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Frg. 7). Leucippus, the probable founder of atomism, like the monists Parmenides and Melissus, found change problematic, since it seemed to require a thing to become what it was not. Change could be saved, he reasoned, if all changes amount to the motions of tiny, unchanging parts. Hence atomism. The atoms’ solidity guarantees their fixity, their determinate effects, and a perfect reductionism: Colors, sounds, and scents are just the impinging on our senses of some atomic swarm. Atomism had three corollaries: First, the reality of the void, opening up the space in which atoms could move.

Conventionally, we count five senses, each with its own portal and presentations: vision and the sights we see, hearing and the sounds we hear, smell and the odors we scent, taste and the savors we taste, touch and the objects we feel. We see with our eyes, hear with our ears, smell with our noses, taste with our tongues and palates, feel with our fingers and skin. Aristotle ranked the senses: Sight was noblest, being closest to the intellectual. Touch ranked last, seeming most physical. 421a20–24).

Shared attention is an early step- 24 / Chapter One ping stone toward the emergent sense of self. 45 The mythic isolated self, then, would be the obverse of the pseudo-mystery of other minds. Social feedback modulates and enriches the shared and unique features of personality. Developmental psychology now charts what philosophers have long suspected: I, and thou, he, and she, and they, are mutually defining. Evidently those who hope to expunge the very idea of souls have not fully contemplated what they prophesy.