13
But the argument which attributes it to water finds in the same way facts to support it; EmpedoclesDiels-Kranz, Frag. der Vorsok. 5, i, p. 319, frag. B 21, lines 3 and 5. Plutarch apparently used a version different from those known to Aristotle and Simplicius. The evidence is complicated and may be consulted in Diels-Kranz. On Empedocles’ meaning see Cherniss, Aristotle’s Criticism of the Presocratics, p. 110. says something like this: Behold the sun, everywhere bright and warm; And then the rain, to all men dark and cold. By thus setting cold against hot, as he does dark against bright, he has given us to understand that dark and cold belong to the same substance, as do also bright and hot. And our senses bear witness that darkness is an attribute of water, not of air, since nothing, to put it simply, is blackened by air and everything is by water.Cf. Mor. 364 b. For if you throw the whitest wool or the whitest garment into water, it will come out black and it will remain black until the moisture is evaporated by heat or is squeezed out by some sort of wringing or pressure. When a patch of ground is sprinkled, the spots which are covered by the drops turn black, but the rest remains as it was. In fact, of water itself the deepest looks the darkest because there is so much of it, while those parts that lie near the air flash and sparkleCf. 952 f infra.; and of the other liquids oil is the most transparent, as containing the most air. A proof of this is its lightness, by reason of which it maintains itself on the surface of all other things, buoyed up by the air.Cf. Mor. 696 b, 702 b. If it is sprinkled upon the waves, it will calm the sea, not because it is so smooth that the winds slip off it, as AristotleProblemata, 961 a 23 ff., though this work is surely not by Aristotle in the form in which it has come down to us. affirmed; but because the waves are dissipated when they are struck by any moist substance. But it is peculiar to oil that it provides light and sight at the bottom since the moist elements are interspersed with air; it is, in fact, not only on the surface that it provides light for those who pass the night at sea; it does so also for sponge-diversCf. 981 e infra; Oppian, Hal. v. 638 ff. below the surface when it is blown out of their mouths. Air, therefore, has no greater proportion of darkness than water has, and it has less cold. Certainly oil, which has more air than any other moist substance, is least cold; and when it freezes, it forms a soft jelly: the air that is intermixed does not permit it to freeze hard. They dip needles, iron clasps, and all delicate artifacts in oil rather than in water, fearing that the water’s excessive frigidity may distort them. It is, in fact, fairer to judge the argument by this evidence than by that of colour, since snow and hail and ice are at their brightest when they are coldest. Moreover, pitch is both hotter and darker than honey.
