§ 6
Empedokles of Akragas did not belong to the Pythagorean school (it lost its external unity in his time); but he approaches Pythagorean doctrine so closely in his opinions and teaching about the soul of man, its problems and destinies, that there can be no doubt about Pythagorean influence upon the formation of his convictions on these points. His many-sided activities also included the study of natural science and he took up the researches of the Ionic Physiologists with zeal and a marked aptitude for the observation and synthesis of natural phenomena. But the roots of his peculiar individuality—the pathos which moved and agitated him—lay in a practical activity far removed from scientific investigation and representing a brilliant resuscitation in a very different age of the character and practice of the mantis, the purification-priest and magical-physician of the sixth century. The introduction to his “Purifications”[56] gives a picture of his triumphal progress from city to city, crowned with ribbons and garlands, adored as a god and questioned by thousands: “Where is the road to healing?” He intends to give his disciple Pausanias the results of his own experience and to teach him all his remedies for disease and their virtues, the arts of stilling the winds and stirring them up, producing drought or rain, raising the dead from Hades.[57] He himself boasted of being a magician and his pupil Gorgias saw him “do magic”.[58] Through him those efforts of the Kathartes, the expiation-priest and seer, which an earlier and already distant-seeming time had honoured as the highest form of wisdom, at last achieved a voice and literary expression—an expression given them with the fullest personal experience of the truth of their claims by one who was convinced of their power to control nature and sure of the godlike status of the man who had reached these almost superhuman heights of empire over nature. As a god, an immortal no longer subject to death, he passed through all the land—so Empedokles himself tells us.[59] He may have won credit in many places. He did not, indeed, found an ordered society of disciples and adherents, a sect: this does not seem to have been his intention. But he alone as a unique and unparalleled being, a self-confident personality of the greatest force and weight impressed himself masterfully both as mystic and politician upon the mundane affairs of his contemporaries and pointed the way beyond time and all things temporal to a blessed and divine state as the final goal of human life. He [379] must have made a profound impression upon the men among whom he lived,[60] though he disappeared from their midst like a comet, and left no permanent traces of his presence behind him. Many legends still witness to the astonishment that his appearance among men provoked, more especially those legends that in varying form related his end.[61] They are all expressions of the same belief: that he, as his own verses had foretold, in his departure did not have to suffer death; he had vanished, “translated” body and soul together to an everlasting divine life, as once Menelaos had been and so many great figures of the ancient days, and even a few Heroes of more recent times.[62] Once more the ancient conception shows in this story that it still lives on: immortal life can only be obtained by undissolved union of the psyche with its body. Such a legend hardly did justice to Empedokles’ own idea. When he claimed to be a god who would never die he certainly did not mean that his psyche would remain for ever bound to his body. On the contrary, he thought that in “death”, as men[63] call it, it would be freed from this last corporeal envelope[64] and never again have to enter into a body, but would live for ever in freedom and divinity. His conception of the conscious after-life of the psyche was as different as it was possible for it to be from the Homeric conception on which that translation legend was based.
Empedokles united in his own person to an astonishing degree the most sober attempts at a study of nature that was scientific according to its lights, and quite irrational beliefs and theological speculations. Occasionally the scientific impulse passes over to influence even the world of his beliefs;[65] but as a rule theology and natural science exist side by side in his mind quite independently. As a physiologist he inherited the already extensive and variously developed stock of ideas belonging to the older generations of inquirers and thinkers. He himself was able to unite conceptions derived from the most different sources into an original whole that satisfied himself at least. Becoming and passing-away, all qualitative change, were denied by him as by the Eleatics, but the permanent substance of Being is for him no single indivisible unity. There are four “roots” of things, the four bodies of elements, which in this division are for the first time clearly distinguished. It is the mixture and separation of the essentially indivisible elements that cause the appearance of becoming and perishing; and those two processes are caused by the two forces—clearly distinguished from the elements—of attraction and repulsion, [380] Love and Hate, which in the creative process struggle and in turn overmaster each other until at last, in the final victory of one of the two forces, all things are either united or divided; in either case an organic world ceases to exist. The present state of the universe is one in which “Love”, the tendency to amalgamation of differences, is prevailing; when this tendency is completed, there will be an absolute levelling-out of all distinction; a result which Empedokles, a quietist in his scientific studies as well, regards as the most desirable end.
