The four “primary elements” or “principles”, considered in ancient Greece as universal constituents of matter – “air”, “water”, “earth” and “fire” – improperly attributed to Aristotle (384 – 322 BC), are the the culmination of a conception whose beginnings are lost in the most ancient Eastern civilizations.
This conception would have developed gradually until it was formulated, in broader terms, by the Greek Empedocles, of Agrigento, Sicily, around 450 BC, as “the theory of the four elements” or “of substances”.
In this conception of the world, it fell to Aristotle, as a great thinker, founder and teacher of the Lyceum of Athens, the merit of publicizing it and giving it such credit that it made it thrive and resist unscathed for more than two thousand years.
This view, called Aristotelian, was accepted by the Roman Church, which adopted and imposed it, with iron and fire, in its essential content, tenaciously opposing it to the so-called atomic theory of the materialist philosophers Leucippus-Democritus. Even today materialism, among others, has a connotation with an anti-religious attitude.
It is not possible to speak separately of Leucippus of Miletus (first half of the 460th century BC) and Democritus of Abdera (c. 370 BC- XNUMX BC), two ancient Greek philosophers. Leucippus, living in Abdera, a Greek city on the coast of Thrace, was the master of Democritus, but from the recovered fragments of the respective works, there is no way to distinguish the ideas of one from the other. According to the records left by Aristotle, Leucipo was the creator of the atomist concept, with Democritus having the credit of developing and disseminating it.
In this conception, a material body can be divided until reaching a tiny indivisible particle that received the name of atom, that is, everything that exists is composed of atoms. When they clustered together, atoms formed all the things we know.
For them, all "beings" (in the sense of material things or entities) in the world and the soul itself were a "vortex of infinite atoms", of different shapes, moving in a vacuum here understood as "non-being", the nothingness, the emptiness. In this fanciful view, movement was not possible without a vacuum, concluding that if there was movement, there must be a vacuum.
It was, however, Democritus who went down in history, as the greatest exponent of atomic theory or atomism, more than 2200 years before the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev (1834-1907) arranged atoms in the periodic table of chemical elements.
Note: the word “atom” was constructed from the Greek elements, “a”, negation, and “tome”, divisible. Atom therefore means indivisible.
Author AM Galopim de Carvalho
Science in the Regional Press – Ciência Viva
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