THE ATOMISTS (_continued_)
_Empedocles at Etna--Brief life and scanty vision--The four
elements--The philosophy of contradiction--Philosophy a form of
poesy--The philosopher a prophet--Sensation through kinship--The whole
creation groaneth_
[129]
II. EMPEDOCLES.--Empedocles was a native of Agrigentum, a Greek colony
in Sicily. At the time when he flourished in his native city (circa
440 B.C.) it was one of the wealthiest and most powerful communities in
that wealthy and powerful island. It had, however, been infested, like
its neighbours, by the designs of tyrants and the dissensions of rival
factions. Empedocles was a man of high family, and he exercised the
influence which his position and his abilities secured him in promoting
and maintaining the liberty of his fellow-countrymen. Partly on this
account, partly from a reputation which with or without his own will he
acquired for an almost miraculous skill in healing and necromantic
arts, Empedocles attained to a position of singular personal power over
his contemporaries, and was indeed regarded as semi-divine. His death
was hedged about with mystery. According to one story he gave a great
feast to his friends and offered a {59} sacrifice; then when his
friends went to rest he disappeared, and was no more seen. According
to a story less dignified and better known--
Deus immortalis haberi
Dum cupit Empedocles, ardentem frigidus Aetnam
Insiluit. HOR. _Ad Pisones_, 464 _sqq_.
"Eager to be deemed a god, Empedocles coldly threw himself in burning
Etna." The fraud, it was said, was detected by one of his shoes being
cast up from the crater. Whatever the manner of his end, the Etna
story may probably be taken as an ill-natured joke of some sceptic wit;
and it is certain that no such story was believed by his
fellow-citizens, who rendered in after years divine honours to his name.
Like Xenophanes, Parmenides, and other Graeco-Italian philosophers, he
expounded his views in verse; but he reached a poetic excellence
unattained by any predecessor. Aristotle characterises his gift as
Homeric, and himself as a master of style, employing freely metaphors
and other poetic forms. Lucretius also speaks of him in terms of high
admiration (_De Nat. Rer. i. 716 sqq._): "Foremost among them is
Empedocles of Agrigentum, child of the island with the triple capes, a
land wondrous deemed in many wise, and worthy to be viewed of all men.
Rich it is in all manner of good things, and strong {60} in the might
of its men, yet naught within its borders men deem more divine or more
wondrous or more dear than her illustrious son. Nay, the songs which
issued from his godlike breast are eloquent yet, and expound his
findings wondrous well, so that hardly is he thought to have been of
mortal clay."
[180]
Like the Eleatics he denies that the senses are an absolute test of
truth. "For straitened are the powers that have been shed upon our
frames, and many the frets that cross us and defeat our care, and short
the span of unsatisfying existence wherein 'tis given us to see.
Shortlived as a wreath of smoke men rise and fleet away, persuaded but
of that alone which each has chanced to light upon, driven hither and
thither, and vainly do they pray to find _the whole_. For this men may
not see or hear or grasp with the hand of thought." Yet that there is
a kind or degree of knowledge possible for man his next words suggest
when he continues: "Thou therefore since hither thou hast been borne,
hear, and thou shalt learn so much as 'tis given to mortal thought to
reach." Then follows an invocation in true Epic style to the
"much-wooed white-armed virgin Muse," wherein he prays that "folly and
impurity may be far from the lips of him the teacher, and that sending
forth her swift-reined chariot from the shrine of Piety, the Muse may
grant him to hear so much as is given to mortal hearing."
{61}
Then follows a warning uttered by the Muse to her would-be disciple:
"Thee the flowers of mortal distinctions shall not seduce to utter in
daring of heart more than thou mayest, that thereby thou mightest soar
to the highest heights of wisdom. And now behold and see, availing
thyself of every device whereby the truth may in each matter be
revealed, trusting not more to sight for thy learning than to hearing,
nor to hearing with its loud echoings more than to the revelations of
the tongue, nor to any one of the many ways whereby there is a path to
knowledge. Keep a check on the revelation of the hands also, and
apprehend each matter in the way whereby it is made plain to thee."
The correction of the one sense by the others, and of all by reason,
this Empedocles deemed the surest road to knowledge. He thus
endeavoured to hold a middle place between the purely abstract
reasoning of the Eleatic philosophy and the unreasoned first guesses of
ordinary observation suggested by this or that sense, and chiefly by
the eyes. The senses might supply the raw materials of knowledge,
unordered, unrelated, nay even chaotic and mutually destructive; but in
their contradictions of each other he hoped to find a starting-point
for order amidst the seeming chaos; reason should weigh, reason should
reject, but reason also should find a residuum of truth.
