THE FORERUNNERS of EMPEDOCLES and the NATURE PHILOSOPHERS by JONATHAN WRIGHT, M
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THE FORERUNNERS OF EMPEDOCLES AND THE NATURE PHILOSOPHERS By JONATHAN WRIGHT, M. D. PLEASANTVILLE, N. Y. EFORE the time of Hippocrates There is an interest chiefly medical1 and it is quite evident that medi- another interest purely personal2 which cine was not only more closely cluster around the name of Empedocles in allied to and dependent on re- medical history, but aside from these there ligion for its inspiration and support,are other connotations of thought associated butB what we are pleased to think of with it which, so far as I know, have not as the scientific alloy in its frame-work been given prominence. I do not mean the bound it more intimately with cosmic phi- bearing the cosmic philosophy of Empedo- losophy than has been the case since the cles has on that of the nature philosophers. time of the nature philosophers. This has His cosmic theories are quite evidently been more specifically illustrated in connec- derived from more original predecessors tion with Empedocles in the themes of and his significance as the connecting my previous essays which have appeared link between the old mystical elements in this and various other journals 1»2 >3. of primitive man and the experimental Students of medical history must realize physiology of today has been sufficiently that it is quite impossible to pursue the emphasized in another paper.3 It is not threads of the fundamental ideas of medical difficult to find a suggestive correlation science in an intelligent manner without between the thought of the nature philo- a thorough understanding of the course sophers of early Greece and the thought and evolution of knowledge in cognate of primitive men, which modern ethnology sciences and even in fields usually con- has revealed to us. This, however, it has sidered as quite remote from medical shown to be associated with a very much interests. If this is to some extent evident less evolved general state of social relations in the study of more recent eras of medicine than it has been the custom to attribute it presses still more for recognition while to those active in the nascent intellectual one is dealing with those remote epochs achievements of early Greek civilization. when the intellectual paths of life were so Empedocles serves again as a medical much less sharply defined, one from another, center from which to take a fresh start than has been the case in the few centuries further to elucidate the paths taken by which have elapsed since the Renaissance. ancient primitive ideas toward the first The consideration that even the most of what is essentially modern scientific distant illumination may yet throw a thought. The career that homoepathic doc- welcome light upon that small corner trine has had in medicine began with the in ancient civilizations upon which our primitive medicine man, but Empedocles attention is intently fixed renders this first domesticated it in such records of imperative. But so apparent is this that ancient Sicilian medicine as we have. Galen, it does not seem necessary to insist upon Aristotle, Theophrastus and Plutarch trace it as an excuse or to refer to it at all except it back to him. Like attracts like. By virtue as an explanation of the reason for going of the affinity which one bit of matter has so far afield to seek the sources of the for another much of the physiology and Greek medical thought with which our pathology of his internal economy, much own is involved at its origin. of health and disease in man was explained. After the exhaustive manner in which the the records of the Egyptian civilization— subject of homoepathic magic has been records so much more copious in many treated by modern ethnologists and es- respects than those of India and Persia. pecially by Frazer4 in “The Golden Bough, ” There are so many points of resemblance only its manifest bearing on the origin of between the Vedic hymns of the Hindus and homoepathic medicine need be mentioned. the Persian Zend Avesta that we can scarcely There can scarcely be a doubt of the doubt from etymological evidence and from origin of the thought of Empedocles. He the imagery set forth in them as well as gave it a refinement and an adaptation to from much other internal evidence, that the more intelligent practice of medicine they issued from the same racial mentality.6 which even in comparatively modern times But when we come to the question of has given ample evidence of its primitive chronology, to the question of the dates of vitality. The antithetic doctrine of AIc- these poems or of the many originally maeon, the reputed preceptor of Empedo- separated parts in them, we enter upon a cles, who taught that opposites are con- very ill-defined territory. We can easily tinually meeting and balancing one another discern traces of the tribes of the Medes and and that during this equilibrium we find Persians or of those tribes which dwelt in the human body in a state of health, the territory occupied by them when, illness resulting from its disturbance, has perhaps much later, they come into clearer also been an underlying concept of medical view of history. We find them in the Baby- men in modern as well as in ancient times. lonian records of the dynasty of Lagash It is rather remarkable that we find both (3000 b .c .); but there is no surety that of these persistent and somewhat oppos- these hill dwellers of Elam were the racial ing ideas making their first appearance in ancestors of the people over whom Cyrus medical history as originating with or the Great and Zoroaster wielded political rather as developed by a master and his and religious dominion. pupil in the Sicilian school of medicine. The language of the Zend Avesta is It is not, however, with the antecedents said7 to be a Medic tongue. The parts and the course of the medical doctrines of collected as a whole appear to have dated similars and opposites that I am here at least from the time of Zoroaster, whose concerned. It is more especially with the period seems to have been most plausibly turn Empedocles gave to theories of the fixed by Jackson8 in the seventh century elementary condition of matter—theories b .c . In the Zend Avesta9 it is directed that entertained by the Asiatic Greeks who had the human corpse be “laid on the summit preceded him—that his name is mentioned of a mountain top, far from man, from by historians. He laid the foundation of the water, from tree, from fire and from the humoral theory out of these previous earth itself.” Darmstetter remarks that the conceptions of elementary matter. I have rite seems to have been evoked by a primi- elsewhere5 briefly reviewed these and as tive idea which also seems to lie at the bot- briefly referred to the racial factor in their tom of sanitation and the prevention of development. I desire here to attempt to contagion. It originated from the notion trace them further back than the dates of the holiness of the elements—fire, earth assigned to Thales and his successors by and water. These life elements were thought referring to some of the evidence which to be contaminated by contact with the associates them first with the records we dead body. There are a number of other have of ancient oriental thought. passages which are referable to this under- I do not know of any trace of them in lying thought of the purity of the elements and a larger number implying the pollution monatomic and a monotheistic doctrine wrought by the dead animal body, itself which was rising in Asia Minor among the suggestive of the ideas with which Greek Greeks on the coast in opposition to the feeling was imbued. In the Persian devo- trinitarian of the Elamite hinterland. tional literature, then, we find not alone a Anaximander, Xenophanes and Heraclitus community of religious sentiment, which took wider views, but they, as well as was too universal to be distinctive, but in Anaximenes and Thales, all took a Unitarian an epoch which covers fairly well the lives view of the universe. Empedocles united all of the Asiatic Greek nature philosophers the elements into which matter had been and in the Zend Avesta, we find an assem- divided before him, into a tetralogy which blage of records in which the cosmogony had a long career in medicine. of the Greeks is intimated as occupying the We have thus far no great assurance that thoughts of an oriental people with which these ideas were distinctive of any nation- they were in direct political relation. It is ality or territory located in the Mediterra- true we have to be on our guard against the nean basin in the seventh century b .c . influence of Greek copyists on the question, These ideas may well have pervaded the but that does not obtrude itself. The air whole area and the chance preservation which Anaximenes included among the of fragments has led us to locate them geo- elements must have been contaminated by graphically and to attach them too exclu- dead bodies, however high their perch in the sively to certain personages. I think few will Persian cemeteries. The air we find included fail to agree that this tendency has existed, in the Hindu anthologies, but not in the perhaps to a large extent, in ancient history Persian. as it is still conceived. There are various indications in early I do not want to drift into the vexed Greek philosophy that the evolution of the question of Hindu claims to priority in the thought of the air as an element was a later arts of civilization.