A History of Philosophy in Epitome. Albert Schwegler
with itself, harmonizes with itself, like the harmony of the bow and the viol.” “Unite,” so runs another of his sayings, “the whole and the not-whole, the coalescing and the not-coalescing, the harmonious and the discordant, and thus we have the one becoming from the all, and the all from the one.”
4. The Principle of Fire.—In what relation does the principle of fire, which is also ascribed to Heraclitus, stand to the principle of the becoming? Aristotle says that he took fire as his principle, in the same way that Thales took water, and Anaximenes took air. But it is clear we must not interpret this to mean that Heraclitus regarded fire as the original material or fundamental element of things, after the manner of the Ionics. If he ascribed reality only to the becoming, it is impossible that he should have set by the side of this becoming, yet another elemental matter as a fundamental substance. When, therefore, Heraclitus calls the world an ever-living fire, which in certain stages and certain degrees extinguishes and again enkindles itself, when he says that every thing can be exchanged for fire, and fire for every thing, just as we barter things for gold and gold for things, he can only mean thereby that fire represents the abiding power of this eternal transformation and transposition, in other words, the conception of life, in the most obvious and effective way. We might name fire, in the Heraclitic sense, the symbol or the manifestation of the becoming, but that it is also with him the substratum of movement, i.e. the means with which the power of movement, which is antecedent to all matter, serves it self in order to bring out the living process of things. In the same way Heraclitus goes on to explain the manifoldness of things, by affirming that they arise from certain hindrances and a partial extinction of this fire. The product of its extremest hindrance is the earth, and the other things lie intermediately between.
5. Transition To the Atomists.—We have above regarded the Heraclitic principle as the consequent of the Eleatic, but we might as properly consider the two as antitheses. While Heraclitus destroys all abiding being in an absolutely flowing becoming, so, on the other hand, Parmenides destroys all becoming in an absolutely abiding being; and while the former charges the eye and the ear with deception, in that they transform the flowing becoming into a quiescent being, the latter also accuses these same senses of an untrue representation, in that they draw the abiding being into the movement of the becoming. We can therefore say that the being and the becoming are equally valid antitheses, which demand again a synthesis and reconciliation. But now can we say that Heraclitus actually and satisfactorily solved the problem of Zeno? Zeno had shown every thing actual to be a contradiction, and from this had inferred their not-being, and it is only in this inference that Heraclitus deviates from the Eleatics. He also regarded the phenomenal world as an existing contradiction, but he clung to this contradiction as to an ultimate fact. That which had been the negative result of the Eleatics, he uttered as his positive principle. The dialectics which Zeno had subjectively used against the phenomenal, he directed objectively as a proof for the becoming. But this becoming which the Eleatics had thought themselves obliged to deny entirely, Heraclitus did not explain by simply asserting that it was the only true principle. The question continually returned—why is all being a becoming? Why does the one go out over into the many? To give an answer to this question, i.e. to explain the becoming from the presupposed principle of being, forms the standpoint and problem of the Empedoclean and Atomistic philosophy.
SECTION VIII.
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 BC, 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.
SECTION IX.
THE ATOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY.