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. At best, the evidences development, at first associated with the for and against such assertions are only too more ancient fire or heat, so prominent in meagre, and at any rate I am entirely too the Sun worships of which Zoroaster was an much of an amateur in such matters to exponent. If we rightly infer from the present them properly. The Hindu claims he accounts of his experiment with the clepsy- originated Greek philosophy, medicine and dra, it was Empedocles who first incident- art. His western rivals deny it, and since ally demonstrated the reality of its existence, they are now his lords paramount they are but there can be no question that in theory, pleased to say they have the best of the at least, the knowledge of it was a part of argument and I believe them. Most of the the body of scientific belief existing before white Aryans believe that Alexander carried him. However, we find earth, fire and water these arts to Hindus a thousand years and as the holy elements in the “Zend Avesta” more after the first Aryan flood surged and these, with the air, are the tetrad out of through the foothills of the Himalayas into which, with the tetrad of the qualities, India. The Rig Veda, critics think, bears Empedocles constructed the lines along indubitable internal traces of that so- which the humoral theory developed in the called Aryan invasion. Accepting this for writings of Hippocrates, and especially in what it may be worth as an historical the works of Galen. We may see in the inference and without going into the ques- advocacy of a single element by one or tion discussed by Hewitt10 and others as to other of the nature philosophers—water by the amount of culture the white men found Thales, fire by Heraclitus—the tendency to a there, it is quite sufficient for our purposes to take note that many commentators trace thousands of years before Thales. We can in the “Rig Veda” the southward progress hardly doubt that the Rig Veda long ante- of these tribes. Very much older than the dates him and the Zend Avesta is at least Zend Avesta these ideas appear in the early as old as Heraclitus. Had the Medes and books of the Rig Veda, in which the most Persians discussed the elementary con- striking resemblance to the Zend Avesta is stitution of matter before Cyrus the Great? to be found. This resemblance is of such a Had the Aryans talked of it on their way to nature as to suggest that at the time the India? Hardly. But we may be permitted to migrating tribes or prehistoric army left the conjecture that the nature philosophy, Medes and Persians behind them they all from which the medicine of Empedocles worshipped a Sun God as a beneficent being. flowed and which was the starting point of Fire was a god to the men from the Boreal rational cosmical analysis, was the seculari- regions of the Danube and the Russians zation of religious ideas which permeated and he remained such in the cool uplands the shores and the distant highlands of beyond the Caspain Sea; but when the tide western Asia, probably when Babylon and rolled on into the torrid zones of India to the Nineveh were in their glory. The gods of south he became something very much like earth and sky, of the waters, the winds and a devil. the sun, are found in the polytheistic There, as in the arid plains of Babylon, it galaxy of most primitive peoples. The was water that was a god. The striking forces of nature usually have undergone benefits, which the forces of nature confer deification by primitive man. When the upon man, bring him to deify, worship and Greek philosophers faced the riddle of the implore them in their personified concep- universe, the fire, the water, the earth and tions. Ea was first a local god of Eridu on the air were conceptions which had stirred the Persian Gulf. The city was the seaport the religious emotions of the preceding of the primitive Chaldeans and it was generations of men, and the first step owing to this, Jastrow thinks, that the god toward rational analysis was the division became the personification of the watery of the universe into the elements familiar element itself. However, the stimulus which to their own minds and to those of their preserved and perpetuated his eminence hearers by this ancestry of thought and by as a god in the plains of Mesopotamia was social environment. A tendency to mono- the marvel of the recurring vegetation theism has been noticed by ethnologists which followed his yearly visit to the among primitive men of an early stage of parched wastes. The Chaldeans turned to culture, often, however, it is a later develop- to him for medical relief just as the Hindus ment. It is usually an indication of a did to Amrit. trend toward the rationalistic rather than toward the emotional confines of religion. Amrit is in the waters, in the waters there is This seems to have been the marked healing balm.11 The waters have their healing power; the waters tendency of the nature philosophy—the sub- drive disease away.12 stitution of a monovalent elementary uni- verse of matter for a polyvalent theurgy. Citations from the Babylonian as well as The idea of the elementary division of from the Hindu record might be multi- matter was fused, especially in the teach- plied. What conclusions are we to draw ings of Heraclitus, who so profoundly from them? influenced Plato, with a conception which We well know from archaeological data is essentially one of mutation, the passing that the Babylonian testimony was extant of one form of matter into another—an idea with which modern experimental phy- of Egypt, still stand four square to all the sics has familiarized us concerning matter winds