Aristotle four elements

Aristotle recognised the importance of water by including it among the four elements along with fire, earth and air. In its many different functions, water is essential to the earth as we know it. Life critically depends on the presence of water. It is the medium of cells and is essential for the structure of proteins, cell membranes and DNA ". It has been estimated that more than 99 % of the molecules in the human body are actually water molecules". ... 

In 340 bce, Aristotle (384—322 bce) published Meteorologica, in which he postulated that the Earths matter is composed of four elements—earth, water, air, and fire. His speculations... 

Empedocles s theory of the four elements was to dominate Western thought for nearly two and a half millennia. It wasn t until the eighteenth century that it was overthrown, because it was endorsed by Aristotle, whose authority was so great that his dogmas often impeded scientific progress. Aristotle added a fifth element, of which the heavenly bodies were supposedly composed. But he agreed with Empedocles that all earthly objects were made of earth, air, fire, and water. 

Aristotle elaborated on the theory by assigning qualities to the four elements. Fire was hot and dry, air was hot and moist, water was cold and moist, and earth was cold and dry. This implied that it was... 

Using the four qualities of matter and four elements as a starting point, Aristotle developed logical explanations to explain numerous natural observations. Both the properties of matter and the changes in matter could be explained using Aristotle s theory. 

But want of originality did not help Etienne de Clave. His idea was heretical because it contradicted the system of elements propounded by the ancient Greeks and endorsed by Aristotle, their most influential philosopher. Aristotle took this scheme from his teacher Plato, who in turn owed it to Empedocles, a philosopher who lived during Athens s Golden Age of Periclean democracy in the fifth century bc. According to Empedocles there were four elements earth, air, fire, and water. 

Empedocles four elements do not represent a multiplication of the prote hyle, but rather a gloss that conceals its complications. Aristotle agreed that ultimately there was only one primal substance, but it was too remote, too unknowable, to serve as the basis for a philosophy of matter. So he accepted Empedocles elements as a kind of intermediary between this imponderable stuff and the tangible world. This instinct to reduce cosmic questions to manageable ones is one reason why Aristotle was so influential. 

Aristotle believed that the four elements of Empedocles were each imbued with two qualities, by means of which they could be interconverted... 

The conventional four-element theory claimed that all four of Aristotle s elements are present in all substances. But Boyle observes that some materials cannot be reduced to the classical elementary components, however they are manipulated by Vulcan , the heat of a furnace ... 

In antiquity, problems relating to chemistry were approached by two philosophies held to be mutually exclusive. The compositional view is best illustrated by the four elements as developed by Aristotle. The opposing view of structure, represented by the atomic theory of Democritus, lost out in antiquity because its materialism left no room for the spiritual. The so-... 

Aristotle s response to the question of what is permanent behind observed changes in the natural world, offered a single undifferentiated but permanent matter. This matter, however, carries properties which give it form, forms manifested fundamentally in the four elements, earth, water, AIR, and FIRE. 

By the end of the seventeenth century, the old traditional elements from Aristotle had been either abandoned by the new Paracelsian iatrochymists or absorbed under new terminology. Paracelsus tria prima of mercury, SULPHUR, and salt became the new set of elements or principles, each more narrowly focused on a single property than had been the four elements of Aristotle. Yet the tria prima clearly derived from the older tradition. Salt assumed the role of the Aristotelian earth, while sulphur took that of FIRE. The mercury of Paracelsus rather absorbed the characteristics of both AIR and water, becoming the carrier of all spiritual, i.e., volatile qualities of the products of fire analysis. Mercury also carried the basic metallic properties from the mercury/sulphur theory of metals brought to the Latin West from Arabic alchemy. 

Aristotle of Stageiros (384-322 BCE) did not agree with his teacher s geometric bodies for the different elements. He rejected the Democritian atoms in which matter was considered a principle but form was a secondary characteristic. Nor did he accept the existence of a void. According to the Aristotelian view, the four elements arose from the action on primordial matter by pairs of qualities (warm + dry, fire, warm + moist, air, cold + dry, earth, cold + moist, water). He introduced another element, ether, as a divine substance of which the heavens and stars are made (23). 

