_EMPEDOCLES._
The Grandeur of his Fame.--His Versatility of Genius.--His
Mysticism.--His Supposed Miracles.--Legends about his
Death.--His Political Action.--His Poems.--Estimation
in which the Ancients held them.--Their Prophetic
Fervor.--Belief in Metempsychosis.--Purifying
Rites.--Contempt for the Knowledge of the Senses.--Physical
Theories.--The Poem on Nature.--The Four Elements.--The
Sphærus.--Love and Discord.--The Eclecticism of Empedocles.
The figure of Empedocles of Agrigentum, when seen across the
twenty-three centuries which separate us from him, presents perhaps
a more romantic appearance than that of any other Greek philosopher.
This is owing, in a great measure, to the fables which invest his life
and death with mystery, to his reputation for magical power, and to
the wild sublimity of some of his poetic utterances. Yet, even in his
lifetime, and among contemporary Greeks, he swept the stage of life
like a great tragic actor, and left to posterity the fame of genius
as a poet, a physician, a patriot, and a philosopher. The well-known
verses of Lucretius are enough to prove that the glory of Empedocles
increased with age, and bore the test of time. Reading them, we cannot
but regret that poems which so stirred the reverent enthusiasm of
Rome's greatest singer have been scattered to the winds, and that what
we now possess of their remains affords but a poor sample of their
unimpaired magnificence.
Nothing is more remarkable about Empedocles than his versatility
and comprehensiveness. Other men of his age were as nobly born, as
great in philosophic power, as distinguished for the part they bore
in politics, as celebrated for poetic genius, as versed in mystic
lore, in medicine, and in magic arts. But Parmenides, Pythagoras,
Pausanias, and Epimenides could claim honor in but one, or two at most,
of these departments. Empedocles united all, and that too, if we may
judge by the temper of his genius and the few legends handed down to
us about his life, in no ordinary degree. He seems to have possessed
a warmth and richness of nature which inclined him to mysticism and
poetry, and gave a tone of peculiar solemnity to everything he did or
thought or said. At the same time, he was attracted by the acuteness
of his intellect to the metaphysical inquiries which were agitating
the western colonies of Greece, while his rare powers of observation
enabled him to make discoveries in the then almost unexplored region
of natural science. The age in which he lived had not yet thrown off
the form of poetry in philosophical composition. Even Parmenides had
committed his austere theories to hexameter verse. Therefore, the
sage of Agrigentum was easily led to concentrate his splendid powers
on the production of one great work, and made himself a poet among
philosophers, and a philosopher among poets, without thereby impairing
his claims to rank highly both as a poet and also as a thinker among
the most distinguished men of Greece. But Empedocles had not only
deeply studied metaphysics, nature, and the arts of verse; whatever was
mysterious in the world around him, in the guesses of past ages, and
in the forebodings of his own heart, possessed a powerful attraction
for the man who thought himself inspired of God. Having embraced the
Pythagorean theories, he maintained the fallen state of men, and
implored his fellow-creatures to purge away the guilt by which they had
been disinherited and exiled from the joys of heaven. Thus he appeared
before his countrymen not only as a poet and philosopher, but also as
a priest and purifier. Born of a wealthy and illustrious house, he did
not expend his substance merely on horse-racing and chariots, by which
means of display his ancestors had gained a princely fame in Sicily;
but, not less proud than they had been, he shod himself with golden
sandals, set the laurel crown upon his head, and, trailing robes of
Tyrian purple through the streets of Agrigentum, went attended by a
crowd of serving-men and reverent admirers. He claimed to be a favorite
of Phoebus, and rose at length to the pretension of divinity. His own
words show this, gravely spoken, with no vain assumption, but with a
certainty of honor well deserved:
"Friends who dwell in the great city hard by the yellow
stream of Acragas, who live on the Acropolis, intent on
honorable cares, harbors revered of strangers, ignorant of
what is vile, welcome; but I appear before you an immortal
god, having overpassed the limits of mortality, and walk with
honor among all, as is my due, crowned with long fillets and
luxuriant garlands. No sooner do I enter their proud prosperous
cities than men and women pay me reverence, who follow me in
thousands, asking the way to profit, some desiring oracles, and
others racked by long and cruel torments, hanging on my lips to
hear the spells that pacify disease of every kind."
We can hardly wonder that some of the fellow-citizens of Empedocles
were jealous of his pretensions, and regarded him with suspicious envy
and dislike, when we read such lines of lofty self-exaltation. Indeed,
it is difficult for men of the nineteenth century to understand how
a great and wise philosopher could lay claim to divine honors in his
own lifetime. This arrogance we have been accustomed to associate
with the names of a Caligula and a Claudius. Yet when we consider the
circumstances in which Empedocles was placed, and the nature of his
theories, our astonishment diminishes. The line of demarcation between
this world and the supernatural was then but vague and undetermined.
Popular theology abounded in legends of gods who had held familiar
intercourse with men, and of men who had been raised by prowess or
wisdom to divinity. The pedigrees of all distinguished families ended
in a god at no great distance. Nor was it then a mere figure of speech
when bards and priests claimed special revelations from Apollo, or
physicians styled themselves the children of Asclepius. Heaven lay
around the first Greeks in their infancy of art and science; it was
long before the vision died away and faded into the sober daylight of
Aristotelian philosophy. Thus when Empedocles proclaimed himself a
god, he only stretched beyond the usual limit a most common pretension
of all men learned in arts and sciences. His own speculations gave
him further warrant for the assumption of the style of deity; for he
held the belief that all living souls had once been dæmons or divine
spirits, who had lost their heavenly birthright for some crime of
impurity or violence, and yet were able to restore themselves to
pristine splendor by the rigorous exercise of abstinence and expiatory
rites. These rites he thought he had discovered. He had prayed and
fasted; he had held communion with Phoebus the purifier, and received
the special favor of that god, by being made a master in the arts of
song and magic and healing and priestcraft. Was he not, therefore,
justified in saying that he had won again his rights divine, and
transformed himself into a god on earth? His own words tell the history
of his fall:
"Woe to me that I did not fall a prey to death before I took
the cursed food within my lips!... From what glory, from what
immeasurable bliss, have I now sunk to roam with mortals on
this earth?"
