EMPEDOCLES.
1. GENERAL VIEW.—Empedocles was born at Agrigentum, and is extolled by
the ancients as a natural philosopher, physician and poet, and also as a
seer and worker of miracles. He flourished about 440 B. C., and was
consequently younger than Parmenides and Heraclitus. He wrote a
doctrinal poem concerning nature, which has been preserved to us in
tolerably complete fragments. His philosophical system may be
characterized in brief, as an attempt to combine the Eleatic being and
the Heraclitic becoming. Starting with the Eleatic thought, that neither
any thing which had previously been could become, nor any thing which
now is could depart, he sets up as unchangeable being, four eternal
original materials, which, though divisible, were independent, and
underived from each other. In this we have what in our day are called
the four elements. With this Eleatic thought he united also the
Heraclitic view of nature, and suffered his four elements to become
mingled together, and to receive a form by the working of two moving
powers, which he names unifying friendship and dividing strife.
Originally, these four elements were absolutely alike and unmovable,
dwelling together in a divine sphere where friendship united them, until
gradually strife pressing from the circumference to the centre of the
sphere (_i. e._ attaining a separating activity), broke this union, and
the formation of the world immediately began as the result.
2. THE FOUR ELEMENTS.—With his doctrine of the four elements,
Empedocles, on the one side, may be joined to the series of the Ionic
philosophers, but, on the other, he is excluded from this by his
assuming the original elements to be four. He is distinctly said by the
ancients to have originated the theory of the four elements. He is more
definitely distinguished from the old Ionics, from the fact that he
ascribed to his four “root-elements” a changeless being, by virtue of
which they neither arose from each other nor departed into each other,
and were capable of no change of essence but only of a change of state.
Every thing which is called arising and departing, every change rests
therefore only upon the mingling and withdrawing of these eternal and
fundamental materials; the inexhaustible manifoldness of being rests
upon the different proportions in which these elements are mingled.
Every becoming is conceived as such only as a change of place. In this
we have a mechanical in opposition to a dynamic explanation of nature.
3. THE TWO POWERS.—Whence now can arise any becoming, if in matter
itself there is found no principle to account for the change? Since
Empedocles did not, like the Eleatics, deny that there was change, nor
yet, like Heraclitus, introduce it in his matter, as an indwelling
principle, so there was no other course left him but to place, by the
side of his matter, a moving power. The opposition of the one and the
many which had been set up by his predecessors, and which demanded an
explanation, led him to ascribe to this moving power, two originally
diverse directions, viz.: repulsion and attraction. The separation of
the one into the many, and the union again of the many into the one, had
indicated an opposition of powers which Heraclitus had already
recognized. While now Parmenides starting from the one had made love as
his principle, and Heraclitus starting from the many had made strife as
his, Empedocles combines the two as the principle of his philosophy. The
difficulty is, he has not sufficiently limited in respect to one
another, the sphere of operation of these two directions of his power.
Although, to friendship belonged peculiarly the attractive, and to
strife the repelling function, yet does Empedocles, on the other hand,
suffer his strife to have in the formation of the world a unifying, and
his friendship a dividing effect. In fact, the complete separation of a
dividing and unifying power in the movement of the becoming, is an
unmaintainable abstraction.
4. RELATION OF THE EMPEDOCLEAN TO THE ELEATIC AND HERACLITIC
PHILOSOPHY.—Empedocles, by placing, as the principle of the becoming, a
moving power by the side of his matter, makes his philosophy a mediation
of the Eleatic and Heraclitic principles, or more properly a placing of
them side by side. He has interwoven these two principles in equal
proportions in his system. With the Eleatics he denied all arising and
departing, _i. e._ the transition of being into not-being and of
not-being into being, and with Heraclitus he shared the interest to find
an explanation for change. From the former he derived the abiding,
unchangeable being of his fundamental matter, and from the latter the
principle of the moving power. With the Eleatics, in fine, he considered
the true being in an original and indistinguishable unity as a sphere,
and with Heraclitus, he regarded the present world as a constant product
of striving powers and oppositions. He has, therefore, been properly
called an Eclectic, who has united the fundamental thoughts of his two
predecessors, though not always in a logical way.