It is not possible to state whether the Hindu concepts of the four elements or of the five elements antedated the four elements of Empedocles or the five elements of Phila-laos or Aristotle. This is largely because chronological data rarely enter into Hindu literature and the dates of the early classics are difficult to determine, as also the extent of changes and interpolation by later copyists. 

Adopted with some important changes by Plato and Aristotle, the doctrine of the four elements became the generally accepted theory of matter until the rival doctrine of the three principles, the tra prima of Paracelsus, appeared, in the sixteenth century. 

The four elements as such are subject to change. There must be something, however, back of these that is eternal and unchangeable. What this is, with Aristotle, it is not easy to understand. It is apparently not merely space as Plato seems to think, but something with at least latent power. It may be considered not as matter, for then it would be only another form of matter perhaps the nearest interpretation is that it is the potentiality of matter. 

This curious notion of the nature of the elements and the fact that there are just four elements in the terrestrial zone of the universe, Aristotle arrives at somewhat in this way. The only absolute criterion of the existence of matter is the sense of touch. Sight and hearing are subjective phenomena dependent upon our senses, liable to errors of interpretation. The phenomena which affect the tactile sense may be analyzed into four elements, hot and cold, moist and dry. All other properties, color, odor, roughness, smoothness, he asserts are either nonessential or combinations of these four. From these four properties there may be made six pairs ... 

When these four elements combine to form the many substances that make up the material universe, their properties then blend into a composite in which the elements lose their identity. Aristotle makes it clear that he considers compound bodies homogeneous even in their smallest conceivable parts, so that the ultimate particle of flesh is still flesh. This is also the idea of Anaxagoras, already cited. To these simple substances of like particles Aristotle gives the name homoiomere. It logically follows that the con cept of the four elements of Aristotle differs fundamentally from that of Empedocles, for the smallest particle of a given substance would, by the theory of Empedocles, be... 

The above is not a complete statement of the theory of matter of Aristotle, but will, it is hoped, give an idea of the elaborateness and complexity of the Aristotelian concept, and serve to illustrate how far removed was his method of developing the theory from the inductive methods of modern science. The concept of the four elements as qualitative factors in the constitution of other bodies, with their inherent forces of heat, cold, moist, dry, became accepted by later centuries as basic truth. His notion of a fifth element, variously interpreted, also held a place in the thought of later times, but his more complex notions of the nature of the elements and matter had little influence on the later development of natural philosophy. 

While the personification of the four elements as deities may well have been in Egyptian mythology earlier than Aristotle, yet the description of qualities of the elements are manifestly Aristotelian, though inadequately reproduced. That religious beliefs of oriental origin in which the elements are personified are older than Aristotle, and even than Empedocles, the earliest proponent of the four elements as constituents of matter, is evident because Herodotus (484 424 B.C.), a writer contemporaneous with Empedocles, in discussing the customs of the Persians, states that they make sacrifices to Jupiter which is the name they give to the whole circuit of the firmament, and also to the sun, moon, to earth, fire, water and wind. 

The chemistry of the ancients, as expressed by the writers from Theophrastus to Pliny and Dioscorides, was thoroughly practical. Their theories of the origin and changes of matter were based on their interpretation of the four elements as constituents of matter, principally as formulated by Plato and Aristotle. 

It will be remembered that Aristotle also conceives of the four elements being transmutable and as substances are made up of these four elements, it is not difficult to understand how the followers of these theories entertained the possibilities of almost any kind of change in the nature of substances if the appropriate agencies or influences might be supplied. 

Aristotle in characterizing the properties of the four elements laid great emphasis upon their four constituting qualities—hot, cold, moist and dry. That Plato also associated these properties with the elements is evidenced from the following passage concerning the causes of disease. 

But. Democritus didn t get very far with his idea. The greatest Greek philosopher of the day, Aristotle, held out for the four elements. And because of his great reputation this false idea governed the thinking of scientists for two thousand years — because no one dared suggest that he knew better than the great Aristotle ... 

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