Deus immortalis haberi Dunn cupit Empedocles, ardentem frigidus ..'Etnam Insduit. HORACE Ars Poet. v• 465.
But the most probable opinion is, that, as Timmus re lates, lie went to Greece about time latter part of his life, and never returned to his native country, so that the time and manner of his death was never certainly known. A statue was erected to his memory at Agrigenturn, which was afterwards carried to Rome ; and the inhabitants of that city, even in the time of Lucretius, made it their highest boast, that it had given birth to so eminent a person as Empedocles, whose poems particularly they still regarded as oracles. Of the few of his sayings which have been preserved, the most frequently cited is his reproof of the luxurious manners of the Agrigen tines, namely, that they pursued pleasures w ith as much eageiness as if they were to die before to•nn••row, and that they built houses with as much magnificence as if they were to live for ever." His philosophy, as far as it can be collected from his fragments, is evidently atomical ; that the first principles of nature are of two kinds, active and passive ; that the active is unity or God, a subtle ethereal fire, intelligent and divine, which gives being to all things, animates all things, and into which zill things shall be finally resolved ; that one spi rit thus pervades the universe, uniting all created beings to itscll and to one another, and that it is therefore un lawful to kill or eat animals, which are allied to us in their principle of life; that the passive principle, viz.
matter, is divided into round corpuscles, indefinitely small, originally eternal, and never capable of being an nihilated; that these corpuscles, being put into motion by the intellectual fire or divine mind, the homogeneous particles united by a principle of affinity, and the hete rogeneous separated by a principle of discord, and thus formed the four elements, fire, earth, water and air, of which all bodies arc composed ; that the world is one whole, surrounded by the heavens, which are a solid body of air crystallized by fire, the sun a fiery mass, the stars fixed in the crystal of heaven, while the planets wander freely beneath ; that many demons, emanations of the divine nature, inhabit the region of the air, and administer human affairs; that the soul of man consists of two parts, the sensitive, produced ,ike the elements, and the rational, a demon sprung from the divine soul of the uniN'erse, and sent down into this world as a punish ment for crimes committed in a former state, to be puri fied by transmigrations through animal and vegetable bodies ; that he distinctly remembered himself to have been successively a girl, a boy, a bird, a fish, a shrub, and, lastly, Empedocles; and that all nature is subject to the immutable and eternal law of necessity. See Cudworth's Intel. System ; Stanley's Lives of the Philosophers ; Fenelon's Lives of the Philosophers, translated by the Rev. J. Cormack ; Castellani Vit Medic. Illus.; and Brucker's Hist. of Phil. by Enfield, vol. i. (q)