He was the founder of the Italian school of medicine, and the medical school which sprang from
him influenced both Plato and Aristotle. According to Burnet (p. 234), it affected the whole
tendency of scientific and philosophical thinking.
All this shows the scientific vigour of his time, which was not equalled in the later ages of Greece.
I come now to his cosmology. It was he, as already mentioned, who established earth, air, fire, and
water as the four elements (though the word "element" was not used by him). Each of these was
everlasting, but they could be mixed in different proportions, and thus produce the changing
complex substances that we find in the world. They were combined by Love and separated by
Strife. Love and Strife were, for Empedocles, primitive substances on a level with earth, air, fire,
and water. There were periods when Love was in the ascendant, and others when Strife was the
stronger. There had been a golden age when Love was completely victorious. In that age, men
worshipped only the Cyprian Aphrodite. The changes in the world are not governed by any
purpose, but only by Chance and Necessity. There is a cycle: when the elements have been
thoroughly mixed by Love, Strife gradually sorts them out again; when Strife has separated them,
Love gradually reunites them. Thus every compound substance is temporary; only the elements,
together with Love and Strife, are everlasting.
There is a similarity to Heraclitus, but a softening, since it is not Strife alone, but Strife and Love
together, that produce change. Plato couples Heraclitus and Empedocles in the Sophist (242):
There are Ionian, and in more recent time Sicilian, muses, who have arrived at the conclusion that
to unite the two principles (of the One and the Many), is safer, and to say that being is one and
many, and that these are held together by enmity and friendship, ever parting, ever meeting, as the
severer Muses assert, while the gentler ones do not insist on the perpetual strife and peace, but
admit a relaxation and alternation of them; peace and unity sometimes prevailing under the sway
of Aphrodite, and then again plurality and war, by reason of a principle of strife.
Empedocles held that the material world is a sphere; that in the Golden Age Strife was outside and
Love inside; then, gradually, Strife