l6 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



misleading and from which he appeals to reason. His abstract conception is 

 also seen in the antitheses by which he expresses existence: hot as opposed to 

 cold, light as opposed to darkness, the "ent" (being) as opposed to the "«<?«- 

 ent" (not-being). In regard to man, he conceived the soul, which to him was 

 the same thing as life, as hot and the body as cold. For the rest, he accepted 

 Anaximander's theory of the origin of living creatures and the doctrine of 

 the Pythagoreans as to the globular form of the celestial bodies. His great- 

 est service to mankind lies in his insistence upon logical consistency in 

 thinking; in this he far outstripped the Ionian philosophers and strongly 

 influenced the thinkers of the ages that followed. The later Eleatics finally 

 pursued the theory of immutability to sheer absurdity and thereby rendered it 

 untenable. The Eleatic Zeno, for instance, denied all change and even motion. 

 Of far greater importance for the development of biology than the 

 Eleatics, however, was another western Greek philosopher, Empedocles, 

 of Acragas, in Sicily. His period of activity is generally placed in the middle 

 of the fifth century. Around his personality and way of life there has grown 

 up, as around Pythagoras, a number of legendary tales, which prove, if 

 nothing else, that he must have very greatly impressed both his contempo- 

 raries and posterity. And this seems to have been very much his own inten- 

 tion. He boasts about himself in the writings, fragments of which have been 

 preserved to us, concerning his own supernatural gifts; he claims that he has 

 power to heal the sick and cure the infirmity of old age, raise the dead, 

 change the direction of the wind, and bring rain and sunshine upon the earth. 

 And he delights in being acclaimed; adorned with chaplets and flowers, he 

 goes in procession into the city that besought his help and is hailed by the 

 inhabitants almost with the reverence due to a divinity. In our days this 

 would, of course, be characterized as shameful humbug, but in early times 

 it was apparently not so. Undoubtedly Empedocles himself believed in his 

 miraculous powers, and the taste for pageantry he shared with his own 

 countrymen. History also relates a number of serviceable acts he performed; 

 for instance, he improved the hot and unhealthy climate of his native city by 

 making a breach in the mountain wall which shut out the cool north wind; 

 he rid a neighbouring town of malaria by arranging for the draining of the 

 district. He was, besides, a leading politician; although descended from a 

 distinguished family, he was a keen democrat; he overthrew the oligarchies 

 in his native city and set up a popular government; the honour of kingship, 

 which was offered to him, he declined. However, his enemies prevailed over 

 him and he had to flee in exile to Greece, where he died. Shortly after his 

 death Acragas fell into the hands of the Carthaginians and was razed to the 

 ground. True, the city again flourished in the time of the Romans under the 

 name of Agrigentum, now Girgenti, but the part it played in the history of 

 culture was at an end. 