{62}
[181]
In our next fragment we have his enunciation in symbolical language of
the _four_ elements, by him first formulated: "Hear first of all what
are the root principles of all things, being four in number,--Zeus the
bright shiner (_i.e._ fire), and Hera (air), and life-bearing Aidoneus
(earth), and Nestis (water), who with her teardrops waters the fountain
of mortality. Hear also this other that I will tell thee. Nothing of
all that perisheth ever is created, nothing ever really findeth an end
in death. There is naught but a mingling, and a parting again of that
which was mingled, and this is what men call a coming into being.
Foolish they, for in them is no far-reaching thought, that they should
dream that what was not before can be, or that aught which is can
utterly perish and die." Thus again Empedocles shows himself an
Eclectic; in denying that aught can come into being, he holds with the
Eleatics (see above, p. 47); in identifying all seeming creation, and
ceasing to be with certain mixtures and separations of matter eternally
existing, he links himself rather to the doctrine of Anaxagoras (see
above, p. 53).
[132]
These four elements constitute the total _corpus_ of the universe,
eternal, as a whole unmoved and immovable, perfect like a sphere. But
within this sphere-like self-centred All there are eternally proceeding
separations and new unions of the elements of things; and every one of
these is at once a birth {63} and an infinity of dyings, a dying and an
infinity of births. Towards this perpetual life in death, and death in
life, two forces work inherent in the universe. One of these he names
Love, Friendship, Harmony, Aphrodite goddess of Love, Passion, Joy; the
other he calls Hate, Discord, Ares god of War, Envy, Strife. Neither
of the one nor of the other may man have apprehension by the senses;
they are spiritually discerned; yet of the first men have some
adumbration in the creative force within their own members, which they
name by the names of Love and Nuptial Joy.
Somewhat prosaically summing up the teaching of Empedocles, Aristotle
says that he thus posited _six_ first principles in nature--four
material, two motive or efficient. And he goes on to remark that in
the working out of his theory of nature Empedocles, though using his
originative principles more consistently than Anaxagoras used his
principle of _Nous_ or Thought, not infrequently, nevertheless, resorts
to some natural force in the elements themselves, or even to chance or
necessity. "Nor," he continues, "has he clearly marked off the
functions of his two efficient forces, nay, he has so confounded them
that at times it is Discord that through separation leads to new
unions, and Love that through union causes diremption of that which was
before." At times, too, Empedocles seems to have had a vision of these
two forces, not as the counteracting yet {64} co-operative
_pulsations_, so to speak, of the universal life, but as rival forces
having had in time their periods of alternate supremacy and defeat.
While all things were in union under the influence of Love, then was
there neither Earth nor Water nor Air nor Fire, much less any of the
individual things that in eternal interchange are formed of them; but
all was in perfect sphere-like balance, enwrapped in the serenity of an
eternal silence. Then came the reign of Discord, whereby war arose in
heaven as of the fabled giants, and endless change,--endless birth, and
endless death.
These inconsistencies of doctrine, which Aristotle notes as faults in
Empedocles, are perhaps rather proofs of the philosophic value of his
conceptions. Just as Hegel in modern philosophy could only adequately
formulate his conceptions through logical contradictions, so also,
perhaps, under the veil of antagonisms of utterance, Empedocles sought
to give a fuller vision,--Discord, in his own doctrine, not less than
in his conception of nature, being thus the co-worker with Love. The
ordinary mind for the ordinary purposes of science seeks exactness of
distinction in things, and language, being the creation of ordinary
experience, lends itself to such a purpose; the philosophic mind,
finding ready to its hand no forms of expression adapted to its
conceptions, which have for their final end Union and not Distinction,
{65} can only attain its purpose by variety, or even contradictoriness,
of representation. Thus to ordinary conception cause must precede
effect; to the philosophic mind, dealing as it does with the idea of an
organic whole, everything is at once cause and effect, is at once
therefore prior to and subsequent to every other, is at once the ruling
and the ruled, the conditioning and that which is conditioned.
So, to Empedocles there are four elements, yet in the eternal
perfection, the silent reign of Love, there are none of them. There
are two forces working upon these and against each other, yet each is
like the other either a unifying or a separating force, as one pleases
to regard them; and in the eternal silence, the ideal perfectness,
there is no warfare at all. There is joy in Love which creates, and in
creating destroys; there is joy in the eternal Stillness, nay, this is
itself the ultimate joy. There are two forces working, Love and Hate,
yet is there but one force, and that force is Necessity. And for final
contradiction, the universe is self-balanced, self-conditioned, a
perfect sphere; therefore this Necessity is perfect self-realisation,
and consequently perfect freedom.
