In the tradition of Plato and Empedocles before him, Aristotle argued that there were four fundamental elements, fire, air, water and earth. It is difficult for us to fully understand what this meant as today we think about matter in very different terms. In Aristotle’s system there was no such thing as void space. All space was filled with some combination of these elements.
Aristotle asserted that you could further reduce these elements into two pairs of qualities, hot and cold and wet and dry. The combination of each of these qualities resulted in the elements. These qualities can be replaced by their opposites, which in this system become how change happens on Earth. For example, when heated, water seemingly turns steam which looks like air.
In Aristotle’s Cosmology, each of these four elements (earth, water, fire and air) had a weight. Earth was the heaviest, water less so, and air and fire the lightest. According to Aristotle the lighter substances moved away from the center of the universe and the heaver elements settled into the center. While these elements attempted to sort themselves out, to achieve this order, most of experience involved mixed entities.
While we have seen earth, fire, air and water, everything else in the world in this system was understood as a mixture of these elements. In this perspective, transition and change in our world resulted from the mixing of the elements. For Aristotle the terrestrial is a place of birth and death, based in these elements. The heavens are a separate realm governed by their own rules.
Credit : Library of Congress
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