EMPEVOCLES, a Greek philosopher of Agrigentum, in Sicily, lived about 450 B.c. So great was the estimation in which he was held by his fellow-citizens as a physician, a friend of the gods, a predicter of futurity, and a sorcerer, or conjuror of nature, that they are said to have offered him the sovereignty. But being an enemy of tyranny, be declined it, and was the means of delivering the community from the dominion of the aristocracy, and bringing in a democracy. There was a tradition that he threw himself into the crater of Etna, in order that his sudden disappearance might beget a belief in his divine origin; this, however, can only be regarded as it mere fable, like the story told by Lucian, that Etna threw out the sandals of the vain philosopher, and thus destroyed the popular belief in his divinity. The statement of Aristotle is, that he died at the age of 60; later writers extend the period of his life considerably further, but their testimony is not equal in weight to that of Aristotle.
In E., philosophic thought is bound up with poetry and myth even in a higher degree than in Parmenides (q.v.). his general point of view is determined by the influ ence of the elcatic school upon the physical theories of the ionic philosophers. He assumed four primitive independent substances—air, water. fire, and earth, which he designates often by the mythical names Zeus, Here, etc. These four elements, as they were called, kept their place till modern chemistry dislodged them. Along with mate rial elements, he affirmed the existence of two moving and operating powers, love and hate, or friendship and strife, the first as the uniting principle, the second as the sepa rating. The contrast between matter and power, or force, is thus brought out more
strongly by E. than by previous philosophers. The origin of the world, or cosmos, he conceived in this way: In the beginning, the elements were held in a sort of blended unity, or sphere, by the attractive force of love; when hate, previously exterior, pene trated as a repelling and separating principle. In this process of separation, which gives rise to the individual objects of nature, he seems to have assumed a series of stages, a gradual development of the perfect out of the imperfect, and a periodical return of things to the elemental state, in order to be again separated, and a new world of phe nomena formed. From the fragments that we possess of his didactic poem, it is not quite clear in how far lie considered fire as the substratum of strife, and water as the substratum of love, and ascribed various creations to the predominance of one or the other of these principles. Of his opinions on special phenomena, may bb mentioned his doctrine of emanations, which proceeding from one thing enter into corresponding openings in other things. By this assumption in connection with the maxim, that like is known only by like, he thought to explain the nature of perception by the senses. He attempted to give a moral application to the old doctrine of the transmigration of souls, his views of which resembled those of Pythagoras. The fragments of E. have been edited by Sturz (2 vols., Leip. 1805), Karsten (Amst. 1838), and Stein (Bonn, 1852).