Again, he says:
"For I have been in by-gone times a youth, a maiden, and a
flowering shrub, a bird, yea, and a fish that swims in silence
the deep sea."
From this degraded state the spirit gradually emerges. Of the noblest
souls he says:
"Among beasts they become lions dwelling in caverns of the
earth upon the hills, and laurels among leafy trees, ... and at
last prophets and bards and physicians and chiefs among the men
of earth, from whence they rise to be gods supreme in honor,
... sitting at banquets with immortal comrades, in their feasts
unvisited by human cares, beyond the reach of fate and wearing
age."
Empedocles, by dint of pondering on nature, by long penance, by the
illumination of his intellect and the coercion of his senses, had been
raised before the natural term of life to that high honor, and been
made the fellow of immortal gods. His language upon this topic is one
of the points in which we can trace an indistinct resemblance between
him and some of the Indian mystics. There is, however, no reason to
suppose that Asiatic thought had any marked or direct influence on
Greek philosophy. It is better to refer such similarities to the
working of the same tendencies in the Greek and Hindoo minds.
To those who disbelieved his words he showed the mighty works which
he had wrought. Empedocles, during his lifetime, was known to have
achieved marvels, such as only supernatural powers could compass.
More than common sagacity and ingenuity in the treatment of natural
diseases, or in the removal of obstacles to national prosperity, were
easily regarded by the simple people of those times as the evidence
of divine authority. Empedocles had devised means for protecting the
citizens of Agrigentum from the fury of destructive winds. What these
means were, we do not know; but he received in consequence the title of
#kôlysanemas#, or warder-off of winds. Again, he resuscitated, from the
very jaws of death, a woman who lay senseless and unable to breathe,
long after all physicians had despaired of curing her. This entitled
him to be regarded as a master of the keys of life and death; nor
did he fail to attribute his own power to the virtue of supernatural
spells. But the greatest of his achievements was the deliverance which
he wrought for the people of Selinus from a grievous pestilence. It
seems that, some exhalations from a marsh having caused this plague,
Empedocles, at his own cost, cut a channel for two rivers through the
fen, and purged away the fetid vapors. A short time after the cessation
of the sickness, Empedocles, attired in tragic state, appeared before
the Selinuntians at a banquet. His tall and stately figure wore the
priestly robe; his brazen sandals rang upon the marble as he slowly
moved with front benign and solemn eyes; beneath the sacrificial
chaplet flowed his long Phoebean locks, and in his hand he bore a
branch of bay. The nobles of Selinus rose; the banquet ceased; all did
him reverence, and hailed him as a god, deliverer of their city, friend
of Phoebus, intercessor between angry heaven and suffering men.
Closely connected with his claim to divinity was the position which
Empedocles assumed as an enchanter. Gorgias, his pupil, asserts that
he often saw him at the magic rites. Nor are we to suppose that this
wizardry was a popular misinterpretation of his real power as a
physician and philosopher. It is far more probable that Empedocles
himself believed in the potency of incantations, and delighted in the
ceremonies and mysterious songs by which the dead were recalled from
Hades, and secrets of the other world wrung from unwilling fate. We can
form to ourselves a picture of this stately and magnificent enchanter,
convinced of his own supernatural ascendency, and animated by the wild
enthusiasm of his ardent nature, alone among the mountains of Girgenti,
or by the sea-shore, invoking the elemental deities to aid his
incantations, and ascribing the forebodings of his own poetic spirit
to external inspiration or the voice of gods. In solitary meditations
he had wrought out a theory of the world, and had conceived the notion
of a spiritual God, one and unseen, pure intellect, an everlasting
omnipresent power, to whom might be referred those natural remedies
that stopped the plague, or cured the sick, or found new channels for
the streams. The early Greek philosophers were fond of attributing to
some "common wisdom" of the world, some animating soul or universal
intellect, the arts and intuitions to which they had themselves
attained. Therefore, with this belief predominating in his mind, it is
not strange that he should have trusted to the divine efficacy of his
own spells, and have regarded the results of observation as a kind of
supernatural wisdom. To his friend Pausanias the physician he makes
these lofty promises, "Thou shalt learn every kind of medicines that
avert diseases and the evils of old age. Thou too shalt curb the fury
of untiring winds, and when it pleases thee thou shalt reverse thy
charms and loose avenging storms. Thou shalt replace black rain-clouds
with the timely drought that men desire, and when the summer's arid
heat prevails, thou shalt refresh the trees with showers that rustle
in the thirsty corn. And thou shalt bring again from Hades the life
of a departed man." Like the Pythagoreans whom he followed, he seems
to have employed the fascination of music in effecting cures: it is
recorded of him that he once arrested the hand of a young man about to
slay his father, by chanting to the lyre a solemn soul-subduing strain.
The strong belief in himself which Empedocles possessed inspired him
with immense personal influence, so that his looks and words and tones
went further than the force of other men. He compelled them to follow
and confide in him, like Orpheus, or like those lofty natures which
in every age have had the power of leading and controlling others by
innate supremacy. That Empedocles tried to exhibit this superiority,
and to heighten its effect by gorgeous raiment and profuse expenditure,
by public ceremonies and mysterious modes of life, we need not
doubt. There was much of the spirit of Paracelsus in Empedocles, and
vanity impaired the simple grandeur of his genius. In every age of
the world's history there have been some such men--men in whom the
highest intellectual gifts are blended with weakness inclining them
to superstitious juggleries. Not content with their philosophical
pretensions, or with poetical renown, they seek a more mysterious fame,
and mix the pure gold of their reason with the dross of idle fancy.
Their very weakness adds a glow of color, which we miss in the whiter
light of more purely scientific intellects. They are men in whom two
natures cross--the poet and the philosopher, the mountebank and the
seer, the divine and the fortune-teller, the rigorous analyst and the
retailer of old wives' tales. But none have equalled Empedocles, in
whose capacious idiosyncrasy the most opposite qualities found ample
room for coexistence, who sincerely claimed the supernatural faculties
which Paracelsus must have only half believed, and who lived at a time
when poetry and fact were indistinguishably mingled, and when the
world was still absorbed in dreams of a past golden age, and in rich
foreshadowings of a boundless future.
