We know of his thought only through the quotations and references made by other ancient authors, and by their summaries of his ideas.7 The thought that thus emerges is a kind of intense humanism, rationalist and materialist.8 Democritus combines a keen attention to nature, illuminated by a naturalistic clarity in which every residual system of mythic ideas is cleared away, with a great attention to humanity and a deep ethical concern for life—anticipating by some two thousand years the best aspects of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
