“Some physicians and sophists,” writes Hippocrates,1 “say that no one can know medicine who is ignorant as to what man is, how he first came to be, and whence he was originally compounded and that whoever would cure men properly must learn this. But this doctrine belongs rather to philosophy, as e.g., Empedocles and others who have written Περι φνσιος.”
To understand Empedocles’ conception of psychical processes one must get at his conception of a living being and this in turn is founded on his cosmic philosophy.
In another place2 I have discussed the general question of the underlying conception of early Greek philosophy and the present work is in a sense a special application of this study. We determined there that in the search for φνσις the early naturalistic philosophers were not primarily interested in “matter,” but for that in the universe which, in Aristotle’s language, “in its primary and strict sense is the essence (ουσία) of those things which have in themselves per se a source of motion ” (Metaph. Δ, iv), what it is that makes things “get a move on.”
This procedure had at first taken the form of explaining cosmic origins from the standpoint of generation,3 but absolute beginnings were totally inconceivable to the philosophies of Empedocles’ time, so that Empedocles faced the problem of accounting for plurality and transformation or motion in an eternal universe.
The orthodox modern account of Empedocles’ philosophy, which we inherit from Zeller, attributes to him a conception of “matter and energy ” somewhat resembling that of our nineteenth century physics, upon which is vaguely reared a crude materialistic doctrine of sensation. Perhaps the most precise statement of this interpretation is that given by Windelband.4 With respect to Empedocles’ general position Windelband writes, “He was the first in whose theory force and matter are differentiated as separate cosmic powers. Under the influence of Parmenides he had accordingly so conceived the world-stuff that the ground of motion could not be found in it itself.”
With regard to psychical processes Windelband considers that: “It is of especial interest that he conceived the process of perception and sensation as analogous to his universal theory of the interaction of elements. He explained this process as contact of the small parts of the perceived things with the similar parts of the perceiving organs, wherein the former were supposed to press υροη the latter, as in hearing ; or the latter upon the former, as in sight. . . . Hence it follows for Empedocles that all perceptual knowledge depends upon the combination of elements in the body and especially in the blood, and that the spiritual nature depends on the physical nature.”
In contradistinction to this current interpretation we maintain that Empedocles was dealing, both cosmologically and anthropologically, with a problem of φνσις and that he was looking for those features of things which would account for their present development; for that aspect of the world at large which has in itself the power of motion, or development, and for the natural source of life and thought in man.
For Empedocles all things in the universe are a combination of the six elements—air, earth, fire, water, love, and hate. Just what is the relation of the last two to the others is not altogether clear. According to Tannery,5 “ne sont nullement des forces abstraites; ce sont simplement des milieux doués de propriétés speciales et pouvant se deplacer l’un l’autre, milieux au sein desquels sont plongées les molecules corporelles, mais qui d’ailleurs sont conçus comme tout aussi materiels que l’ether imponderable des physiciens modernes, avec lequel ils presentent la plus grande analogie.”
Empedocles apparently recognized as the great motive force the attraction of like for like. “L’attraction des semblables n’est pas, chez l’Agrigentin, une force abstraite transcendantalement; c’est une propriété immanente a la matière ” (I.c., p. 309).
From a universe of elements having this source of motion in itself the world and its inhabitants “live and move and have their being.”
A man or an animal is a definite, organic complex. A man has in himself this source of motion and in his surroundings the conditions thereof. Psychical processes are activities occasioned by the meeting of the organism with its cognate environment. It is an activity latent in the elements and complex structure of the man, determined by the nature of his sense organs and “central nervous system,” causing him to react to certain conditions. The organic structure of the man is the determining factor along with the immanent tendency to motion.
The individual organs of perception were involved in the discussion and what chiefly troubled the ancient commentators was the so-called relation or perception of like by like in these special cases. It was not recognized that they are here discussing organs and that the attraction of like to like, in so far as it may have figured, was the starting to activity, the bringing into relation of the organism to the object through physical contact set up by way of the organ. The famous fragment (84) of Empedocles on the structure of the eye is obviously a discussion of the problem of obtaining a connection between the object and the eye.
Subsequent Greek philosophers and historians of philosophy, in giving their account of this naturalistic psychology, rewrote it into the language and doctrines of their own or contemporary systems and made nonsense of most of it. Plato alone took the position seriously and with some appreciation, and it is from his controversy that most is to be learned.
Some light is thrown on the subject by examination of the genuine works of Hippocrates who was bred in the tradition and was in a high degree capable of appreciating it. It is also in this connection interesting to note that, although all traces of the meaning of the early view have died out in philosophical literature by the time of Theophrastus, they apparently survived to an extent in Galen, the physician (second century, A.D.).6
On ancient med., 20: ed. Kvehlewein. ↩
“The Meaning of φύσις in Early Greek Philosophy,” Studies in the History of Ideas, edited by the department of philosophy of Columbia University, Vol. I, 1918, p. 27. ↩
Cf. F. J. E. Woodbridge, “The Dominant Conception of Early Greek Philosophy,” Philosophical Review, Vol. X, 1901. ↩
History of Ancient Philosophy, 1899, pp. 74, 78. ↩
La Science Hellène, 1887, p. 306. ↩
Cf. Chauvet, La philosophie des médecins grecs, p. 367 sq. (N. B. p. 371). ↩