But instead Democritus took a more skeptical line, because he was impressed by the fact that the underlying reality of atoms and void is not evident to our senses. Thus he criticized the senses, saying in effect that things in the phenomenal world—the giraffes and tennis-courts—are unreal, because what is really real is the atomic universe we can’t see. He put this in a famous aphorism: “By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color, but really atoms and void”
