The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.84

v2.c41.84

Yet another instance is that of the five elements. As Deussen³ points out there are characteristic differences between the two lists which show a divergence of origin; the Greeks place fire between ether and air, the Indians air—which is really for them wind, Vāyu—between ether and fire. Moreover there is a perfectly simple natural fact to which the series corresponds, the division of states of matter into the solid, the fluid, the fiery or gaseous, the elastic, and the imponderable, which could not fail to win early attention. In point of fact we can trace in Greek philosophy the gradual emergence of the doctrine of the five elements in a perfectly characteristic manner. Thales claimed water as the primary source of reality, Anaximenes air, Herakleitos fire, Parmenides, in the part of his work dealing with opinion as opposed to true knowledge, admitted the hot and the cold, fire and earth, and Empedokles, accepting four, set fire off against the other three, and, in a wholly un-Indian manner, experimentally proved air to be different from space. The fifth element was added, whether under the title ‘ether’ or not, by the school of Pythagoras, not himself, and is derived from a conception of a πνεῦμα surrounding the world, which is also regarded as space.⁴