^ f. UBBARV - JScholarship - Johns Hopkins University

VISION 21
contains the opposites, viz. the fiery and watery elements, in
definite relationship to light and shade, or white and black.
A passage of Aristotle^ corroborates the Information
contained in the foregoing extract from Theophrastus. ' To
suppose that, as Empedocles says, gleaming eyes {ykavKa
öjufiara) are fiery, while black contain more of water than
of fire, and that on this account the former, the gleaming,
see dimly by day owing to lack of water, and the latter
by night owing to lack of fire, is an error; since we must
assume that the visive part of the eye in all cases consists
not of fire but of water ^.'
§ IQ. Plato in the Menon ^ teils us that Gorgias, as a follower Object of
of Empedocles, held the doctrine of pores and emanations; colmr.
and that by means of this doctrine he furnished an explanation
of colour as object of vision. According to this,
colour is an emanation consisting of figures symmetrical
with the pores of the visual organ and for this reason
capable of being seen. We read elsewhere also* that
Empedocles regards colour as ' that which fits into the
pores of the eye.' To this Stobaeus^ adds the statement
already referred to (§ 5 suprd) that' Empedocles regarded
white, black, red, green (or, with utyjiöv for ^(Kaipöv, yellow)
as the primary colours ^, being equal in number with the
1 779* 15 seqq.
^ Philoponus (in Arist. de Gen. An. v. l, Hayduck, p. 217, 15), in
his remarks on this passage, says that ' Empedocles makes the organ
of sight to consist of the four elements . . . and asserts (but H. reads
^rjpi) that vision itself is the power of the soul in virtue whereof we
see, inasmuch as it (vision) is the form (e'Soj) of the eye.' This (if cf)rj(7i
be kept) well illustrates the untrustworthiness of late commentators
on early philosophers whose views they looked at only through the
medium of their successors. Here Philoponus represents Empedocles
as an Aristotelean. The opinion of Empedocles about gleaming and
black eyes is referred to also in the Pseudo-Arist. Problems, 910. 13.
We find similar views held on this point by Anaxagoras arid Diogenes.
^ Men. 76 C-D. * Plut. Epit. i. 15. 3 (Diels, Dox., p. 313).
^ Ecl. i. 16. 3 (Diels, Dox., p. 313).
* For MSS. ö>xp6v, xXwpöv has been adopted; yet the change may be
not worth while making, if the suspicion mentioned below be well
founded. äxpös is used by Arist. 559^ 18 to denote the colour of the yolk
of an egg; i. e. it vaeans yellow. Cf. Diels, Box., Prol. p. 50 ; and Mullach,
Bemocritus, p. 353. Curiously enough, the same error of a>xpiv for