CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY, MIDDLE AGES 17 



The four elements 

 As a philosopher Empedocles bases his theories on Parmenides. The world 

 is uniform, immutable. Nevertheless changes do take place, but these must 

 be explained by movements in existing matter and by the alternating com- 

 mixture and dissolution of its component parts. As the fundamental ma- 

 terial causes Empedocles postulates fire, air, water, and earth — in other 

 words, the four elements or roots. The theory of these elements, which has 

 been maintained, one is almost tempted to say, up to the present day, origi- 

 nates, as was universally acknowledged by antiquity, from Empedocles. And 

 if he asked what it was that produced the motions in the four elements which 

 caused the changes in their constitution, he would answer: love and hate; 

 love acts as attraction, hate as repulsion. Through their alternating predomi- 

 nance are produced all the changes in nature. Love, when it ousts hate, gives 

 rise to new worlds; when hate predominates, they are again dissolved. The 

 world was formed by parts of the four elements becoming united in a work; 

 through the same kind of motion the water elements were flung out of the 

 originally humid earth-mass, so that the latter became dry and habitable. 

 If fresh beings arise or such beings as have existed perish, it is not to be con- 

 cluded from this that something can arise out of nothing or become nothing; 

 for whence could anything new come to that aggregate of reality that exists, 

 or whither could anything already existing disappear? No, the cosmic matter 

 was and remains the same, only its component parts are mixed in different 

 ways through love and hate alternately predominating. Living creatures he 

 conceives as having arisen out of the earth; first, plants, whose life he com- 

 pares in detail with that of the animals; their nourishment is procured 

 through pores in the stem and leaves, and their germination is comparable 

 to the reproduction of animals. Animate organisms have likewise originally 

 sprung from the earth; first arose individual limbs and later, through the 

 powers of attraction of love, these were conjoined; from them then arose 

 animals themselves. But this development did not proceed undisturbed, for as 

 the conjoining of the separate parts took place by accident, it was entirely a 

 matter of chance whether beings capable of life or malformed monsters arose. 

 Mankind also originated in a similar way; through the co-operation of the 

 subterranean fire there were cast up out of the interior of the earth shapeless 

 lumps which formed themselves into limbs, from the union of which man 

 developed. Men, who are of a warmer temperament, came into being in a 

 southern climate, while women, the more cold-blooded sex, were created in 

 a more northerly climate. In reproduction the embryo received some parts 

 of the body from the father's and the others from the mother's seed. Growth 

 in childhood is due to increase of warmth in the body, and the infirmity of 

 age to its diminution. Respiration he believed to be effected not only through 

 the windpipe, but also through the pores of the skin; as the blood is conveyed 



