[985a]
[1]
and that there are more bad and common things than
there are good and beautiful: in view of this another thinker
introduced Love and Strife1 as the respective causes
of these things—because if one follows up and appreciates the statements of
Empedocles with a view to his real meaning and not to his obscure
language, it will be found that Love is the cause of good, and Strife
of evil. Thus it would perhaps be correct to say that Empedocles in a
sense spoke of evil and good as first principles, and was the first to
do so—that is, if the cause of all good things is absolute
good.These thinkers then, as I say, down to the
time of Empedocles, seem to have grasped two of the causes which we
have defined in the Physics2: the material cause and the source of motion;
but only vaguely and indefinitely. They are like untrained soldiers in
a battle, who rush about and often strike good blows, but without
science; in the same way these thinkers do not seem to understand
their own statements, since it is clear that upon the whole they
seldom or never apply them.Anaxagoras avails himself of Mind as an artificial device for
producing order, and drags it in whenever he is at a loss to
explain
[20]
some necessary
result; but otherwise he makes anything rather than Mind the cause of
what happens.3 Again, Empedocles does indeed use causes to a
greater degree than Anaxagoras, but not sufficiently; nor does he
attain to consistency in their use.At any rate Love often differentiates and
Strife combines: because whenever the universe is differentiated into
its elements by Strife, fire and each of the other elements are
agglomerated into a unity; and whenever they are all combined together
again by Love, the particles of each element are necessarily again
differentiated.Empedocles, then, differed from his
predecessors in that he first introduced the division of this cause,
making the source of motion not one but two contrary forces.Further, he was the first to
maintain that the so-called material elements are four—not
that he uses them as four, but as two only,
1 Empedocles Fr. 17, 26 (Diels); R.P. 166. Cf. Burnet, E.G.P. 108 ff.
2 Aristot. Phys. 2.3, 7.
3 Cf. Plat. Phaedo 98b, Plat. Laws 967b; also Aristot. Met. 7.5.
Aristotle. Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vols.17, 18, translated by Hugh Tredennick. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1933, 1989.
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