The men who have had the profoundest vision of things--Heraclitus,
Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, ay, and Aristotle himself when he was the
thinker and not the critic; not to speak of the great moderns, whether
preachers or philosophers--have none of {66} them been greatly
concerned for consistency of expression, for a mere logical
self-identity of doctrine. Life in every form, nay, existence in any
form, is a union of contradictories, a complex of antagonisms; and the
highest and deepest minds are those that are most adequate to have the
vision of these antagonisms in their contrariety, and also in their
unity; to see and hear as Empedocles did the eternal war and clamour,
but to discern also, as he did in it and through it and behind it and
about it, the eternal peace and the eternal silence.
Philosophy, in fact, is a form of poesy; it is, if one pleases so to
call it, 'fiction founded upon fact.' It is not for that reason the
less noble a form of human thought, rather is it the more noble, in the
same way as poetry is nobler than mere narrative, and art than
representation, and imagination than perception. Philosophy is indeed
one of the noblest forms of poetry, because the facts which are its
basis are the profoundest, the most eternally interesting, the most
universally significant. And not only has it nobility in respect of
the greatness of its subject matter, it has also possibilities of an
essential truth deeper and more far-reaching and more fruitful than any
demonstrative system of fact can have. A great poem or work of art of
any kind is an adumbration of truths which transcend any actual fact,
and as such it brings us nearer to the underlying fundamentals of {67}
reality which all actual occurrences only by accumulation _tend_ to
realise. Philosophy, then, in so far as it is great, is, like other
great art, prophetic in both interpretations of the word, both as
expounding the inner truth that is anterior to actuality, and also as
anticipating that final realisation of all things for which 'the whole
creation groaneth.' It is thus at the basis of religion, of art, of
morals; it is the accumulated sense of the highest in man with respect
to what is greatest and most mysterious in and about him.
The facts, indeed, with which philosophy attempts to deal are so vital
and so vast that even the greatest intellects may well stagger
occasionally under the burden of their own conceptions of them. To
rise to the height of such an argument demands a more than Miltonic
imagination; and criticisms directed only at this or that fragment of
the whole are as irrelevant, if not as inept, as the criticism of the
mathematician directed against _Paradise Lost_, that it 'proved
nothing.' The mystery of being and of life, the true purport and
reality of this world of which we seem to be a part, and yet of which
we seem to have some apprehension as though we were other than a part;
the strange problems of creation and change and birth and death, of
love and sin and purification; of a heaven dreamt of or believed in, or
somehow actually apprehended; of life here, and of an immortality
yearned after and hoped for--these {68} problems, these mysteries, no
philosophy ever did or ever can empty of their strangeness, or bring
down to the level of the commonplace 'certainties' of daily life or of
science, which are no more than shadows after all, that seem
certainties because of the background of mystery on which they are cast.
But just as an individual is a higher being, a fuller, more truly human
creature, when he has got so far removed from the merely animal
existence as to realise that there are such problems and mysteries, so
also the humanisation of the race, the development of its noblest
peoples and its noblest literatures, have been conditioned by the
successive visions of these mysteries in more and more complex
organisation by the great philosophers and poets and preachers. The
systems of such men may die, but such deaths mean, as Empedocles said
of the ordinary deaths of things, only an infinity of new births.
Being dead, their systems yet speak in the inherited language and ideas
and aspirations and beliefs that form the never-ending, still-renewing
material for new philosophies and new faiths. In Thales, Heraclitus,
Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles we have been touching hands with an
apostolic succession of great men and great thinkers and great
poets--men of noble life and lofty thoughts, true prophets and
revealers. And the apostolic succession even within the Greek world
does not fail for centuries yet.
{69}
Passing from the general conceptions of Empedocles to those more
particular rationalisations of particular problems which very largely
provided the motive of early philosophies, while scientific methods
were in an undeveloped and uncritical condition, we may notice such
interesting statements as the following: [135] "The earth, which is at
the centre of the sphere of the universe, remains firm, because the
spin of the universe as a whole keeps it in its place like the water in
a spinning cup." He has the same conception of the early condition of
the earth as in other cosmogonies. At first it was a chaos of watery
slough, which slowly, under the influence of sky and sun, parted off
into earth and sea. The sea was the 'sweat' of the earth, and by
analogy with the sweat it was salt. The heavens, on the other hand,
were formed of air and fire, and the sun was, as it were, a speculum at
which the effulgence and the heat of the whole heavens concentrated.
But that the aether and the fire had not been fully separated from
earth and water he held to be proved by the hot fountains and fiery
phenomena which must have been so familiar to a native of Sicily.
Curiously enough he imagined fire to possess a solidifying power, and
therefore attributed to it the solidity of the earth and the hardness
of the rocks. No doubt he had observed some effects of fire in
'metamorphic' formations in his own vicinity.
