88 RICHARD MCKEON 



Plato or Macrobius or on St. Ambrose's statement that the 

 Greek word stoicheia means joining with each other.^® 



Isidore of Seville (560-636) takes up the elements in his 

 encyclopaedic Etymologies, briefly in his treatment of medicine, 

 and more fully as ordering principles in his treatment of the 

 universe. In medicine the four humors are explained by the 

 four elements; blood refers to air, choler to fire, melancholy to 

 earth, and phlegm to water."^ Man is composed of soul and 

 body; and his living flesh is compacted of the four elements .*° 

 The treatment of meteorology and geography opens with suc- 

 cessive chapters on the world, on atoms, on elements, on heaven, 

 and on the parts of heaven. Atoms are defined as " certain 

 parts of the bodies in the world so extremely minute that they 

 can neither be seen nor undergo tonne, that is, cutting, for which 

 reason they are called atoms." ^^ Isidore adds that there are 

 atoms in body, in time, in number, or in language. The list 

 recalls Aristotle's list of kinds of elements, but Isidore's criterion 

 for atoms is indivisibility: the atom of body is the indivisible 

 particle, of time the point or indivisible moment of time, of 

 number the unit, of language the letter. The chapter on 

 elements begins with a definition of the Greek word hyle as a 

 kind of first matter in no way formed but capable of all bodily 

 forms. The Greek word for elements, stoicheia, means those 

 things which agree with each other in a kind of concord of 

 society and communion, since they are said to be joined to 

 each other in a kind of natural proportion, and therefore the 

 sequence from fire, through air and water, to earth, and the 

 sequence back, are causal. All elements are present in all things, 

 but a thing is named from the preponderant element. Animate 

 beings are distributed among the elements by divine provi- 



"* Ambrose, Hexaemeron, III, 4. PL 14, 176: "... atque ita sibi per hunc cir- 

 cuitum et chorum quendam concordiae societatisque conveniunt. Unde et Graece 

 stoicheia dicuntur, quae Latine elementuvi dicimus, quod sibi conveniant et 

 concinnant." 



-* Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, IV, 5.3; PL 82, 184C. 



'"' Etymologiae, XI, 1; PL 82, 398-9. 



" Ibid., XIII, 2, 472D-3B. 



