Mixture and blending

Use in the book

At the start of chapter 17, Thales and his followers are credited with defining blends as mixtures of elements through alteration. In the account of pleasure and pain attributed to Empedocles, differences in composition and elemental blending help explain why things are alien to one another.

Places to read

1. I.17.1.1Blends are mixtures through alteration in the report assigned to Thales and his followers.
2. I.50.31Differences in elemental blending enter the explanation of pain and opposition.

Translation in this edition

“Mixture” normally renders mixis and “blending” krasis. This distinction keeps both words visible while leaving each ancient account to define how closely they coincide.

Use in the book

B 8 makes mixture the correct account of what people call birth. The rejection concerns absolute coming-to-be, not the reality of every transformation. B 212 says blending alters appearance so greatly that trees, animals, humans, and gods arise from the same enduring sources. The painters in B 232 show how “more of these and less of those” can generate a diverse visible world. The analogy supplies a principle of proportional combination without specifying one recipe for everything.

Particular bodily passages then make proportions important. B 96 gives an eight-part account of bone, and B 98 near equality with permissible variation for blood and flesh. The poem can therefore recognise differences of structure and proportion within one ontology of persistent constituents. B 712 makes forms and colours depend on the mixing of water, earth, aither, and sun.

B 352 is the strongest warning against imagining mixing as a single instantaneous event. Some things join while others remain unmixed, and Strife has not fully departed. The new mortal forms emerge from this uneven transition. The end-point of complete union is different from any one of those forms.

“Mixture” consequently explains both continuity and novelty: the ingredients endure, while their visible forms, bodily capacities, and organised lives change. It should not be reduced to a denial that anything meaningful happens. The fragmentary corpus also does not licence a detailed modern particle mechanism where none is stated.

Places to read

1. B 8Mixture and interchange replace literal birth and final destruction as the explanation of mortal change.
2. B 21.9–142Blending changes the appearance of the same constituents into many kinds of things.
3. B 232The proportions of pigments model multiplicity from a finite stock.
4. B 35.5–172Mixed and still-unmixed things coexist during Love's advance.
5. B 96Bone receives a specified proportioned mixture.
6. B 98Blood and flesh arise from an approximately equal mixture, with variation.

Translation in this edition

The translation alternates “mixture,” “mingling,” and “blending” in response to the Greek. They need not denote three formally defined chemical operations. B 92 is a useful additional report on mixture and hardness, but it is Aristotle's prose, not a surviving recipe in Empedocles' own verse.

Use in the book

Mixture is the central means of explaining diversity from persistent roots. A28 makes change a matter of more and fewer constituents combined or separated; A332 speaks of proportion and blending; Galen at A34 describes composite bodies formed from four unchangeable elements. These formulations establish the importance of arrangement without supplying a single uncontested account of how ingredients remain in a compound.

Aristotle’s A43 turns that uncertainty into a criticism. If the elements retain their identity, he argues, their mixture will be a composition like a wall made of bricks and stones, small parts lying alongside one another. Galen’s parallel notice explicitly denies thorough blending and speaks of juxtaposed, touching portions. His other illustration in A34 describes pulverized mineral ingredients mixed so closely that one cannot take one apart without the others. These statements illuminate different aspects of preserved ingredients and practical inseparability; they need not be treated as laboratory descriptions of one exact process.

The edition attempts to refute the wall comparison by appealing to bone’s fixed ratio at A782. Ratio is indeed important, but it does not logically prove that an arrangement is not juxtaposed: a wall too can be built to numerical proportions. The dispute concerns what mixture and form contribute beyond an inventory of pieces, not whether either side can count. The ratio evidence must therefore be considered alongside the criticisms rather than invoked as a summary dismissal.

A872 adds a further explanatory condition: things mix when their pores are commensurate. That links mixture to the mechanisms used in perception, but it does not by itself settle whether the pores contain void or finer material. The mixed state at the cosmic extreme raises another issue again, since uniformity in the Sphairos may or may not preserve the roots’ distinctive qualities.

Places to read

1. A 34 (testimony)Galen, In Hippocratis De natura hominis XV 32 K. Models composite bodies through intimately mingled but unchangeable mineral ingredients.
2. A 43 (polemical)Aristotle, De gen. et corr. B 7; Galen, In Hipp. De nat. hom.. Presents mixture as small preserved parts juxtaposed and touching, with Aristotle’s wall analogy.
3. A 33 (testimony)2Aëtius I 3,20. Couples proportion with blending in the formation of the All.
4. A 87 (testimony)2Aristotle, On Coming-to-be and Passing-away. Attributes mixing to commensurate pores in addition to their role in acting and being acted upon.
5. A 32 (testimony)Aëtius I 7,28 (D. 303). Uses μῖγμα for the mixture of elements called the cosmos.

Translation in this edition

The edition’s assertion that a wall “has no ratio” is an overstatement, not a decisive textual argument. The source preserves a real interpretative dispute, and the various Greek mixing words should not be assigned rigid modern senses without evidence.