{70}
[137]
He had also a conception of the gradual development on the earth of
higher and higher forms of life, the first being rude and imperfect,
and a 'struggle for existence' ensuing in which the monstrous and the
deficient gradually were eliminated--the "two-faced, the
double-breasted, the oxen-shaped with human prows, or human-shaped with
head of ox, or hemaphrodite," and so forth. Love and Strife worked out
their ends upon these varied forms; some procreated and reproduced
after their image, others were incapable of reproduction from mere
monstrosity or [138] weakness, and disappeared. Something other than
mere chance thus governed the development of things; there was a law, a
reason, a _Logos_ governing the process. This law or reason he perhaps
fancifully illustrated by attributing the different characters of flesh
and sinew and bone to the different numerical proportions, in which
they severally contain the different elements.
On this Aristotle, keen-scented critic as he was, has a question, or
series of questions, to ask as to the relation between this Logos, or
principle of orderly combination, and Love as the ruling force in all
unions of things. "Is Love," he asks, "a cause of mixtures of any
sort, or only of such sorts as Logos dictates? And whether then is
Love identical with this Logos, or are they separate and distinct; and
if so, what settles their separate functions?" Questions {71} which
Empedocles did not answer, and perhaps would not have tried to answer
had he heard them.
[139]
The soul or life-principle in man Empedocles regarded as an ordered
composite of all the elements or principles of the life in nature, and
in this kinship of the elements in man and the elements in nature he
found a rationale of our powers of perception. "By the earth," said
he, "we have perception of earth; by water we have perception of water;
of the divine aether, by aether; of destructive fire, by fire; of love,
by love; of strife, by strife." He therefore, as Aristotle observes,
drew no radical distinction between sense-apprehension and thought. He
located the faculty of apprehension more specifically in the blood,
conceiving that in it the combination of the elements was most
complete. And the variety of apprehensive gift in different persons he
attributed to the greater or lesser perfectness of this blood mixture
in them individually. Those that were dull and stupid had a relative
deficiency of the lighter and more invisible elements; those that were
quick and impulsive had a relatively larger proportion of these.
Again, specific faculties depended on local perfection of mixture in
certain organs; orators having this perfectness in their tongues,
cunning craftsmen possessing it in their hands, and so on. And the
degrees of capacity of sensation, which he found in various animals, or
even plants, he explained in similar fashion.
{72} The process of sensation he conceived to be conditioned by an
actual emission from the bodies perceived of elements or images of
themselves which found access to our apprehension through channels
[140] congruous to their nature. But ordering, criticising, organising
these various apprehensions was the Mind or _Nous_, which he conceived
to be of divine nature, to be indeed an expression or emanation of the
Divine. And here has been preserved a strangely interesting passage,
in which he incorporates and develops in characteristic fashion the
doctrine of transmigration [141] of souls: "There is a decree of
Necessity, a law given of old from the gods, eternal, sealed with
mighty oaths, that when any heavenly creature (daemon) of those that
are endowed with length of days, shall in waywardness of heart defile
his hands with sin of deed or speech, he shall wander for thrice ten
thousand seasons far from the dwellings of the blest, taking upon him
in length of time all manner of mortal forms, traversing in turn the
many toilsome paths of existence. Him the aetherial wrath hurries
onward to the deep, and the deep spews him forth on to the threshold of
earth, and unworn earth casts him up to the fires of the sun, and again
the aether hurls him into the eddies. One receives him, and then
another, but detested is he of them all. Of such am I also one, an
exile and a wanderer from God, a slave to strife and its madness."
{73}
Thus to his mighty conception the life of all creation, and not of man
only, was a great expiation, an eternal round of punishment for sin;
and in the unending flux of life each creature rose or fell in the
scale of existence according to the deeds of good or ill done in each
successive life; rising sometimes to the state of men, or among men to
the high functions of physicians and prophets and kings, or among
beasts to the dignity of the lion, or among trees to the beauty of the
laurel; or, on the contrary, sinking through sin to lowest forms of
bestial or vegetable life. Till at the last they who through obedience
and right-doing have expiated their wrong, are endowed by the blessed
gods with endless honour, to dwell for ever with them and share their
banquets, untouched any more with human care and sorrow and pain.
[143]
The slaying of any living creature, therefore, Empedocles, like
Pythagoras, abhorred, for all were kin. All foul acts were forms of
worse than suicide; life should be a long act of worship, of expiation,
of purification. And in the dim past he pictured a vision of a golden
age, in which men worshipped not many gods, but Love only, and not with
sacrifices of blood, but with pious images, and cunningly odorous
incense, and offerings of fragrant myrrh. With abstinence also, and
above all with that noblest abstinence, the abstinence from vice and
wrong.
{74}