We are not, therefore, surprised to read the fantastic legends which
involve his death in a mystery. Whatever ground of fact they may
possess, they are wholly consistent with the picture we have formed
to ourselves of the philosopher, and prove at least the superstition
which had gathered round his name. One of these legends has served
all ages as a moral for the futility of human designs, and for the
just reward of inordinate vanity. Every one who knows the name of
Empedocles has heard that, having jumped into Etna in order to conceal
the time and manner of his death, and thus to establish his divinity,
fate frustrated his schemes by casting up his brazen slippers on the
crater's edge. According to another legend, which resembles that of the
death of Romulus, of Oedipus, and other divinized heroes, Empedocles is
related to have formed one of a party of eighty men who assembled to
celebrate by sacrifice his restoration of the dying woman. After their
banquet they retired to sleep. But Empedocles remained in his seat at
table. When morning broke, Empedocles was nowhere to be found. In reply
to the question of his friends, some one asserted that he had heard a
loud voice calling on Empedocles at midnight, and that, starting up,
he saw a light from heaven and burning torches. Pausanias, who was
present at the sacrificial feast, sent far and wide to inquire for his
friend, wishing to test the truth of this report. But piety restrained
his search, and he was secretly informed by heavenly messengers that
Empedocles had won what he had sought, and that divine honors should be
paid to him. This story rests on the authority of Heraclides Ponticus,
who professed to have obtained it from Pausanias. The one legend we may
regard as the coinage of his foes, the other as a myth created by the
superstitious admiration of his friends.
We have hitherto regarded Empedocles more in his private and priestly
character than as a citizen. Yet it was not to be expected that a man
so nobly born, and so remarkable for intellectual power, should play no
public part in his native state. A Greek could hardly avoid meddling
with politics, even if he wished to do so, and Empedocles was not one
to hide his genius in the comparative obscurity of private life. While
he was still a young man, Theron, the wise tyrant of Agrigentum, died,
and a powerful aristocracy endeavored to enslave the state. Empedocles
manfully resisted them, supporting the liberal cause with vehemence,
and winning so much popular applause that he is even reported to have
received and refused the offer of the kingly power. By these means he
made himself many foes among the nobility of Agrigentum; it is also
probable that suspicion attached to him for trying to establish in his
native city the Pythagorean commonwealth, which had been extirpated in
South Italy. That he loved spiritual dominion we have seen; and this he
might have hoped to acquire more easily by taking the intellectual lead
among citizens of equal rights than by throwing in his lot with the
aristocratic party, or by exposing himself to the dangers and absorbing
cares of a Greek tyrant. At any rate, it is recorded that he impeached
and procured the execution of the leaders of the aristocracy; thus
rescuing the liberty of his nation at the expense of his own security.
After a visit to Peloponnesus, Empedocles returned to Agrigentum,
but was soon obliged to quit his home again by the animosity of his
political enemies. Where he spent the last years of his life, and died,
remains uncertain.
It remains to estimate the poetical and philosophical renown of
Empedocles. That his genius was highly valued among the ancients
appears manifest from the panegyric of Lucretius. Nor did he fail to
exhibit the versatility of his powers in every branch of poetical
composition. Diogenes Laertius affirms that forty-three tragedies
bearing his name were known to Hieronymus, from whom he drew materials
for the life of Empedocles. Whether these tragedies were really written
by the philosopher or by another Sicilian of the same name admits of
doubt. But there is no reason why an author possessed of such varied
and distinguished talents as Empedocles should not have tried this
species of composition. Xenophanes is said to have composed tragedies;
and Plato's youthful efforts would, we fondly imagine, have afforded
the world fresh proofs of his commanding genius, had they escaped
the flames to which they were condemned by his maturer judgment.
No fragments of the tragedies of Empedocles survive; they probably
belonged to the class of semi-dithyrambic compositions which prevailed
at Athens before the days of Æschylus, and which continued to be
cultivated in Sicily. Some of the lyrical plays of the Italians--such,
for instance, as the _Orfeo_ of Poliziano--may enable us to form an
idea of these simple dramas. After the tragedies, Diogenes makes
mention of political poems. These may be referred to the period of the
early manhood of Empedocles, when he was engaged in combat with the
domineering aristocracy, and when he might have sought to spread his
liberal principles through the medium of gnomic elegies, like those
of Solon or Theognis. The fragments of the #katharmoi#, or poem on
lustral rites, sufficiently display his style of earnest and imperious
exhortation to make us believe that at a time of political contention
he would not spare this powerful instrument of persuasion and attack.
In the next place, we hear of an epic poem on the invasion of Greece by
Xerxes, which Empedocles is said to have left unfinished, and which his
sister or his daughter burned with other papers at his death. The great
defeat of the Medes took place while Empedocles was still a youth. All
Hellas had hung with breathless expectation on the events of Marathon
and Salamis. The fall of Xerxes brought freedom and relief from
terrible anxiety, not only to the towns of Attica and the Peloponnesus,
but also to the shores of Sicily and Italy. It is not, therefore,
unlikely that the triumph which excited Simonides and Æschylus to
the production of masterpieces may have stirred the spirit of the
youthful patriot of Agrigentum. Another composition of Empedocles which
perished under his sister's hands was a Proemium to Apollo. The loss
of this poem is deeply to be regretted. Empedocles regarded himself
as specially protected by the god of song and medicine and prophetic
insight. His genius would therefore naturally take its highest flight
in singing praises to this mighty patron. The hymn to Zeus, which has
been ascribed to Cleanthes, and some of the pseudo-Orphic declamations,
may give us an idea of the gravity and enthusiasm which Empedocles
would have displayed in treating so stirring a theme. Of his remaining
works we possess fragments. The great poem on Nature, the Lustral
Precepts, and the Discourse on Medicine were all celebrated among
the ancients. Fortunately, the inductions to the first and second of
these have been preserved, and some lines addressed to Pausanias may
be regarded as forming the commencement of the third. It is from these
fragments, amounting in all to about 470 lines, that we must form our
judgment of Empedocles, the poet and the sage.
