[498]. Arist. Met. Α, 5. 986 a 27 (R. P. 66).
[499]. Aet. v. 30, 1, Ἀλκμαίων τῆς μὲν ὑγιείας εἶναι συνεκτικὴν τὴν ἰσονομίαν τῶν δυνάμεων, ὑγροῦ, ξηροῦ, ψυχροῦ, θερμοῦ, πικροῦ, γλυκέος, καὶ τῶν λοιπῶν, τὴν δ’ ἐν αὐτοῖς μοναρχίαν νόσου ποιητικήν· φθοροποιὸν γὰρ ἐκατέρου μοναρχίαν.
[500]. My colleague, Dr. Fraser Harris, points out to me that Alkmaion’s πόροι may have been a better guess than he knew. The nerve-fibres, when magnified 1000 diameters, “sometimes appear to have a clear centre, as if the fibrils were tubular.”—Schäfer, Essentials of Physiology (7th edition), p. 132.
CHAPTER V
EMPEDOKLES OF AKRAGAS
Pluralism.
97. The belief that all things are one was common to the philosophers we have hitherto studied; but now Parmenides has shown that, if this one thing really is, we must give up the idea that it can take different forms. The senses, which present to us a world of change and multiplicity, are deceitful. From this there was no escape; the time was still to come when men would seek the unity of the world in something which, from its very nature, the senses could never perceive.
We find, accordingly, that from the time of Parmenides to that of Plato, all thinkers in whose hands philosophy made real progress abandoned the monistic hypothesis. Those who still held by it adopted a critical attitude, and confined themselves to a defence of the theory of Parmenides against the new views. Others taught the doctrine of Herakleitos in an exaggerated form; some continued to expound the systems of the early Milesians. This, of course, showed want of insight; but even those thinkers who saw that Parmenides could not be left unanswered, were by no means equal to their predecessors in power and thoroughness. The corporealist hypothesis had proved itself unable to bear the weight of a monistic structure; but a thorough-going pluralism such as the atomic theory might have some value, if not as a final explanation of the world, yet at least as an intelligible view of a part of it. Any pluralism, on the other hand, which, like that of Empedokles and Anaxagoras, stops short of the atoms, will achieve no permanent result, however many may be the brilliant aperçus which it embodies. It will remain an attempt to reconcile two things that cannot be reconciled, and may always, therefore, be developed into contradictions and paradoxes.
Date of Empedokles.
98. Empedokles was a citizen of Akragas in Sicily, and his father’s name, according to the best accounts, was Meton.[[501]] His grandfather, also called Empedokles, had won a victory in the horse-race at Olympia in Ol. LXXI. (496-95 B.C.),[[502]] and Apollodoros fixed the floruit of Empedokles himself in Ol. LXXXIV. 1 (444-43 B.C.). This is the date of the foundation of Thourioi; and it appears from the quotation in Diogenes that the almost contemporary biographer, Glaukos of Rhegion,[[503]] said Empedokles visited the new city shortly after its foundation. But we are in no way bound to believe that he was just forty years old at the time of the event in his life which can most easily be dated. That is the assumption made by Apollodoros; but there are reasons for thinking that his date is too late by some eight or ten years.[[504]] It is, indeed, most likely that Empedokles did not go to Thourioi till after his banishment from Akragas, and he may well have been more than forty years old when that happened. All, therefore, we can be said to know of his date is, that his grandfather was still alive in 496 B.C.; that he himself was active at Akragas after 472, the date of Theron’s death; and that he died later than 444.