Book Title: Microcosmology Atom in Jain Philosophy and Modern Science
Author(s): Jethalal S Zaveri, Mahendramuni
Publisher: Jain Vishva Bharati
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Atom in Modern Science together in different proportions and separated to form the varieties of things and thus produce the changing complex substances that we find in the world. Here for the first time, the idea is expressed that the mixture and separation of a few substances, which are fundamentally different, explains the infinite variety of things and events.
According to these views, the soil, for example, was a combination of earth substance and water substance closely mixed, atom by atom. A plant growing from the soil combined earth and water atoms with the fire atoms coming from the rays of the sun to form composite molecules of wood substance. The burning of dry wood from which the water element was gone, was viewed as decomposition or breaking up of wood molecule into the original fire atoms, which escape in the flame and the earth atoms which remain as the ashes.
Anaxagoras (462-422 B.C.), a contemporary of Empedocles, took the next step towards the concept of atom. He assumed infinite variety of infinitely small seeds (not the four elements of Empedocles, but innumerably many different seeds) which were mixed together and separated again to create multiplicity of things. The seeds may change in number and in relative position. All seeds were in everything, only the proportions might change from one thing to another.
THE ATOMISTS
The founders of atomisnı were two-Leucippus and Democritus. It is difficult to disentangle them because they are generally mentioned together. They drew clear line between spirit and matter, picturing the latter as being made up of "basic building blocks"
Democritus who was a contemporary of Socrates and who flourished about 420 B.C., took the final step towards the concept of atom, the indivisible smallest unit of matter. His atom is eternal and indestructible but it has a finite size. Thus the idea, of the elementary particle as the fundamental building block of the matter, was voiced for the first time in the history of western philosophy twenty-three centuries ago.
1. The Jain Theory of Para mănu is more ancient. See Chapter II
