Commentary

This fragment is the best-known statement of Democritus' distinction between the way things appear to the senses and the way they are in reality. The sensory qualities of sweetness, heat, and colour are said to exist only by convention, while the underlying reality consists of atoms and void. C. C. W. Taylor, in The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus (1999), argues that the fragment expresses a primary and secondary quality distinction in which the atomic structure of matter is the only real basis of perception. David Furley, in Two Studies in the Greek Atomists (1967), treats the passage as an account of how the sensory world arises from the collisions and arrangements of atoms, a physical rather than merely epistemological claim. Gregory Vlastos, in his early essay Ethics and Physics in Democritus (1945), notes the difficulty of reconciling the conventional status of sensory qualities with Democritus' ethical concern for a life of cheerfulness, which depends on the senses. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, in The Presocratic Philosophers, discuss the fragment alongside Sextus' wider critique of sensation. Scholars continue to debate whether convention here implies subjectivity or merely a non-natural mode of being. The English wording is approximate and should be checked against the Greek text in Diels-Kranz before quotation.