Page:Early Greek philosophy by John Burnet, 3rd edition, 1920.djvu/249

Rh as formerly in that of Love." In another, he tells us that Empedokles omits the generation of things in the period of Love, just because it is unnatural to represent this world, in which the elements are separate, as arising from things in a state of separation. This remark can only mean that Empedokles assumed the increase of Strife, or, in other words, that he represented the course of evolution as the disintegration of the Sphere, not as the coming together of things from a state of separation. That is what we should expect, if we are right in supposing that the problem he set himself to solve was the origin of this world from the Sphere of Parmenides, and it is also in harmony with the tendency of such speculations to represent the world as getting worse rather than better. We have only to consider, then, whether the details of the system bear out this general view.

112. To begin with the Sphere, in which the "four roots of all things" are mixed together, we note that it is called a god in the fragments just as the elements are, and that Aristotle more than once refers to it in the same way. we