That Empedocles was a poet of the didactic order is clear from the
nature of his subjects. Even as early as the time of Aristotle, critics
disputed as to whether poems written for the purpose of scientific
instruction deserved the name of poetry. In the _Poetics_, Aristotle
says, #ouden de koinon estin Homêrôi kai Empedoklei plên to metron;
dio ton men poiêtên dikaion kalein, ton de physiologon mallon ê
poiêtên#.[47] The title #physiologos#, or philosopher of nature, was
of course generic, and might have been claimed by Heraclitus, on the
strength of his prose writings, no less than by Empedocles. Lucretius,
in the exordium to his poem, argues for the utility of disguising
scientific precepts under the more attractive form of art; as we
sweeten the lips of the vessel that contains bitter medicine, in order
to induce the child to take it readily. And not only had Empedocles
this reason in his favor for the use of verse, but also, at the age in
which he lived, it was still a novelty to write prose at all; nor would
it have been consistent with his theories of inspiration, and with the
mysticism he professed, to abandon the poetic form of utterance. He
therefore thought and wrote hexameters as naturally as the scientific
men of the present day think and write their sentences and paragraphs,
until the discourse is formed into a perfect whole. Allowing, then, for
the subject of his poem, Empedocles was regarded by antiquity as first
among the Greek didactic singers, though he competed with Parmenides
for this distinction, and was placed upon a level with Lucretius.
Lactantius mentions them both together, in his definition of this kind
of poetry. And Aristotle, in another treatise, now lost, but quoted
by Diogenes, praises the artistic genius of the philosopher in these
words: #Kai Homêrikos ho Empedoklês kai deinos peri tên phrasin gegone
metaphorikos te ôn kai tois allois peri tên poiêtikên epiteugmasi
chrômenos#.[48] The epithet #Homêrikos# is very just; for not only is
it clear that Empedocles had studied the poems of Homer with care, and
had imbibed their phraseology, but he also possessed a genius akin
to that of Homer in love of simplicity, in fidelity to nature, in
unimpeded onward flow of energetic verse.
The simile of the girl playing with a water-clock, whereby Empedocles
illustrates his theory of respiration, and that of the lantern,
which serves to explain his notion of the structure of the eye,
are both of them Homeric in their unadorned simplicity and vigor.
Again, such epithets as these, #polyaimaton# (full-blooded) for the
liver, #hilaeira# (gentle) for the moon, #oxybelês# (quick-darting)
for the sun, #polystephanos# (crowned) for majesty, #themerôpis#
(grave-visaged) for harmony, and the constant repetition of #theoi
dolichaiônes timêisi pheristoi# (the long-aged gods in honor foremost),
have the true Homeric ring. Like Homer, he often chooses an epithet
specific of the object which he wishes to describe, but not especially
suited to the matter of his argument. Thus #polyklautôn gynaikôn#
(women given to tears) occurs where there is no particular reason to
fix the mind upon the tearfulness of women. But the poetic value of
the passage is increased by the mind being thus carried away from the
logical order of ideas to a generality on which it can repose. At
other times, when this is necessary, the epithets are as accurately
descriptive as those of a botanist or zoologist: #en konchaisi
thalassonomois barynôtois# (in whelks that inhabit the sea with heavy
backs) ... #lithorrhinôn te chelônôn# (stony-coated tortoises), for
example. Again, Empedocles gives rein to his imagination by creating
bold metaphors; he calls the flesh #sarkôn chitôn# (a robe of flesh),
and birds #pterobamonas kymbas# (boats that move with wings). Referring
to his four elements, he thus personifies their attributes: "Fiery
Zeus, and Herè, source of vital breath, and Aidoneus, and Nestis, with
her tears." At another time he speaks of "earth, and ocean with his
countless waves, and liquid air, the sun-god and ether girdling round
the universe in its embrace."
The passage, too, in which he describes the misery of earth rises to
a sublime height. It may well have served as the original of Virgil's
celebrated lines in the sixth Æneid:
"I lifted up my voice, I wept and wailed, when I beheld the
unfamiliar shore. A hideous shore, on which dwell murder, envy,
and the troop of baleful destinies, wasting corruption, and
disease. Through Até's meadow they go wandering up and down in
gloom. There was the queen of darkness, and Heliope with her
far-searching eyes, and bloody strife, and mild-eyed peace,
beauty and ugliness, swiftness and sloth, and lovely truth, and
insincerity with darkling brows. Birth too and death, slumber
and wakefulness, motion and immobility, crowned majesty and
squalid filth, discordant clamor and the voice of gods."
We can understand by these passages how Empedocles not only was
compared with Homer by Aristotle, but also with Thucydides and Æschylus
by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who speaks of his "austere harmony"
(#austêran harmonian#). The conciseness of his argumentative passages,
the breadth of his treatment, and the dryness of his coloring, to quote
the terms of painting, resemble the style of Thucydides, while his
bold figures and gloomy grandeur are like those of Æschylus. Plutarch,
in the treatise on the genius of Socrates, speaks of the style of
Empedocles at large, both as regards his poems and his theories, as
"inspired with dithyrambic ecstasy" (#mala bebakcheumenê#). This seems
a contradiction to the "austere harmony" of Dionysius. But there are
passages which justify the title. This exordium, for instance, savors
of prophetic fury:
"It stands decreed by fate, an ancient ordinance of the
immortal gods, established from everlasting, ratified by ample
oaths, that, when a spirit of that race, which has inherited
the length of years divine, sinfully stains his limbs with
blood, he must go forth to wander thrice ten thousand years
from heaven, passing from birth to birth through every form of
mortal mutability, changing the toilsome paths of life without
repose, even as I now roam, exiled from God, an outcast on this
world, the bondman of insensate strife.
