Effluvia

Use in the book

One account links agreeable sensation to a loss of substance: to give and receive pleasure entails changing and wasting away. Seeing someone dear is then pictured as reciprocal effluvia making each presence perceptible. The later explanation of historical “species” compares optical images shed by bodies with particles shed by odorous substances. These models preserve outward transmission rather than merely naming an inward impression.

Places to read

1. I, p. 167, entry 4, ¶5Pleasure is linked to invisible outflow and loss of substance.
2. I, p. 167–168, entry 5, ¶1Dear persons exchange imagined emanations.
3. II, p. 758, entry 2, ¶3Optical images are compared with odor-bearing emissions.
4. I, p. 241, entry 2, ¶2Water fills surrounding air with exhalation.

Translation in this edition

The English translation uses “effluvia” in the earlier reflections and “effluences” in the later explanation. Neither is silently replaced by a modern sensory mechanism. These are historical accounts and images, not evidence that persons literally lose substance whenever they see one another.

Emanation

French: émanation.

The modeled voice is more than air in the cited account: warmth and a skin-like vapor from an inner atmosphere give it configuration and powers of affecting minds. Émanation is rendered emanation as part of that outward transmission. The account is not silently converted into a modern account of sound waves, nor is every occurrence of voice taken to imply this same material mechanism.

Places to read: I, p. 198, entry 8, ¶1.

Expansibility and susceptivity

French: expansibilité; susceptibilité; susceptivité.

The source condition joins extreme expansibility to extreme susceptibility, with susceptivity offered in parentheses as an alternative. If joined, those powers would permit perpetual repair rather than lasting loss, illustrated by heavenly bodies emptying and refilling, nourishing and being nourished. The English translation preserves the technical words, the condition, and the detached ending Through divine irradiation. The reciprocity is not presented as a verified scientific mechanism or an unconditional theory of all outflow.

Places to read: II, p. 792, entry begun p. 791, no. 6, ¶16.

Use in the book

The universal range in B89 is striking, but its precise wording should be preserved. It concerns things that have come to be, a formulation naturally linked to the compounded beings of the physical account. The fragment itself does not enumerate particle sizes, state a frequency of emission, or name the organs that receive them.

B101 gives a concrete scene that can illuminate this general principle. Nostrils track small fragments left by beasts from their feet in soft grass. The originating animal is no longer directly present at the point of investigation, yet a bodily trace can guide perception. The verse thus renders smell as contact with something materially left behind, rather than as knowledge acquired without a medium. Calling every trace an effluence in a strict technical sense remains an interpretive connection, since B101 uses “fragments,” not the noun from B89.

The introduction supplies the fuller explanatory framework: outflows fit the passages of sense organs, and such fitting produces perception. It also says that additional papyrus material bears on effluences and pores while explicitly excluding that text from the edition. These are useful notices about the limits of the book, not additional verses that the lexicon may quote as though printed here.

The distinction between surviving sentence and reconstructed system matters especially for vision. B842 emphasizes the eye’s fire passing outward through its tissues. B89 does not by itself explain how all object-effluences and ocular fire interact in a single optical sequence. A careful account can recognize the common concern with routes, material qualities, and encounter while refusing to hide the gaps in transmission.

Effluence is accordingly a central organizing concept with a very short direct attestation in this corpus. Its importance exceeds the length of its quotation, but that importance is established by comparison and reported context, not by multiplying the words of B89 into a lost treatise.

Outflow also changes what it means for an object to be absent. The beast of the tracking scene can have gone elsewhere while a trace remains available to investigation. Perception can thus depend on a sequence of contacts, rather than a perceiver simply standing immediately beside an intact object. This is a grounded comparison between the fragments, not a claim that the surviving verse spells out every intermediate stage. It helps explain why small residues and open routes can matter as much as the large visible forms of things.

Nothing in the isolated B89 describes the emitted material as originating from nothing or as an independent fifth constituent. Read within the book's physical account, effluences belong to the transformations and movements of what already exists. The source nonetheless leaves their exact relation to the changing size or stability of an emitting body unexplained here. A universal claim of outflow is not yet a complete account of how every emitter is maintained.

Places to read

1. B 89The direct assertion concerns effluences from all generated things.
2. B 101Material traces left by beasts provide a concrete olfactory comparison.
3. B 84.7–11The eye description supplies a distinct outward process through channels.
4. Introduction V (editorial discussion)The introduction summarizes perception as effluences fitting passages.
5. Introduction III (editorial discussion)The book mentions further papyrus evidence concerning effluences and pores but does not print it.

Translation in this edition

The translation introduction deliberately retains “effluences” and asks the reader to hear its flowing metaphor. Its broader prose summary about continually emitted particles should be cited as exposition, not attributed word-for-word to B89.

Use in the book

Effluence carries colours toward sight in Theophrastus's account and supports the definition of colour in Plato's Meno. Aëtius invokes streams gathering at a mirror, and Alexander invokes outflows from both magnet and iron. This breadth is philosophically important: the proposed explanation uses a common physical resource across sensation and apparently remote interaction.

Theophrastus nevertheless distinguishes the relative plausibility of its applications. He can make some sense of outflow in several senses, but asks how it represents roughness and smoothness to touch and taste. He further says fire alone appears to flow off among the elements. That last remark is the critic's assessment, not evidence that Empedocles denied effluences from all nonfiery things. The fragrant-plant objection assumes that effluence also explains wasting: stronger odour should then entail faster destruction, whereas long-lived aromatic plants appear to provide counterexamples.

A cosmic objection follows. Under Love, where things are combining rather than flowing off, perception would diminish or disappear. Again this is a conditional consequence drawn by Theophrastus, not a quoted prohibition of all cognition during Love's dominance. Alexander subjects magnetism to a comparable explanatory test: if two bodies emit, why should only one follow its outflow, and why do other matching bodies not attract?

The term thus joins disparate testimonies while exposing their argumentative differences. The reports should not be flattened into one fully reconstructed corpuscular theory with details no witness states.

Places to read

1. A 86 §§ 7–8 (testimony)2Theophrastus, On the Senses 7. Says that effluence brings colours to sight.
2. A 86 §§ 20–21 (polemical)2Theophrastus, On the Senses 20. Questions touch, taste, decay, fragrant plants, and perception under Love.
3. A 88 (testimony)Aëtius. Makes streams and their compaction part of mirror reflection.
4. A 89 (testimony)2Alexander of Aphrodisias, Questions. Describes reciprocal emissions in the magnetic mechanism.
5. A 92 (reception)Plato, Meno. Presents effluences and fitting passages as premises of an Empedoclean-style definition.

Translation in this edition

The witnesses use different formations and levels of detail. Aëtius's preference for an image reading at A90 is an interpretation of the effluence evidence, not proof that every effluence is a miniature image.