Plato, four elements

On Plato s discussion of the four elements and their interchangeability as a possible source of Jabirian number formula 1+3 + 5 + 8=17 in Jabirian alchemy... 

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. 

Plato s elements can be interconverted because of the geometric commonalities of their atoms . For Anaxagoras, all material substances are mixtures of all four elements, so one substance changes to another by virtue of the growth in proportion of one or more elements and the corresponding diminution of the others. This view of matter as intimate blends of elements is central to the antiquated elementary theories, and is one of the stark contrasts with the modern notion of an element as a fundamental substance that can be isolated and purified. 

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 by their manifold combinations make up all the material universe. Water, thinks Plato, by heat is converted to vapor and eventually into air by cooling, on the other hand, it is converted into snow or hail or ice and under the earth, by heat or cold and pressure, it may be converted into rocks or stones. 

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. 

The kinds of matter are five, an ether being added to the four elements of Empedocles and Plato. This ether is, however, not supposed to exist as a constituent of substances of this world, but to be the substance from which are formed the heavenly bodies and the sphere of the heavens in which these are set. This ether is eternal and unchangeable. Below the zone of the heavens lies the zone of fire, lightest of the four elements, and below this the air, and then water between the air and the earth which is the heaviest of the four. Characteristic motion is the property of the five elements. The most perfect motion is circular and this belongs to the ether, which has no tendency to approach the center of the universe nor to fly away from it, and the circular motion belongs to the eternal and unchangeable. All other motions may be resolved into... 

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. 

Plato explains why there should he four and only four elements in a very characteristic logic. After assuming that the universe must be material because it is visible and tangible, he proceeds ... 

Throughout the writings of the alchemists even to the seventeenth century, we find allusions to waters and to the congealing of waters in the earth to form rusts or metals, the source of which are plainly to be traced to these curious speculations of Plato. Plato leaves no doubt as to his belief that these four elements are not absolutely distinct substances but that they may be changed from one to another and that they are not to be too definitely characterized. 

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. 

A century later Aristotle (384—322 b.c.), who had been a pupil of Plato and tutor to Alexander the Great, took up the idea of prime matter and Empedocles four elements, and he added four qualities, hot, cold, wet, and dry. Qualities imposed on prime matter generated elements, which, when mixed, constituted the substances that we find in and on the earth. Earth was cold and... 

The roots of molecular beauty can be traced back to the Platonic tradition. To Plato, the most beautiful bodies in the whole realm of bodies were the tiny polyhedra, now deemed the Platonic solids, which he proposed comprise the universe the four elements - earth (cube), fire (tetrahedron), air (octahedron), water (icosahedron) - and the ether (dodecahedron) (Fig. 1). Joachim Schummer, who has written [9] extensively on chemical aesthetics, writes ... 

Plato s material world was divided into realms. The terrestrial realm was imperfect and was based on the four elements of earth, water, air, and fire. These elements were made of particles representing the first four Platonic solids ... 

There is a long history for us to recognize polymers. Let us start with the early evolution of our molecular views (Rupp 2005). As early as in the middle of 500 BC, the Greek philosopher Leucippus and his follower Democritus suggested that, an indivisible minimum substance called atoms constituted our world. Almost at the same time, Empedocles proposed that the world was formed by four elements, i.e., water, air, fire, and earth. Later on, Plato set up the Academy at Athens, inherited the atomic theory, and also advocated the four-element theory on the basis of the formal logic system of geometries. 

Jacques Bongars (1546-1612), the Calvinist historian of the Crusades, in a Berne MS. refers favourably to Paracelsus, who replaced Plato s god, ex-amplar, and matter, and Aristotle s matter, form, and privation, by three principles, salt, sulphur, and mercury, although he also recognised four elements in two spheres, fire and air in the upper and water and earth in the lower. The latter idea was attributed by Barchusen to Severinus (see Vol. II, p. 163) ... 

Aristotle (384-322 bce), a student of Plato, elaborated on the earlier ideas about elements. He argued that in addition to the four elements that make up all matter, there were four basic properties hot, cold, wet, and dry. In Aristotle s view, the four elements could each have two of the basic properties. For example, water was wet and cold, while air was wet and hot. He thought that one element could change into another element if its properties were changed. 

The fourth century b.c.e. philosopher Plato added four qualities to this theory hot, dry, wet, and cold Two of each of these qualities were shared by each element, as can be seen in Figure 5.2, and because of this shared quality one element could transform into another. Alchemists also related the four qualities and elements to four liquid qualities in the body called humors black bile, phlegm, blood, and yellow bile. They believed that health was attained through the proper balance of these humors. They also believed that an excess of any humor led to... 

Circa 428-347 The life of Plato, the great philosopher and mystic, who contributes the four qualities to the alchemical theory of the elements, provides the first description of the ladder of the seven planets, and provides a theory of the threefold structure of the soul. 

The concept of elements is intimately entwined with the idea of atoms, but each does not demand the other. Plato believed in the four canonical elements of antiquity, but he did not exactly concur with the notion of atoms. Other Greek philosophers trusted in atoms but did not divide all matter into a handful of basic ingredients. 

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