Act Accordingly: A Philosophical Framework by Colin Wright

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For the plurality made up of all of them combined is more numerous than the atoms under a single shape. So if each of these is impossible, and it is absolutely necessary that one of them follows, given that the atoms are infinite in number, the hypothesis about the number of the atoms being infinite has to be false. )] What he is saying ‘differ from each other’ are not the elements, as one might think from the way he speaks, but the things composed of the elements. For the reference of ‘they’ is not to the immediately preceding subject, but the one further up, I mean, to ‘everything else’, which indicated the composite things.

However, speaking also of all those who, by positing more than one element, could preserve both coming-to-be and alteration, he says 39 they did not all in fact preserve them. Empedocles, for instance, though positing four elements, got rid of alteration, since he said that the elements are incapable of being affected and that the qualities that are in them are unchangeable; so that coming-to-be Translation 29 alone is admitted on hypothesis, even if in a different manner from that in which we posit it, as will be shown in what follows.

In which the composite things merely seem to participate in virtue of their relation to us. As for these affections, which they seem to us to have, but which do not really65 exist in bodies – some of them correspond to the bodies’ being constituted by the aggregation of atoms of certain kinds, as heat seems to belong to fire from the spherical atoms which compose it on account of the ease with which spherical objects can be moved (for it is this ease with which it penetrates , caused by the fact that a sphere moves around a point, which, in his view, makes heat seems to exist, as, conversely, the cube cold by its solidity and the difficulty with which it is moved).