Four Aristotelian

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... 

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. ... 

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. ... 

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. 

It is interesting to note the introduction of the Greek chaos by Paracelsus as a generalized expression for all aerial matter. For instance, discussing the four Aristotelian elements in their relation to the components of the human organism ... 

The foregoing passage is from a treatise on the separation of the elements, (meaning the four Aristotelian elements) from their complexes. The whole discussion is obscure and metaphysical. The interpretation of this passage is none too easy. 

Van Helmont s chemical experiments and his chemical theories exerted a powerful influence on the chemists of his century. No chemist is cited more frequently nor with higher respect. Yet, his theory of the two elements, air and water, did not, with many, replace the four Aristotelian elements, nor the three principles, though the latter had by this time been frequently elaborated into five, sulphur, mercury, salt (the active principles), and phlegm (water) and earth (the passive principles). The suggestion of the rational and desirable term gas which he used, was ignored by his early successors. Boyle, Boerhaave, and Priestley used instead the terms artificial air, factitious air, ... 

Paracelsus seems to have believed in the four Aristotelian elements, but he rejected almost everything else of the ancient system. Instead, he promoted the concept of the three principles, namely sulfur, mercury, and salt. These three principles were not exactly the materials they were named after, since they really represented concepts sulfur was combustion and represented the soul, mercury was fluidity and represented the spirit, and salt was inertness and represented the body. By their combination and balance, they could explain the behavior of the world and, in particular, the body. Paracelsus wrote extensively, but most of his work was not published until after his death. His writing style was complex and often convoluted, full of obscure references, metaphors, and religious symbolism. For example, when describing the relation of sulfur, mercury, and salt, he said, The Sulphur resolves itself by the spirit of Salt in the liquor of Mercury, which of itself is a liquid distributed from heaven to earth, and is the albumen of the heaven, and the mid space. 6 It would not be clear to a non-Paracelsian what this description meant. 

Paracelsus believed that the material world was ultimately composed of the four Aristotelian elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, but that more immediately it was made up of three substances. These were known as mercury, sulfur, and salt, and were sometimes referred to as the triaprima. They were not the actual substances that we know by these names today, but stood for certain principles. Mercury, also known as the spirit, stood for the principles of fusibility and volatility. Sulfur, which represented the soul, stood for inflammability, and salt, the body, stood for incombustibility and nonvolatility. In this theory Paracelsus had revived an old Arabic idea that metals were formed from a combination of sulfur and mercury. He added the third principle of salt, and extended the definition to include all material substances. 

We have imbibed, sweated, and excreted water since time immemorial—so it might be nice to know what it s made of. Water boils, freezes, and is recovered unchanged from salts and other earths. It is absolutely elemental to our very existence, as is air. One of the four Aristotelian elements, water can be transmuted to air by adding heat, to earth by removing wetness, and it neutralizes its contrary element—fire. Its status as an element survived Robert Boyle s scathing criticism of the ancients in his 1661 classic The Sceptical Chymist. As late as 1747, Ambrose Godfrey, Boyle s very capable assistant, reported the chemical conversion of water to earth, an experimental conclusion once and for all time refuted in 1770 by Antoine Lavoisier. So, when and how did we learn the true nature of water, or how to get From H to eau, as Philip Ball so wittily phrases it ... 

The Jabirian alchemists also believed that metals were ultimately composed of the four Aristotelian elements earth, water, air and fire, and in consequence possessed the qualities of coldness, hotness, dryness and moisture in varying proportions. They adopted a rational approach to the problem of transmutation. A base metal had to be treated with a medicine or elixir to adjust the qualities present to coincide with the proportions of gold. The existing proportions of the qualities in a base metal were estimated by means of rather obscure calculations. 

Boyle s destructive criticism of the old ideas had little immediate effect on contemporary chemical thought, as he was unable to propose a list of elements to replace the three principles or the four Aristotelian elements. His importance lies in the fact that he helped to liberate chemistry from the old modes of thought. He started to shift the emphasis of theoretical speculation away from why a chemical reaction occurred (which the Aristotelians did in terms of final causes) to how a reaction occurred (which Boyle attempted to do in terms of particles). 

Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim) develops new study of iatrochemistiy, use of chemistry in medicine. He introduces the doctrine of the tria prima medical substances are made up of the four Aristotelian elements. 

Natural philosophy was concerned with events in the terrestrial world a sphere composed of the four Aristotelian elements of earth, air, fire and water. In that... 

Figtne 8. The four operations of chemistry — solution, ablution, conjunction and fixation — represented as four sisters. The female figures also make reference to the four Aristotelian elements earth, water, air and fire (left to right). Daniel Stolcius von Stolcenberg, Vitidaiium chymicum, Frankfurt, 1624. Reproduced with the permission of the Bibliotheque nationale univetsitaire de Strasbourg. 

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