Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/189

Rh Agrigentum, and of the almost miraculous restoration to life of a woman who had long lain in a death-like trance. Legends stranger still told of his disappearance from among men. Empedocles, according to one story, was one midnight, after a feast held in his honour, called away in a blaze of glory to the gods; according to another, he had only thrown himself into the crater of Etna, in the hope that men, ﬁnding no traces of his end, would suppose him translated to heaven. But his hopes were cheated by the volcano, which cast forth his brazen sandals, and betrayed his secret.

As his history is uncertain, so his doctrines are hard to put together. He does not belong to any one definite school. While, on one hand, he combines much that had been suggested by Parmenides, Pythagoras, and the Ionic school, he has germs of truth that Plato and Aristotle afterwards developed. There are, according to Empedocles, four ultimate kinds of things, four primal divinities, of which are made all structures in the world—fire, air, water, earth. These four elements are eternally brought into union, and eternally parted from each other, by two divine beings or powers, love and hatred—an attractive and a repulsive force which the ordinary eye can see working amongst men, but which really pervade the whole world. According to the different proportions in which these four indestructible and unchangeable matters are combined with each other is the difference of the organic structure produced; e.g., ﬂesh and blood are made of equal parts of all four elements, whereas bones are one-half ﬁre, one-fourth earth, and one-fourth water. It is in the aggregation and segregation of elements thus arising that Empedocles, like the atomists, ﬁnds the real process which corresponds to what is popularly termed growth, increase, or decrease. Nothing new comes or can come into being; the only change that can occur is a change in the juxtaposition of element with element.

Empedocles apparently regarded love and discord as alternately holding the empire over things,—neither, however, being ever quite absent. As the best and original state, he seems to have conceived a period when love was predominant, and all the elements formed one great sphere or globe. Since that period discord had gained more sway; and the actual world was full of contrasts and oppositions, due to the combined action of both principles. His theory attempted to explain the separation of elements, the formation of earth and sea, of sun and moon, of atmosphere. But the most interesting and most matured part of his views dealt with the ﬁrst origin of plants and animals, and with the physiology of man. As the elements (his deities) entered into combinations, there appeared quaint results—heads without necks, arms without shoulders. Then as these fragmentary structures met, there were seen horned heads on human bodies, bodies of oxen with men’s heads, and ﬁgures of double sex. But most of these products of natural forces disappeared as suddenly as they arose; only in those rare cases where the several parts were found adapted to each other, and casual member ﬁtted into casual member, did the complex structures thus formed last. Thus from spontaneous aggregations of casual aggregates, which suited each other as if this had been intended, did the organic universe originally spring. Soon various inﬂuences reduced the creatures of double sex to a male and a female, and the world was replenished with organic life.

As man, animal, and plant are composed of the same elements in different proportions, there is an identity of nature in them all. They all have sense and understanding; in man, however, and especially in the blood at his heart, mind has its peculiar seat. But mind is always dependent upon the body, and varies with its changing constitution. Hence the precepts of morality are with Empedocles largely dietetic.

Knowledge is explained by the principle that the several elements in the things outside us are perceived by the corresponding elements in ourselves. We know only in so far as we have a cognate nature within us to the object of knowledge. Like is known by like. The whole body is full of pores, and hence respiration takes place over the whole frame. But in the organs of sense these pores are specially adapted to receive the effluxes which are continually rising from bodies around us; and in this way perception is somewhat obscurely explained.

It is not easy to harmonize these quasi-scientiﬁc theories with the theory of transmigration of souls which Empedocles seems to expound. Probably the doctrine that the divinity (δαίμων) passes from element to element, nowhere finding a home, is a mystical way of teaching the continued identity of the principles which are at the bottom of every phase of development from inorganic nature to man. At the top of the scale are the prophet and the physician, those who have best learned the secret of life; they are next to the divine. One law, an identity of elements, pervades all nature; existence is one from end to end; the plant and the animal are links in a chain where man is a link too; and even the distinction between male and female is transcended. The beasts are kindred with man; he who eats their ﬂesh is not much better than a cannibal.

Looking at the opposition between these and the ordinary opinions, we are not surprised that Empedocles notes the limitation and narrowness of human perceptions. We see, he says, but a part, and fancy that we have grasped the whole. But the senses cannot lead to truth; thought and reﬂection must look at the thing on every side. It is the business of a philosopher, while he lays bare the fundamental difference of elements, to display the identity that subsists between what seem unconnected parts of the universe.

(W. W.) 

EMPEROR (imperator, αὐτοκράτωρ, Kaiser), a formerly borne by the s of the  (see ), and since their time by a variety of other potentates. The term imperator seems to have originally belonged to every  who received from the  the imperium (i.e., the power of the  and  to command in ). It was, therefore, in strictness not a but a descriptive. Towards the end of the, however, it had become rather a special of  bestowed by the acclamations of a victorious  on their , or by a  of the  as a reward for distinguished services (see Tac., Ann., iii. 74; Cic., Philipp., xiv. 4), and in this sense it continued to be used during the earlier period of the. , however, assumed it (under a of the ) in a different sense, viz., as a permanent, or rather as a part of his  (prænomen), denoting the absolute  power which had come into his hands; and it was given by the , in like manner and with a like signiﬁcance, to  (see Dion Cassius, lii. 41, liii. 17.)  and  refused it; but under their successors it soon became established as the regular ofﬁcial  of the  of the , ultimately superseding the  of princeps. When became the sole  of the, imperator was rendered sometimes by βασιλεύς and sometimes by αὐτοκράτωρ, the former word being the usual designation of a , the latter specially denoting that ic power which the imperator held, and being infect the ofﬁcial  of imperator.