"Alas, ill-fated race of mortals, thrice accursed! from what
dire struggles and what groans have ye been born! The air in
its anger drives them to the sea, and ocean spues them forth
upon the solid land, earth tosses them into the flames of the
untiring sun, he flings them back again into the whirlwinds of
the air; from one to the other are they cast, and all abhor
them."
And the following adjuration has a frantic energy, to modern readers
almost laughable but for its indubitable gravity:
Wretches, thrice wretches, keep your hands from beans!
or, again, with reference to the abomination of animal food:
"The father drags along his dear son changed in form, and slays
him, pouring prayers upon his head. But the son goes begging
mercy from his maniac sire. The father heeds him not, but goads
him on, and, having slaughtered him, prepares a cursed meal.
In like manner sons take their fathers, and children their
mothers, and tearing out the life devour the kindred flesh.
Will ye not put an end to this accursed slaughter? Will ye not
see that ye consume each other in blind ignorance of soul?"
It is not strange that the poems of Empedocles were pilfered by
oracle-mongers in after-ages.
Besides these passages, there are some of a milder beauty which deserve
high praise for their admirable power of suggesting the picture that
the poet wishes to convey. The following lines describe the golden age
of old, to which Empedocles looked back with melancholy longing:
"There every animal was tame and familiar with men, both beasts
and birds, and mutual love prevailed. Trees flourished with
perpetual leaves and fruits, and ample crops adorned their
boughs through all the year. Nor had these happy people any
Ares or mad Uproar for their god; nor was their monarch Zeus,
or Kronos, or Poseidon, but Queen Cypris. Her favor they
besought with pious symbols and with images, and fragrant
essences, and censers of pure myrrh, and frankincense, and with
brown honey poured upon the ground. The altars did not reek
with bullocks' gore."
It may sound ridiculous to say so, yet Empedocles resembles Shelley in
the quality of his imagination and in many of his utterances. The lines
just quoted, the belief in a beneficent universal soul of nature, the
hatred of animal food, the love of all things moving or growing on the
face of earth, the sense of ancient misery and present evil, are all,
allowing for the difference of centuries and race and education, points
by which the Greek and the English poets meet in a community of nature.
Two more passages illustrative of the poetical genius of Empedocles may
be quoted. In the first he describes the nature of God, invisible and
omnipresent. In the second he asserts the existence of a universal law.
They are both remarkable for simplicity and force, and elevation of
style:
"Blessed is the man who hath obtained the riches of the wisdom
of God; wretched is he who hath a false opinion about things
divine.
"He (God) may not be approached, nor can we reach him with our
eyes or touch him with our hands. No human head is placed upon
his limbs, nor branching arms; he has no feet to carry him
apace, nor other parts of man; but he is all pure mind, holy,
and infinite, darting with swift thought through the universe
from end to end."
"This law binds all alike, and none are free from it: the
common ordinance which all obey prevails through the vast
spaces of wide-ruling air and the illimitable fields of light
in endless continuity."
The quotations which have served to illustrate the poetical genius
of Empedocles have also exhibited one aspect of his philosophy--that
wherein he was connected with the Pythagoreans. It is quite consistent
with the whole temper of his intellect that he should have been
attracted to the semi-Oriental mysticism which then was widely spread
through Grecian Italy and Sicily. After the dissolution of the monastic
commonwealth founded by Pythagoras, it is probable that refugees
imbued with his social and political theories scattered themselves
over the adjacent cities, and from some of these men Empedocles may
have imbibed in early youth the dream-like doctrines of an antenatal
life, of future immortality, of past transgression and the need of
expiation, of abstinence, and of the bond of fellowship which bound man
to his kindred sufferers upon the earth. It is even asserted in one
legend that the philosopher of Agrigentum belonged to the Pythagorean
Society, and was expelled from it for having been the first to divulge
its secrets. In later life these theories were developed by Empedocles
after his own fashion, and received a peculiar glow of poetic coloring
from his genius. There is no need to suppose that he visited the East
and learned the secrets of Gymnosophists. A few Pythagorean seeds sown
in his fruitful soil sprang up and bore a hundred-fold. Referring
to the exordium of his poem on Nature, and to the lines in which he
describes the unapproachable Deity, we find that Empedocles believed
in a pristine state of happiness, when the "Dæmons," or "gods, long of
life, supreme in honor," dwelt together, enjoying a society of bliss.
Yet this state was not perfect, for some of these immortals stained
their hands with blood, and some spoke perjury, and so sin entered
in and tainted heaven. After such offence the erring spirit, by the
fateful, irrevocable, and perennial law of the divine commonwealth,
had to relinquish his heavenly throne and wander "thirty thousand
seasons" apart from his comrades. In this period of exile he passed
through all the changes of metempsychosis. According to the rigorous
and gloomy conception of Empedocles, this change was caused by the
hatred of the elements: earth, air, fire, and water refusing to retain
the criminal, and tossing him about from one to the other without
intermission. Thus, he might be a plant, a bird, a fish, a beast, or
a human being in succession. But the transmigration did not depend
upon mere chance. If the tortured spirit, environed, as he was, by the
conflicting shapes and contradictory principles and baleful destinies
which crowded earth--"the over-vaulted cave," the "gloomy meadow of
discord," as Empedocles in his despair described our globe--could yet
discover some faint glimmering of the truth, seize and hold fast some
portion of the heavenly clue, then he might hope to reascend to bliss.
