docles did not answer, and perhaps would not have tried to answer
had he heard them.

[139]

The soul or life-principle in man Empedocles regarded as an ordered
composite of all the elements or principles of the life in nature, and
in this kinship of the elements in man and the elements in nature he
found a rationale of our powers of perception. "By the earth," said
he, "we have perception of earth; by water we have perception of water;
of the divine aether, by aether; of destructive fire, by fire; of love,
by love; of strife, by strife." He therefore, as Aristotle observes,
drew no radical distinction between sense-apprehension and thought. He
located the faculty of apprehension more specifically in the blood,
conceiving that in it the combination of the elements was most
complete. And the variety of apprehensive gift in different persons he
attributed to the greater or lesser perfectness of this blood mixture
in them individually. Those that were dull and stupid had a relative
deficiency of the lighter and more invisible elements; those that were
quick and impulsive had a relatively larger proportion of these.
Again, specific faculties depended on local perfection of mixture in
certain organs; orators having this perfectness in their tongues,
cunning craftsmen possessing it in their hands, and so on. And the
degrees of capacity of sensation, which he found in various animals, or
even plants, he explained in similar fashion.

{72} The process of sensation he conceived to be conditioned by an
actual emission from the bodies perceived of elements or images of
themselves which found access to our apprehension through channels
[140] congruous to their nature. But ordering, criticising, organising
these various apprehensions was the Mind or _Nous_, which he conceived
to be of divine nature, to be indeed an expression or emanation of the
Divine. And here has been preserved a strangely interesting passage,
in which he incorporates and develops in characteristic fashion the
doctrine of transmigration [141] of souls: "There is a decree of
Necessity, a law given of old from the gods, eternal, sealed with
mighty oaths, that when any heavenly creature (daemon) of those that
are endowed with length of days, shall in waywardness of heart defile
his hands with sin of deed or speech, he shall wander for thrice ten
thousand seasons far from the dwellings of the blest, taking upon him
in length of time all manner of mortal fo