THE HELLENIC PERIOD 43 



Beside the nature of the lunar light, Empedocles laid 

 claim to another equally important discovery of his 

 times, which enabled him to determine the true cause 

 of solar eclipses. On the other hand, he professed 

 strange opinions on the evolution of living beings . These 

 had their birth in the following manner : the limbs, 

 heads, arms, legs, etc., appeared separately, then they 

 were united indiscriminately by love. Thus there came 

 into existence cattle with human heads, and monsters 

 with several heads. Of these strange animals only the 

 fittest survived and perpetuated themselves by the 

 ordinary methods of procreation. In physiology, 

 Empedocles maintained that respiration takes place 

 not only by the mouth, but by all the pores of the body. 

 He also had an interesting theory of perception which 

 has been preserved by Theophrastus. Perception is 

 due to the contact of an element found in the organs of 

 our senses (fire, for example, in the eye) with the same 

 element placed outside us (Diels, Box, 500, 19). By his 

 conceptions as a whole and above all by his doctrine 

 of the four elements, Empedocles was bound to exercise 

 a lasting influence on medicine as well as metaphysics. 



Anaxagoras was the contemporary of Empedocles 

 and Leucippus. He was born in the year 500 B.C. at 

 Clazomenae, where he possessed much property. In 

 order to devote himself entirely to philosophy he con- 

 verted his arable land into pasture for sheep, and after- 

 wards left it entirely to his family. He then settled in 

 Athens, where he introduced philosophical speculations, 



to giddy heights, which have never been reached by the golden 

 wings of fancy " (p. 180 et seq.). Empedocles would certainly 

 have been surprised, could he have known that at the begin- 

 ning of the twentieth century the theory of phantom stars, 

 in a finite and spherical universe, would be considered as a 

 giddy height which human imagination up to the present 

 had never dared to attempt. 