Instead of abiding among birds and unclean beasts and common plants,
his soul passed into the bodies of noble lions and mystic bay-trees,
or became a bard, a prophet, a ruler among men, and lastly rose again
to the enjoyment of undying bliss. Throughout these wanderings death
was impossible. Empedocles laughed at the notion of birth and death;
he seems to have believed in a fixed number of immortal souls, capable
of any transformation, but incapable of perishing. Therefore, when
his spirits, falling earthward, howled at the doleful aspect of the
hideous land, the very poignancy of their grief consisted in that
bitter thought of Dante's, "questi non hanno speranza di morte"--in
that thought which makes the Buddhist welcome annihilation. It has
been already hinted, that although the soul by its forced exile lost
not only happiness but also knowledge, yet the one might be in part
retrieved, and the other toilsomely built up again in some degree by
patient observation, prayer, and magic rites. On this point hinges
the philosophy of Empedocles. It is here that his mysticism and his
science are united into one system. In like manner, Plato's philosophy
rests upon the doctrine of Anamnesis, and is connected with the vision
of a past beatitude, the tradition of a miserable fall, and the
prospect of a possible restoration. Empedocles, like Parmenides and
Xenophanes in their disquisitions on the eternal Being, like Plato in
his references to the Supreme Idea, seems to have imagined that the
final Essence of the universe was unapproachable, and to have drawn a
broad distinction between the rational and sensual orders, between the
world as cognizable by pure intellect, and the world as known through
the medium of human sense. The lines of Empedocles upon God, which
have been already quoted, are similar to those of Xenophanes: both
philosophers assert the existence of an unknown Deity pavilioned in
dense inscrutability, yet not the less to be regarded as supreme and
omnipresent and omnipotent--as God of gods, as life of life. How to
connect this intuition with the physical speculations of Empedocles
is difficult. The best way seems to be to refrain from identifying
his eloquent description of the unknown God with the Sphærus of his
scientific theories, and to believe that he regarded the same universe
from different points of view at different times, as if in moments
of high exaltation he obtained a glimpse of the illimitable Being by
a process of ecstatic illumination, while in more ordinary hours of
meditation his understanding and his senses helped him to obtain a
knowledge of the actual phenomena of this terrestrial globe. His own
language confirms this view of the case:
"Weak and narrow," he says, "are the powers implanted in the
limbs of men; many the woes that fall on them and blunt the
edge of thought; short is the measure of the life in death
through which they toil; then are they borne away, like smoke
they vanish into air, and what they dream they know is but the
little each hath stumbled on in wandering about the world; yet
boast they all that they have learned the whole--vain fools!
for what _that_ is, no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, nor
can it be conceived by mind of man. Thou, then, since thou hast
fallen to this place, shalt know no more than human wisdom may
attain.
"But, O ye gods, avert the madness of those babblers from my
tongue, and cause the stream of holy words to issue from my
hallowed lips. And thou, great Muse of Memory, maiden with
the milk-white arms, I pray to thee to teach me things that
creatures of a day may hear. Come from the House of Holiness,
and bring to me her harnessed car."
Here we see plainly set forth the impossibility of mortal, fallen
intellects attaining to a perfect knowledge of the Universe, the
impiety of seeking such knowledge, or pretending to have found it; and,
at the same time, the limitations under which true science remains
within the reach of human beings. How this science may be reached,
he tells us in some memorable lines, probably supposed to issue from
the lips of the Muse whom he invokes: "But come, search diligently,
and discover what is clear in every realm of sense, ... check the
conviction of thy senses, and judge by reason what is evident in every
case."
Thus the senses, although feeble and erring guides, are, after all,
the gates to knowledge; and their reports, when tested by the light of
reason, form the data for human speculation. The senses, resident in
the limbs, are composed in certain proportions of the four elements,
which also constitute the earth. Therefore, between the frame of man
and the world outside him, there is a community of substance, whereby
he is enabled to know. #Homoia homoiois gignôsketai# (likes are known
by likes) is the foundation of our philosopher's theory of knowledge.
The rational soul, being that immortal part of man whereon depends
his personal identity, whether he take the shape of plant or animal,
receives and judges the results of sensation. This theory, it will
be observed, has a kind of general similarity to that of Parmenides.
Empedocles draws a marked difference between the province of the
senses and of the reason, and inveighs against the impotence of the
former. Again, he speaks of the real being of the world as pure and
perfect intellect; and at the same time elaborately describes the
universe as it appears to human sense and understanding. But here
the likeness ends. Parmenides has no mysticism, and indulges in no
theology. He believes in the actual truth of his rational ontology,
and sneers at the senses. "Thy fate it is," he says, "all mysteries
to learn, both the unswerving mind of truth that wins a sure assent,
and the vain thoughts of men, in which no certainty abides. But,
baseless as they are, these also shalt thou learn; since thou must
traverse every field of knowledge, and discern the fabric of the
dreams of men." His ontology is just as elaborate as his physics, and
he evidently considers its barren propositions of more value than any
observations on astronomy or physiology. Empedocles, on the other
hand, despaired of ontology, and gave all his mind to explanations of
the physical universe--how it came to be, and what laws governed its
alternations--believing all along that there was a higher region of
pure intellect beyond the reach of his degraded soul. "Here we see in
a glass darkly, but then face to face." In this respect he resembled
Xenophanes more than Parmenides. Xenophanes had said, "No man hath
been, nor will ever be, who knows for certain all about the gods, and
everything of which I speak; for should one publish the most sure and
settled truth, yet even he cannot be said to _know_: opinion is supreme
in all things." Empedocles belonged more to the age behind him than to
that which followed; and his extensive knowledge of nature was a part
of his artistic rather than his scientific temperament.
Yet, allowing for the march of human progress during twenty-three
centuries, we are bound to hold much the same language as Empedocles
regarding the limitations of knowledge. We have, indeed, infinitely
extended our observation of phenomena; we have gained fuller
conceptions of the Deity and of the destinies of man. But the plummet
which he threw into the bottomless abyss of science has as yet found
no bottom, and the circle which it made by striking on the surface
of the illimitable ocean has grown and grown, but yet has touched
no shore on any side. Like him, we still speak of an unapproachable
God, utterly beyond the reach of human sense and intellect; like him,
we still content ourselves with receiving the reports of our senses,
comparing and combining them by means of our understanding, and thus
obtaining some conception of the universe in which we live. If we
reject the light of Christianity, the guesses which we form about a
future world are less vague than those of Empedocles, but founded on
no surer scientific basis; the God we worship still remains enveloped
in symbols; we still ascribe to him, if not a human form, at least
the reason, partialities, and passions of mankind. Indeed, in this
respect, the sage of Agrigentum stood unconsciously upon the platform
which only our profoundest thinkers have attained. He felt the awe
of the Unseen--he believed in the infinite Being; but he refused
to dogmatize about his attributes, confining his own reason to the
phenomenal universe which he strove in every way to understand, and to
employ for the good of his race. Empedocles was greater than most of
his contemporaries, for he neither believed it possible to explain the
whole mystery of the world, nor did he yet reject the notion of there
being a profound mystery. He steered clear between the Parmenides and
Democritus of his own day--between the Spinoza and the materialist
of modern speculation. Herein the union of philosophy and poetry, of
thought and feeling, in his nature, gave the tone to all his theories.
