Unsettling Cosmologies
Protagoras' relativistic approach to such fundamental issues as the moral basis of
the rule of law in society was not the only source of disquietude for many Athenian
men concerning the new intellectual developments. Philosophers such as
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae1 in
Ionia and
Leucippus2 of
Miletus3 propounded unsettling new theories about the nature of the cosmos in
response to the provocative physics of the Ionian thinkers of the sixth century B.C.
Anaxagoras' general theory postulating an abstract force he called
“
mind4” as the organizing principle of
the universe probably impressed most people as too obscure to worry about, but the
details of his thought seemed to offend those who held the assumptions of
traditional religion. For example, he argued that the sun was in truth nothing more
than a lump of flaming rock, not a divine entity.
Leucippus, whose doctrines
were made famous by his pupil Democritus5 of Abdera, invented an atomic theory of matter to explain
how change was possible and indeed constant. Everything, he argued, consisted of
tiny, invisible particles in eternal motion. Their random collisions caused them to
combine and recombine in an infinite variety of forms. This physical explanation of
the source of change, like Anaxagoras' analysis of the nature of the sun, seemed to
deny the validity of the entire superstructure of traditional religion, which
explained events as the outcome of divine forces.
