Elements of Aristotle

A The five elements of Aristotle cube or hexahedron (earth), tetrahedron (fire), octahedron (air), icosahedron (water), and dodecahedron (aether). 

Thus the traditional elements of Aristotle become for the iatrochymists the matrices of creation rather than the components of corporial bodies of chemical interest. 

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. 

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... 

Chemistry, as we know it today, deals with the stmcture, composition, and properties of substances, and the way they react under different conditions. Before coming to any general conclusion, a chemist will repeat an experiment many times under identical conditions, and will keep careful records of the results. The alchemist s only interest in substances until the 16th century was as the possible ingredients of the Philosopher s Stone. Alchemists were not concerned to examine them further because they had a ready-made answer as to the nature of substances— first in the theory of the four elements of Aristotle, and... 

The beginnings of all material things, Paracelsus asserted, were not the elements of Aristotle (earth, air, fire, and water) but the three principles, or tria prima, of Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury. These were as much symbolic categories as rudimentary components of matter. Salt represented an unburnable, nonvolatile ash or earth Sulphur stood for combustible natures and Mercury denoted the volatile and metallic constitutions of bodies. Creation of the physical world was itself a process of separation. The mother and parent of all generation, he proclaimed, has always been, even from the very beginning, separation. Separation was the first divine act (hght separated from darkness), and as such was a miracle... 

Boyle s arguments were especially aimed at the four elements of Aristotle and the three principles (Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury) of the Paracelsians. Anyone could claim to have resolved bodies into sulphur, salt, and mercury, but what types of substances were these Did sulphur mean the marketplace stuff, or was it a reference to a kind of combustible principle Moreover, he noted, there was no real agreement among Paracelsian chemists as to which properties these principles were responsible for in mixed bodies. I could easily prosecute the imperfections of the vulgar chymists philosophy, says Boyle, and shew you, that by going about to explicate by their three principles. .. all the abstruse properties of mixed bodies [and] even such obvious and more familiar phenomena as fluidity and firmness. . . chymists will be much more likely to discredit themselves and their hypothesis, than satisfy an intelligent inquirer after truth (pp. 163-164). 

It was as a physicist that Boyle first achieved scientific fame through his studies of the properties of air. He used an improved version of the air pump first constructed by the German physicist Otto von Guericke, and worked with Robert Hooke (1635-1703), who had become his assistant. These studies led to the formulation of Boyle s law (the volume of a gas varies inversely with the pressure), as well as the discovery that air (in contrast to vacuum) is able to propagate sound. He also seems to have realized that air was necessary in order to sustain the life of an animal and the burning of a candle. In his most influential chemical publication, The Sceptical Chymist (1661), he refutes not only the elements of Aristotle (earth, air, fire and water) but also the ideas put forward by Paracelsus that mercury, sulfur and salt were the principles whose proportions in the living organism determined health and disease. 

Robert Boyle (1627-1691) was one of the pioneering chemists of this era. A major problem that occupied his interest was elucidating what really constituted an element. He showed through experimentation that the four elements of Aristotle and the three principles of the alchemists (mercury, sulfur, and salt) did not deserve to be called elements or principles at all, since none of them could be extracted from bodies, e.g., metals. He defined an element as follows ... 

The nature of the philosopher s stone depends on the positive interaction (+) of Sun, Moon and Hermes Trismegistos, the mythical founder of alchemy, whose name appears on the Rosetta stone and who represents the syncretic link between the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian moon god Thot. Active masculine qualities are separated from passive feminine qualities. The relationship between Avicenna s two-element model and the four elements of Aristotle is shown. The total pattern resembles the incommensurable nesting of Platonic solids within the celestial sphere. 

The result of the rejection of the four elements of Aristotle was the introduction of dozens of others. Chemists used their new tools of measurement and thought to discover new elements and new laws governing their interactions. Chemistry became a science chemical reactions became controllable chemical production became an industry and the chemist became a professional. 

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 shared Anaximander s view that the qualities heat, cold, wetness, and dryness are the keys to transformation, and also to our experience of the elements. It is because water is wet and cold that we can experience it. Each of the elements, in Aristotle s ontology, is awarded two of these qualities, so that one of them can be converted to another by inverting one of the qualities. Wet, cold water becomes dry, cold earth by turning wetness to dryness (Fig.l). 

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 ... 

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. 

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. 

These beliefs led to the creation of an extensive development of folk medicine that prevailed for many centuries. However, with the publication in 1661 of Robert Boyle s The Skeptical Chemist, the foundations for the application of chemistry to the development of drugs were laid down. The archaic ideas of Aristotle (regarding the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water) and Hippocrates (the body s four fluids humors —blood, black and yellow bile, and phlegm) were finally swept away, and a chemical element was defined as a substance that could not be broken down into simpler substances. 

What were principles for Stahl They were not universal elements, like Aristotle s four elements or Paracelsus s tria prima. They were, however, like Aristotle s elements in one crucial respect although they were material, they could not be isolated. Most importantly for Stahl, they were the causes of particular properties of chemical bodies, and they conferred those properties on the mixt bodies that contained them as constituents. Bodies burned if they contained the phlogistic earth or principle. If they did not contain that principle, then they could not burn. The phlogistic earth could therefore reasonably be called the principle of combustibility. 

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