�������t¶��

She begins in the 5th century B.C., when Democritus formulated his atomism, locating the ultimate nature of things in matter rather than divinity.

At the same time, he wondered whether his own logic was faulty, since he based his arguments on geometry, whose infinitely divisible lines automatically reject atomism.

In English there was an alternative: Robert Boyle invented the term ‘the corpuscularian philosophy’ in 1662 to cover both ancient atomism and Descartes’ new corpuscular theory.

The “seeds of disease” were almost certainly influenced by Democritean atomism and took inspiration from the Roman poet Lucretius, whose work had been rediscovered in the 15th century.

But such a system, critics have long said, breeds not autonomy but atomism, not fairness but inequality, not fulfillment but emptiness, not culture but anarchy.