that blow, the most solid foundation, vastly more elementary than that of the as the ages have proved, of which the mind nature philosophy. The thought that we of man could conceive. When an Egyptian dwell not in a static universe but in one of doctor told his patient to take his medicine, change was based on the visible change of it was not t.i.d., in the rule of the Trinity, ice, water and vapor, and upon many the “third time for luck,” but four times other phenomena where the change is less a day. Ebers early noticed that with the real than apparent. weights there constantly occurred in the I do not perceive that this latter aspect of hieratic scripts the four square numbers, cosmic analysis receives any emphasis in the 8, 16, 32, 64. Through the Arabians the fragments of Empedocles. Sicily, within English standards, which Herbert Spencer the scope of our knowledge, has always so stubbornly upheld, blind to all argument served as the basin for the backwash of the in the face of his mental prepossessions and human race from the teeming populations his heredity of thought, are still with us. of the African continent, almost in sight of The grain and the drachm, the inch and the her shores across the Mediterranean. It is in foot, are derived from these old divisions of the medicine of the Sicilian school we Egyptian weight and measure. We find find the plainest traces of Egyptian culture. this mental preoccupation with four among Elsewhere2 I have pointed out that the the Egyptians and among some modern tetrad of the elements in the philosophy of African tribes. With the former it was Empedocles is matched not only by the almost as frequent as the number seven tetrad of the qualities, but of the colors and among the Babylonians. The clinging to the ■of the humors. I have urged that blood, number seven in magic is a very curious phlegm and bile fall more or less naturally and a very ancient trait, which has never into the category of the body fluids as been satisfactorily explained even by Ros- they occur to the mind of the medical man, cher.13 In the Egyptian phylacteries,14 the but it seems as though dividing the bile repetition of an incantation four times into black and yellow, in spite of our is constantly enjoined on the officiating student pre-occupations with bilirubin and priests. The intrusion of the Asiatic seven biliverdin, was an artificial effort towards a in these magic formulas is also very fre- tetralogy rather than a natural analysis. quent, but the number four for Egypt and We might naturally ask, as did some an- Africa generally, like the number five cient critics, among them Hippocrates, among the Chinese, is distinctive because of why precisely four qualities? Why not three the emphasis it receives. The famous Kyphi pair or eight definitions of the state of prescription, which has been identified in matter appreciable to the senses? It seems the papyri found in modern times, is care- as though some deep rooted heredity of fully stated by Plutarch15 to have had six- thought must have Iain like an occult and teen ingredients, “being the square of a unconscious mental pressure behind this square, and making the only square surface preoccupation with the number four. which has a periphery equal to its area.” Now Egyptian medicine, like Egyptian Whatever that means it appears to have had architectural supports for the vault of a profound significance for some. The idea heaven, was steeped in that numeral. was found of interest by Plutarch, and Four pillars, one each, to the north, south, foreshadows the Abracadabra of the magic cast and west, held up the roof of the sky of the Middle Ages. By careful examination over their heads. Its buildings, the pyramids of the Papyrus Ebers Luring16 found there a reckoning for the human body which the journeys of Pythagoras, Democritus showed 48 metu or channels which were of and Plato and cites them as evidence of such great importance in the physiological the curiosity good men felt and the exertions theories of ancient Egyptian medicine. they made to gather knowledge. The indi- For these reasons von Oefele 17 supposes cations of the frequent intercommunication that the cardinal number of the body of men of learning, from the community of fluids in the humors of Greek medicine can views held at given periods among various be traced back to Egypt. The implication nationalities around the Mediterranean, can of Empedocles and the Sicilian school in not be ignored; the evidence of the locali- this transmission seems very probable, zation of certain methods of thought, and the influence of Africa upon a doctrine on the other hand, and the specific deriva- which was fundamentally of Greek-Asiatic tion of certain ideas by the Greeks from origin is as obvious. the Asiatics can not be denied. We may briefly glance at the doctrine One who has grown familiar with the of pores and particles, held by Alcmaeon museum specimens of the sculpture, or and Empedocles, in its relation to the who has studied the illustrations on the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus. It walls of Nineveh and the temples of the seems chiefly an application of the atomic Nile, or even one who has only a more or less theory to animal physiology. The men whose vivid recollection of the reproductions of names are thus associated are, approxi- these in books will be struck by certain mately, contemporaries, though the elders, details concerning the remnants of the Alcmaeon and Leucippus, have such a vague evolutionary doctrine of Empedocles. Some chronology we are not able clearly to of this art, especially the Egyptian, is associate Pythagoras with their ideas. He of a very high order measured