In this world, then, that experiences only mechanical movement and change, and from whose evolution Empedokles by an ingenious turn is able to exclude all idea of purpose, there are also to be found souls; or rather psychical powers which grow up entirely within it. Sense-perception is expressly distinguished from the capacity of thought by Empedokles.[66] The former takes place when each of the elements, from the mixture of which the perceiving being has its origin, comes into contact with, and so becomes aware of, the same elements in the object perceived, through the “passages” that connect the interior of the body with the exterior.[67] “Thinking” has its seat in the heart’s blood, where the elements and their powers are mixed most equally. Or rather this blood actually is thinking and the power of thought;[68] the material substance and its vital functions thus also for Empedokles completely coincide. Plainly, nothing in the nature of a permanent substantial “soul” is here intended by the thinking-power of the “mind”, but rather a capacity of bringing together and unifying the individual sense-activities;[69] a capacity no less than the individual powers of sensation bound up with the elements, the senses, and the body.[70] With the varying constitution of the body, they too vary.[71] Both capacities, that of sense-perception, and that of thought, as vital expressions of the matter that is combined together in the organic creature, are present in all organisms; in men, in beasts, and even in plants.[72]
If we give the name of “soul”[73] to the sum of these psychical powers—a name generally reserved for the common permanent substratum of the changing psychical activities—we cannot avoid concluding, in accordance with the logic of this philosopher, that the “soul” must be perishable. With the death and destruction of the individual the elementary parts that go to compose him are disunited, and the soul which in this case is nothing but the highest resultant of that composition, must itself disappear with their dissolution—as it had come into being with their union.[74] [381]
It might seem as if Empedokles himself was as far as possible removed from drawing such conclusions from his own premises. No one speaks more distinctly and forcibly of the spiritual, individual beings that dwell in men and in other creatures of nature as well. They are regarded by him as Daimones fallen to the corporeal world, who have to pass through many different forms of life till they may at last hope for release.
In the introduction to his poem on Nature, he describes, from his own experience, and the information of the Daimones who had once led his soul down to this earthly Vale of Grief,[75] how by an ancient decree of the gods and the compulsion of Necessity, every daimon that has “polluted” itself by drinking the blood or eating the flesh of living beings,[76] or has broken its oath,[77] is banished for a long period[78] from the company of the blessed. It is thrust down to the “Meadow of Disaster”, into the realm of contradiction,[79] the cave of misery upon this earth, and must now wander through many “painful ways of life”[80] in changing incarnations. “Thus, I myself was once a boy and also a maiden, a bush, a bird, and a voiceless fish in the salty flood” (ll. 11, 12 = fr. 117). This daimon that in expiation of its crime must wander through the forms of men, beasts, and even plants, is evidently no other than what popular speech and that of theologians as well called the “psyche”, the soul-spirit.[81] In all essentials though perhaps in clearer language, Empedokles merely repeated[82] what the adherents of the doctrine of Transmigration had long told of its divine origin, its fall and penal banishment in earthly bodies. So, too, when as teacher of the means that bring salvation, he tells how more gracious forms and conditions of life may be obtained in the series of births, till at last complete release from rebirth is achieved,[83] Empedokles follows in the footsteps of the purification-priests and theologi of old. It is a matter of keeping the daimon within us free from the pollutions that bind it fast to the earthly life. To this end the methods of religious purification are most efficacious; Empedokles respects them quite as much as did the old Kathartai. It is necessary to keep the internal daimon far removed from every kind of “sin”,[84] more particularly from the drinking of blood and the eating of meat which must necessarily involve the murder of kinsmen daimones which are dwelling in the slaughtered beasts.[85] By purification and asceticism (which here again dispenses with a positive form of morality aimed at reforming the man) a gradual process to purer and better births is achieved;[86] in the end the persons thus reborn in a purified condition [382] become seers, poets, doctors, and are the leaders of mankind.[87] Finally, when they have emerged superior even to these highest steps of earthly life, they return to the other immortals, and become themselves gods released from human misery, escaping death, and now indestructible.[88] Empedokles regard himself as one who has reached the last stage,[89] and points out to others the way up to it.
Between what Empedokles the mystic here tells us of the soul that was once living its divine life, but has since been plunged into the world of the elements, though it is not for ever bound to them; and what Empedokles the physiologist teaches of the psychical powers that dwell in the elements and are bound to the body that is composed of the elements and perish with their dissolution, there seems to be a hopeless contradiction. And yet if we are to grasp the whole truth of what Empedokles means, we must neither leave on one side half of what he says,[90] nor yet by well-meaning interpretation seek to bring the philosopher into harmony with himself,[91] when he clearly speaks with two different voices. The two voices say different things, and yet in the mind of Empedokles, there is no contradiction in what they say, for they are dealing with totally distinct objects. The psychical powers and faculties of feeling and perception which are functions of matter, born in matter, and determined by it, together with the thinking faculty that is no other than the heart’s blood of men—these neither make up the character and content of that soul-spirit which dwells in men, beasts, and flowers, nor are they expressions of its activity. They are entirely bound up with the elements and their combination, and in man they are joined to the body and its organs; they are the powers and faculties of this body, and not of a special and invisible entity, the soul. The soul-daimon is not made out of the elements, nor is it for ever chained to them. It enters as a stranger into this world in which the only permanent component parts are[92] the four elements, and the two forces of Love and Hate; and it enters it from another world, the world of gods and spirits, to its detriment; the elements cast it about from one to another “and they all hate it” (fr. 115, 12, l. 35 M.). This living soul, with its independent existence, that thus enters into foreign and hostile surroundings, only enters into such earthly creatures as already possess senses, feeling and perception, together with reason or the faculty of thinking, the crowning manifestation of their material union. It is, however, as little identical with these psychical faculties as it is with the mixture of elementary matter or, in [383] the case of men, with the heart’s blood. It exists, unmixed and incapable of mixture, alongside the body and its faculties which indeed only have life—“what men call life”—(fr. 15, 2, l. 117 M.) when united with it. When they are separated from it they fall into dissolution; not so the soul, which continues its journey and visits other dwelling places, and does not share in their dissolution.