We must not, however, in our praise forget that all these problems
appeared in a far more simple form to the Greeks of that age than
to ourselves, and were therefore more hastily and lightly answered.
Between the ontology of Parmenides and that of Hegel what a step there
is! What meagre associations gather round the one; what many-sided
knowledge gives substance to the other!
Remembering, therefore, in what light Empedocles regarded his own
physical speculations, we may proceed to discuss them more in detail.
We shall find that he deserved a large portion of that praise which
Bacon rather whimsically lavished on the pre-Socratic philosophers, to
the disadvantage of the mightier names of Plato and Aristotle.
The poem on Nature is addressed to Pausanias the physician, who was
a son of Anchitus of Agrigentum, and a special friend of Empedocles.
To Pausanias the philosopher begins his instruction with these words:
"First learn what are the four chief roots of everything that is: fiery
Zeus, and Herè, source of vital breath, and Aidoneus, and Nestis with
her tears, who is the fount of moisture in the world." Thus Empedocles,
after the fashion of the Pythagoreans, allegorized his four elements.
In other passages he calls them "fire, water, earth, and air's
immeasurable height;" or, "earth, and ocean with his countless waves,
and liquid air, the sun-god, and ether girdling the universe in its
embrace;" or again, "Hephæstus, rain, and radiant ether;" or lastly,
"light, earth, heaven, and ocean." It will be seen that he designated
his elements sometimes by mythological titles, sometimes by abstract
terms, and sometimes by selecting one or other natural object--such
as the sun, the air, the ocean--in which they were most manifest. It
is well known that Empedocles was the first philosopher to adopt the
four elements, which, since his day, continued to rule supreme over
natural science, until modern analysis revealed far simpler and broader
bases. Other speculators of the Ionian sect had maintained each of
these four elements--Thales the water, Anaximenes the air, Heraclitus
the fire, and perhaps (but this rests on no sure evidence), Pherecydes
the earth. Xenophanes had said, "Of earth and water are all things
that come into existence." Parmenides had spoken of dark and light,
thick and subtile, substances. Each of these fundamental principles is
probably to be regarded not as pure fire, or pure water, or pure air,
but as a universal element differing in rarity, and typified according
to the analogical necessities of language, by means of some familiar
object. The four elements of Empedocles appear to have been suggested
to him, partly by his familiarity with contemporary speculation, and
partly by his observation of Nature. They held their ground so long in
scientific theory, because they answered so exactly to a superficial
view of the world. Earth with everything of a solid quality, water
including every kind of fluid, fire that burns or emits light, air that
can be breathed, appear to constitute an exhaustive division of the
universe. Of the eternity of these four primal substances, according to
the Empedoclean theory, there is no doubt. The philosopher frequently
reiterates his belief in the impossibility of an absolute beginning
or ending, though he acquiesces in the popular use of these terms to
express the scientific conceptions of dissolution and recombination.
These elements, then, were the material part of the world according
to Empedocles. But inherent in them, as a tendency is inherent in
an organism, and yet separable in thought from them, as the soul is
separable from the body, were two conflicting principles of equal
power, love and discord. Love and discord by their operation wrought
infinite changes in the universe: for it was the purpose of love to
bind the elements together into a compact, smooth, motionless globe;
and of discord to separate them one from another, and to keep them
distinct in a state of mutual hostility. When, therefore, either love
or discord got the upper-hand, the phenomenal universe could not be
said to exist, but in the intermediate state was a perpetual order
of growth and decay, composition and dissolution, whereby the world,
as we behold it, came into existence. This intermediate state, _das
Werdende_, #to gignomenon kai apollymenon# (the Becoming, that which
comes into existence and passes out of it again by dissolution), was
#physis#, or Nature. The conflicting energies of love and discord
formed the pulses of its mighty heart, the systole and diastole of its
being, the one power tending to life, the other power to death, the one
pushing all the elements forward to a perfect unity of composition,
the other rending them apart. To the universe when governed by love
in supremacy Empedocles gave the name of #sphairos# (perfect globe),
which he also called a god. This #sphairos# answered to the Eleatic
#hen#, while the disjointed elements subservient to the force of strife
corresponded to the Eleatic #polla#. Thus the old Greek antagonism of
Good and Evil, One and Many, Love and Hatred, Being and Not-being, were
interpreted by Empedocles. He looked on all that is, _das Werdende_, as
transitory between two opposite and contradictory existences.
Again, according to his system, the alternate reigns of love and
discord succeeded one another at fixed intervals of time; so that,
from one point of view, the world was ceaselessly shifting, and from
another point of view, was governed by eternal and unalterable Law.
Thus he reconciled the Heraclitean flux and the Parmenidean immobility
by a middle term. Each of the elements possessed a separate province,
had separate functions, and was capable of standing by itself. To fire
it would seem that the philosopher assigned a more active influence
than to any of the other elements; therefore a kind of dualism may
be recognized in his Universe between this ruling principle and the
more passive ingredients of air, earth, and water. The influence of
love and harmony kept them joined and interpenetrated, and so mingled
as to bring the different objects which we see around us into being.
Empedocles professed to understand the proportions of these mixtures,
and measured them by Pythagorean rules of arithmetic. Thus everything
subsists by means of transformation and mixture; absolute beginning and
ending are impossible.
Such, briefly stated, is the theory of Empedocles. The following
passage may be quoted to show how the phenomenal Universe comes into
being under the influence of love:
"When strife has reached the very bottom of the seething mass,
and love assumes her station in the centre of the ball, then
everything begins to come together, and to form one whole--not
instantaneously, but different substances come forth, according
to a steady process of development. Now, when these elements
are mingling, countless kinds of things issue from their union.