by our own is credited with wide travels and long standards. Accustomed, as we are, to the visits to Egypt and Babylon but these winged celestial choir of our own religious rumors are still more vague than the chro- art, familiar as we are with the copies of the nology of his life span. At any rate the scarcely less monstrous centaurs of the surmise is warranted that he was an Greeks and the pinions of victory we really interpreter to the island and European have no right to the feeling of revolt that mainland Greeks, much influenced by the moves us when we first see the winged already domesticated Orphic mysticism of bulls, the hawk-headed men, and the other oriental thought. We can only surmise that theriomorphic creations pictured in Meso- the rise of the ancient atomic theory, potamia and Luxor by the artists of like that of the modern, was due to the Tiglathpileser and Rameses II. necessity in cosmical analysis for the min- These may be seen on turning the pages ute divisibility of matter. It may be of of the first illustrated work on Egyptian interest to note that Diogenes Laertius, or Mesopotamian archaeology which comes Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, and Aristotle to hand. We can scarcely doubt that this before them, gave particulars of the life of tendency of oriental thought had its in- Democritus,18 all the more valuable because fluence upon Empedocles and led him to they do not agree in some details. He also, that fantastic scheme of evolution, to though a native of Abdera in Thrace, is which I have alluded in a former article,1 credited with extensive travels in Asia, whereby disjointed members were attracted and his father is said to have entertained to or repelled from one another by Love Xerxes on his march with his army of and Strife, until forms fit for survival were invasion. Cicero19 refers to the stories of attained. It was a scheme of evolution which started at a more advanced stage Orientals and the nature philosophers. One than our own theory of cellular synthesis, of the interpreters of their ideas, if not the but the general outlines of the thought are chief link between prehistoric thought and the same. The drying up of the mud, the Hippocrates, was Empedocles. change from the sea to the dry land along 1 Wright, Jonathan. Ann . Med . Hist ., ii, No. 2, some of the low lying coasts of the eastern 126. Mediterranean, especially, too, those at the 2 Am. Med., March, 1920. head of the Persian Gulf, has been extreme, 3 N. York M. J., Sept. 20, 1919. and easily attracts the attention of modern 4 The Magic Art and Evolution of Kings. London observers. We find it, therefore, quite natural and New York, 1913. 5 Scient. Month., August, 1920. that Anaximander drew conclusions that 6 Rapson, E. T. Ancient India from the Earliest ocean life, left on the bottom by the retreat- Times to the First Century, A. D. Cambridge, 1914. ing sea, occasionally was changed into land 7 Browne, Edward G. A Literary History of forms. This seems to have been the thought Perisa. London, 1902. of Empedocles, also, as it evidently furnished 8 Jackson, A. V. Williams. On the date of Zoroas- the basis of the idea of Thales that the land ter. J. Am. Orient. Soc., 1896, xvii, 1. Zoroaster, the Prophet of Ancient Iran. New is born from the sea, that water is changed York, 1899. into earth in the mutation of the elements 9 Zend Avesta, part 1. Tr. by James Darmstet- as conceived by others. Considerations of ter. Oxford, 1880, Ixxxxviii, 10. this kind, I think, are helpful to us in 10 Hewitt J. F. Notes on the early history of realizing that not from primitive man Northern India. J. Roy. Asiatic Soc., Great Britain alone, but from his own environment, from and Ireland, 1888, xx; 1889, XXU 1908, xxii. 11 The Hymns of the Rig Veda. Tr. by T. H. his contact with contemporary thought, Griffith. 1889-92, 4 vols., Book 1, Hymn xxiii. Empedocles had an opportunity to absorb 12 Idem.” Book X, Hymn cxxxvii. his ideas of the cosmos. For primitive man 13 Roscher, W. R. Abhandlungen der philologisch- too had his evolutionary thoughts. We read historischen Klasse der koniglichen Sachischen from Frazer20 that some of the Samoans Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften. 1903, 1904, 1913. believed that men were evolved from grubs, 14 Ebers, Georg.: Papyrus Ebers, das hermetische Buch uber die Artzneimittel der alten Aegypter in themselves born from the rotting roots of hieratischen Schrift Herausgegeben. Leipzig, 1875. trees. 15 Plutarch. Symposiacs—Isis and Osiris. Tr. I should go beyond the intent of this by Goodwin. Boston, 1875, 5 vols., iv, 65. paper if I were to dwell further upon early 16 Luring, H. L. Die fiber die Kentnisse der alten Greek philosophy. Marvellous as was its Aegypter berichtenden Papyri. Leipzig, 1888. development and momentous as was its 17 Von Oefele, F. Aegyptische Pneumalehre im Auslande. (Reprint.) influence upon evolution of modern medical 18 Smith. “Dictionary of Greek and Roman science, it did not spring spontaneously out Biography and Mythology. 3 vols., 1873. of the mud, as did the crawling creatures 19 Cicero. “De finibus bonorum et malorum.” studied by Anaximander, nor was there Book V, Chap. 19. an absence of transitional periods between 20 Frazer, Sir James George. “Folk Lore in the primitive magic and the medicine of Hippo- Old Testament.” 3 vols., London & New York, 1918. See also (1) Windeband, W. History of Ancient crates. These transitional periods, it is true, Philosophy; (2) Burnett, John. Early Greek Philoso- are far from clear to us, but we see them phy. 1908, 2 ed.; (3) Gomperz, Theodor. Greek occupied by the mental activities of ancient Thinkers. 1908-12, 4 vols.