This page has been validated.
218
NOTES.
[BK. I.

what is derived from heat. The visual organ is said to be of water, and to see objects, not as being water but, as being diaphanous, as this quality belongs to air as well as water, but then water is more protective and condensed than air, and, therefore, the pupil and the eye are con-
stituted of water. These are rude theories, no doubt, and sorry substitutes for the knowledge of the brain and its system; but philosophy cannot rest upon a confession of ignorance, and this hypothesis, unsatisfactory as it may now seem, was for ages the admitted theory of sentient perception. But this theory of Empedocles, however otherwise faulty, may well be supposed, without violence to the text, to convey in the terms στοργὴ and νεῖχος, a knowledge, or perception rather, of attraction and repulsion; and an assumption of these principles may be traced in most of the systems of that time con-
cerning elementary combinations. This must be main-
tained with some reserve, however, as some have given a more literal version of the terms in amor and discordia, or lis, which, as moral or sentient qualities, seem to be without any relation to elementary combinations. The latin version of the phrase is, Terram nam terra, lympha cognoscimus undam, ætheraque æthere; sane ignis dignoscitur igne; sic et amore amor, ac tristi discordia lite; and the French is, "Par la terre nous voyons la terre; l'eau par l'eau; par l'air, l'air divin; par le feu, le feu qui consume; par l'amour, l'amour; et la discorde par la discorde funeste."