Much, however, remains unmixed, in opposition to the mingling
elements, and these malignant strife still holds within his
grasp. For he has not yet withdrawn himself altogether to the
extremities of the globe; but part of his limbs still remain
within its bounds, and part have passed beyond. As strife,
however, step by step, retreats, mild and innocent love pursues
him with her force divine; things which had been immortal
instantly assume mortality; the simple elements become confused
by interchange of influence. When these are mingled, then the
countless kinds of mortal beings issue forth, furnished with
every sort of form--a sight of wonder."
In another passage this development is compared to the operation
of a painter mixing his colors, and forming with them a picture of
various objects. Discord is said to have made the elements immortal,
because he kept them apart, and would willingly have preserved their
separate qualities; whereas love mixes them together, breaks up
their continuity, and confuses their kinds. What Empedocles exactly
meant by Sphæris is hard to understand; nor do we know how far he
intended Chance to operate in the formation of the Universe. He often
uses such expressions as these, "So they chanced to come together,"
and describes the amorphous condition of the first organisms in a
way that makes one think he fancied a perfectly chaotic origin.
Yet "the art of Aphrodite," "so Cypris ordained their form," are
assertions of designing intelligence. In fact, we may well believe
that Empedocles, in the infancy of speculation, was led astray by his
double nomenclature. When talking of Aphrodite, he naturally thought
of a person ruling creation; when using the term "Love," he naturally
conceived an innate tendency, which might have been the sport of chance
in a great measure. It also appears probable that, when Empedocles
spoke of "Chance" and "Necessity," he referred to some inherent quality
in the elements themselves, whereby they grew together under certain
laws, and that the harmony and discord which ruled them in turn were
regarded by him as forces aiding and preventing their union.
To understand the order of creation, we may begin by imagining the
sphere, which, in the words of Empedocles, "by the hidden bond of
harmony is stablished, and rejoices in unbroken rest ... in perfect
equipoise, of infinite extent, it stays a full-orbed sphere rejoicing
in unbroken rest." Love now is omnipotent; she has knit all the
elements into one whole; Discord has retreated, and abides beyond the
globe. But soon his turn begins: he enters the sphere, and "all the
limbs of the god begin to tremble." Now the elements are divided one
from the other--ether first, then fire, then earth, then water from
the earth. Still the elements are chaotic; but wandering about the
spaces of the world, and "permeating each the other's realm," they form
alliances and tend to union. Love is busy no less than Discord. The
various tribes of plants and animals appear at first in a rudimentary
and monstrous condition: "many heads sprouted up without necks, and
naked arms went wandering forlorn of shoulders, and solitary eyes
were straying destitute of foreheads." Still the process of seething
and intermingling continued; "when element with element more fully
mixed, these members fell together by hap-hazard ... many came forth
with double faces and two breasts, some shaped like oxen with a human
front, others, again, of human race with a bull's head; and some were
mixed of male and female parts." Unfortunately, the lines in which
he describes the further progress of development have been lost, and
we do not know how the interval between chaos and order was bridged
over in his system. Only with reference to human beings he asserts
that in the earliest stage they were produced in amorphous masses,
containing the essence, as it were, of both male and female; and that
after the separation of these masses into two parts, each part yearned
to join its tally. And therefrom sprang the passion of desire in human
hearts. This theory has been worked out by Plato artistically in the
_Symposium_. Also with reference to the accretion of the phenomenal
universe, he says that earth formed the basis of all hard and solid
substances preponderating in the shells of fish, and so on. Bones were
wrought of earth and fire and water, "marvellously jointed by the
bonds of Harmony." It is needless to follow Empedocles through all
his scattered fancies, to show that he knew that the night was caused
by the earth intercepting the sun's rays, or that he thought the sun
reflected heaven's fire like a mirror, or that he placed the intellect
in the blood, and explained respiration by a theory of pores, and the
eyesight by imagining a fire shut up within the pupil. The fragments we
possess are too scanty to allow of our obtaining a perfect view of his
physical theory; all we gather from them is that Empedocles possessed
more acquired and original knowledge than any of his contemporaries.
It may appear from what has been said about his system that Empedocles
was at best a great eclectic. But this is not entirely the case. If
he deserves the name of eclectic, he deserves it in the same sense
as Plato, though it need not be said how infinitely inferior, as an
original thinker, he is to Plato. Empedocles was deeply versed in all
the theories, metaphysical, cosmogonical, mystical, and physiological,
of his age. He viewed from a high station all the problems,
intellectual, social, and moral, which then vexed Greece. But he did
not pass his days in a study or a lecture-room, nor did he content
himself with expounding or developing the theories of any one master.
He went abroad, examined nature for himself, cured the sick, thought
his own thoughts, and left an impress on the constitution of his native
state. In his comprehensive mind all the learning he had acquired from
men, from books, from the world, and from reflection, was consolidated
into one system, to which his double interest for mysticism and
physics gave a double aspect. He was the first in Greece to reconcile
Eleatic and Heraclitean speculations, the puzzle of plurality and
unity, the antagonism of good and evil, in one theory, and to connect
it with another which revealed a solemn view of human obligations and
destinies, and required a life of social purity and self-restraint. The
misfortune of Empedocles as a philosopher consisted in this--that he
succeeded only in resuming the results of contemporary speculation, and
of individual research, in a philosophy of indisputable originality,
without anticipating the new direction which was about to be given to
human thought by Socrates and Plato. He closed one period--the period
of poetry and physical theories and mysticism. The period of prose,
of logic, and of ethics was about to begin. He was the last of the
great colonial sages of Greece. The Hellenic intellect was destined
henceforth to centre itself at Athens.
FOOTNOTES:
[47] Between Homer and Empedocles there is nothing in common except
their metre: therefore it is right to call the former a poet, the
latter a natural philosopher rather than a poet.
[48] Empedocles again was Homeric in style, and clever in his use of
phrase, for he inclined to metaphor, and employed the other admirable
instruments of the poetic art.