Pullman traces the ups and downs of atomic theory through the centuries and shows how it finally triumphed only at the beginning of the twentieth century.