This peculiar dualistic doctrine reflects the two sides of Empedokles’ own mental activity. He probably intended in this way to unite the views of both the physiologists and the theologians. To the Greeks, such a twofold division of the inner life may have seemed less surprising than it does to us. The conception of a “soul” that as an independent, unique, and self-contained spiritual being dwells within the body, while the body does not receive its intellectual faculties of perceiving, feeling, willing and thinking from the soul, but exercises these by its own power—this conception agrees at bottom with the ideas of popular psychology that are as a rule described or implied in the Homeric poems.[93] The only difference is that these ideas of poet and populace are elaborated and defined by the speculations of theologians and philosophers. How deeply impressed upon the Greek mind such conceptions, derived eventually from Homer, actually were, can be measured by the fact that a conception of the twofold origin of psychic activity, its twofold nature and sphere of action, closely related to that of Empedokles, is continually recurring in more advanced stages of philosophy. It occurs not merely in Plato, but even in Aristotle, who in addition to the “soul” that directs and expresses itself in the physico-organic nature of man, recognizes another being of divine descent that enters into man “from without”, the “mind” (νοῦς) which is separable both from the soul and from the body, and is alone destined to survive the death of the man to which it was assigned.[94] In the doctrine of Empedokles, too, it is a stranger-guest from the distant land of gods that enters into man to give him a soul. This being is indeed far below the “mind” of Aristotle in philosophic importance; nevertheless, in the introduction of this Stranger into the world composed of the elements and vital faculties, a sense of the absolute uniqueness of spirit, its unlikeness to everything material, its essential distinctness from matter, finds expression, if only in a limited theological fashion.
In the light of such theological considerations, the soul seems also to Empedokles something essentially distinct from its prototype, the Homeric psyche, which after its separation [384] from the body passes to the twilight of a shadowy dream-life. To him, the soul is of divine race, too noble for this world of visibility, and only when it escapes from this world does it seem to him to begin its real and full life. Though confined within the body, it has its separate existence there; it has no concern with the everyday business of perception and sensation—not even with that of thinking, which is nothing else but the heart’s blood. But it is active in the “higher” mode of knowledge, in ecstatic inspiration;[95] to it alone belongs the profound insight of the philosopher who is enabled to pass beyond the limits of mere experience and sense-perception, and behold the totality of the universe in its true nature.[96] To it alone apply all the requirements of ethical and religious systems—duties in this higher sense belong only to the soul; it is something in the nature of a “conscience”. Its highest duty is to free itself from the unhallowed union with the body, and the elements of this world; the rules of purification and asceticism refer solely to it.
Between this soul-daimon that yearns after its divine home, and the world of the elements, there exists no inward bond or necessary connexion. And yet, since they have become implicated in each other’s existence, a certain parallelism exists between them in character and destiny. In the mechanically moved world, too, the separate and particular phenomena tend back again towards their starting point, the inwardly coherent Unity from which they once took their origin. A day will come when, after all struggle has been done away, “Love” alone will have absolute rule; and this means for the poet—who in his description even of this world of mechanical attraction and repulsion interpolates half-realized ethical concepts[97]—a state of absolute goodness and happiness. If there is no longer any world, then, until another one is created, no soul-daimon can be bound any more to the individual organisms of a world. Have they then all returned to the blessed communion of the immortal gods? It appears that not even the gods and daimones (and so not the spirits enclosed in world as “souls”) are regarded by Empedokles as having everlasting life. “Long-living” is the name he repeatedly applies to them; he never distinctly ascribes eternal life to them.[98] They, too, shall for a period enjoy “the happiness of profoundest peace” until, just as the elements and forces are drawn into the unity of the Sphairos, they, too, come together in the unity of the godlike Universal Mind, thence at a new world-creation to appear once more as individual separate being.[99] [385]