At first this philosophy was physical; it looked out upon the material world and asked what was the final and irreducible constituent of things. The natural termination of this line of thought was the materialism of Democritus (460–360 B.C.)—“in reality there is nothing but atoms and space.” This was one of the main streams of Greek speculation; it passed underground for a time in Plato’s day, but emerged in Epicurus (342–270), and became a torrent of eloquence in Lucretius (98–55 B.C.). But the most characteristic and fertile developments of Greek philosophy took form with the Sophists,
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