The four elements are discussed a good deal and it is explained that fire is hot and dry, air is hot and wet, and so on.[500] To fire correspond cholera, the light of the eyes, and curiosity; to air, blood, words, and loquacity; to water, phlegm, abundance of natural humors, and lust; to earth, melancholy, corpulence, and cruelty.[501] Daniel, like Adelard of Bath and William of Conches, repeats the doctrine that the four elements are not found in a pure state in any bodies perceptible to our sense, that no one has ever touched earth or water, or seen pure air or fire, and that the four elements are perceptible only to the intellect. Daniel differs from Adelard and William, however, in denying that the stars are made merely out of the purer parts of the four elements. He declares that the Arabs will not agree to this, but that the higher authorities in astrology assert that the stars are composed of a fifth essence.[502] Daniel furthermore speaks of three bonds existing between the four elements, stating that scientists call the relation between fire and air, obedience; that between air and water, harmony; and that between water and earth, necessity.[503] This faintly reminds one of the three relationships between the four principles of things which were associated with the names of the three fates in the essay on fate ascribed to Plutarch.
Superiors and inferiors.
But the greatest bond in nature is that existing between the superior and inferior worlds. An oft-repeated and fundamental principle of Daniel’s philosophy, and one which explains the division of his work into two parts, is the doctrine that superiors conquer inferiors, that the world of the sky controls the world of the four elements, and that the science of the stars is superior to all other disciplines.[504] “The sages of this world have divided the world into two parts, of which the superior one which extends from the circle of the moon even to the immovable heaven is the agent. The other, from the lunar globe downwards, is the patient.”[505] Much depends, however, not only upon the force emitted by the agent but upon the readiness of the patient to receive the celestial influence.
Daniel’s astronomy.
Daniel of course believed in a spherical earth and a geocentric universe. Influenced probably by the Almagest, he explains the eccentrics of the five planets in a way which he regards as superior to what he calls the errors of Martianus Capella and almost all Latins, and to the obscure traditions which the Arabs have handed down but scarcely understood themselves.[506] He affirms that there are not ten heavens or spheres, as some have said, but only eight, as Alphraganus truly teaches.[507]
Astrological argument.
There are some men who deny any efficacy to the motions of the stars, but Daniel charges that they for the most part condemn the science without knowing anything about it, “and hold astronomy in hatred from its name alone.”[508] He replies that it is useful to foreknow the future and defends astrology in much the usual manner. He details the qualities of the seven planets[509] whom the Arabs call “lords of nativities.”[510] Also he takes up the properties and attributes of the signs of the zodiac and how the Arabs divide the parts of the human body among them.[511]
Astrology and other sciences.
Daniel interprets the scope of astrology very broadly, asserting that it has eight parts: the science of judgments, or what we should call judicial astrology; medicine; nigromancy according to physics; agriculture; illusions or magic (de praestigiis); alchemy, “which is the science of the transmutation of metals into other species; the science of images, which Thoz Grecus set forth in the great and universal book of Venus; and the science of mirrors, which is of broader scope and aim than the rest, as Aristotle shows in the treatise on the burning glass.”[512] Except that magic illusions have replaced navigation, this list of eight branches of learning is the same as that which Gundissalinus repeated from Al-Farabi, but which they called branches of natural science rather than of astrology. At any rate we see again the close association of natural science and useful arts with astrology and magic, and necromancy and alchemy, and with pseudo-writings of Aristotle and Hermes Trismegistus. In other passages Daniel cites genuine Aristotelian treatises[513] and speaks of “the great Mercury” and of the other “Mercury Trismegistus, the nephew of the aforesaid.”[514] Despite his subordination of alchemy to astrology in the above passage, Daniel does not seem to have it in mind when he remarks that there are “some who assign diverse colors of metals to the planets,” as lead to Saturn, silver to Jupiter, white to Venus, and black to Mercury.[515] He goes on to deny that the stars are really colored any more than the sky is.
Daniel and Greek: a misinterpretation.