Elements Aristotelian

In one sense, the creation of alchemy represented a step backward. The Egyptians had known seven metallic elements gold, silver, copper, tin, iron, lead, and mercury, which they associated with the seven planets (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, respectively). The Greeks, however, failed to recognize them as distinct elements. According to the Aristotelian theory, the metals were mixtures of the traditional four elements. This idea seemed to... 

The Sceptical Chymist, which is written in the form of a dialogue between five people (two of whom mysteriously disappear in the part following the second title page and reappear near the end of the book), is a discussion of the chemical philosophies that prevailed in Boyle s day, the Aristotelian theory of the four elements and Paracelsus s theory of three principles. Boyle discusses them in exhaustive detail in order to foster skepticism concerning them. 

Boyle expounded no alternative theory in The Sceptical Chymist. He concerned himself mainly with fostering skepticism about the Aristotelian and Paracelsian chemical philosophies. But the book is a science classic nevertheless. Little progress could be made in chemistry until those theories were overthrown. To be sure, Boyle failed to accomplish this and belief in the four-element theory, especially, lingered on for quite a long time. However, Boyle showed that it was possible to doubt long-established ideas, thus performing a great service to science. 

In 1661 Robert Boyle published The Sceptical Chymist, a book in which he discussed the criteria by which one can decide whether a substance is or is not a chemical element. He concluded that the four Aristotelian elements and three principles commonly accepted in his time cannot be real chemical elements since they can neither compose nor be... 

In closing this section, remember that Aristotle rejected the concept of atoms. Aristotle could not accept the idea of a void space and believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Furthermore, Aristotle did not consider internal structure. Substances contained their qualities and elements as a homogenous mixture. An Aristotelian would explain the reaction of hydrogen gas and oxygen gas to produce liquid water as... 

Which is why the plan of Etienne de Clave and a handful of other French intellectuals to debate a non-Aristotelian theory of the elements at the house of Parisian nobleman Fran9ois de Soucy in August 1624 was squashed by a parliamentary order, leading to the arrest of its ringleader. 

Even allowing for the ancient and medieval obsession with correspondences among the characteristics and creations of nature, there is clearly something about the four Aristotelian elements that has deep roots in human experience. The Canadian writer Northrop Frye writes The four elements are not a conception of much use to modern chemistry - that is, they are not the elements of nature. But... earth, air, water and fire are still the four elements of imaginative experience, and always will be. ... 

It may seem strange from today s perspective that several of the substances recognized today as elements - the metals gold, silver, iron, copper, lead, tin, and mercury - were not classed as such in antiquity, even though they could be prepared in an impressively pure state. Metallurgy is one of the most ancient of technical arts, and yet it impinged relatively little on the theories of the elements until after the Renaissance. Metals, with the exception of fluid mercury, were considered simply forms of Aristotelian earth . 

Some scholars have identified Jabir s sulphur and mercury with the Aristotelian opposites fire and water. One thing is sure they are not the yellow sulphur and the glistening, fluid mercury of the chemistry laboratory, which were known in more or less pure form even to the alchemists. Instead, these two principles were rather like the four classical elements ideal substances embodied only imperfectly in earthly materials. 

So the Jabirian system embraced the four classical elements and then buried them, just as the Aristotelian elements allowed but ignored the universalhyle. It marks the beginning of a tendency to pay lip service to Aristotle while getting on with more practical concerns about what things are made of. 

Lavoisier delivered two shocks to the Aristotelian elements. His experiments on water led him to conclude in 1783 that it is not a simple substance at all, not properly called an element, as had always been thought . And, concerning that other fluid element of antiquity, he announced that atmospheric air is composed of two elastic fluids of different and opposite qualities , which he called mephitic air and highly respirable air . Neither water nor air, in other words, is an element. 

Two additional material principles were added to the tria prima in the seventeenth century to form the five-principle view that characterized the iatrochemistry until the middle of the eighteenth century, when the four Aristotelian elements returned largely through the influence of the French chemist Pierre-Joseph Macquer. Robert P. Multhauf has given a splendid account of these pre-modern years in The Origins of Chemistry. ... 

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. 

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, water and earth had become the two passive elements in a way they were the old Aristotelian matter onto which various properties were impressed by the active elements, SPIRIT, FIRE, and SALT. Surely earth is the more passive, indeed, its recognition depends upon its extreme passivity. It is the otherwise undistinguished material that remains after a fire analysis, it s what doesn t distill off, called the caput mortuum. Later, some time in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, it was recognized that the solid residue of fire analysis had to be divided because it often contained salt, which could be... 

Macquer found in the four elements a convenient way to organize the great gains in the empirical knowledge of chemical behavior that had accumulated in the previous fifty years. Macquer s definition of chemistry is consonant with the iatrochemical tradition, but his constituent elements are different, and even though the four elements have names identical with the Aristotelian tradition, they were given an identity that was more operational than metaphysical. 

The mechanical philosophy now provided a new justification for the philosophical inability to isolate the elements. Bodies combined with one another because of some kind of attractive force, and the strongest such attraction would be between the two principles which combined to form a mixt. The force between two mixts would be much smaller because much of that attractive force had been used up, so to speak, in forming the mixts themselves. Thus there came to be a rule that the more compounded a body was, the easier it would be to decompound it. Running that rule in the other direction, the simpler a body was, the harder it would be to decompound it further. The only way to decompound a mixt containing only two principles, was to offer another mixt with which the principles in the first could exchange partners. There was nothing that could take one principle from another and leave it in isolated state. Whatever the origin of this idea, it readily served as a mechanistic rationalization for what had been the traditional view from Aristotelian times, that the elements cannot be isolated in material reality. 

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). 

The above is a typical illustration of many confused notions of the ancients due to the fact that they possessed no knowledge of the elementary constituents of substances. The criteria for classification and nomenclature were based upon superficial phenomena, or upon the sources or the applicability of the substances to particular purposes. So long as the. concept prevailed that all substances consisted of variable quantities of the four Aristotelian elements, and that their properties were determined by the proportion of these elements, it was not possible for them to conceive of the possibility of a method of analysis based upon elementary compositions of bodies as understood in modern times. 

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. 

The Aristotelian theory of the elements according to which any element might be changed to another by changing one of its inherent qualities, hot, dry, etc., to its opposite, apparently helped to keep alive with the alchemists the hope of changing base metals into precious metals, a belief in the first instance dependent on failure to understand... 

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. 

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