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BOOK TWO
PART 4
[p. 145]
Let us, then, sum up again this same argument, and, having said a few words more in answer to the Erasistrateans, proceed to our next topic. The fact is, these people seem to me to have read none of Aristotle's writings, but to have heard from others how great an authority he was on "Nature," and that those of the Porch
The Stoics.
follow in the steps of his Nature-lore; apparently they then discovered a single one of the current ideas which is common to Aristotle and Erasistratus, and made up some story of a connection between Erasistratus and these people.
The Peripatetics (Aristotelians).
That Erasistratus, however, has no share in the Nature-lore of Aristotle is shown by an enumeration of the aforesaid doctrines, which emanated first from Hippocrates, secondly from Aristotle, thirdly
from the Stoics (with a single modification, namely, that for them the qualities are bodies).
Aristotle regarded the qualitative differences apprehended by our senses (the cold, the warm, the moist, and the dry) as fundamental, while the Stoics held the four coprporeal elements (earth, air, fire, and water) to be still more fundamental. cf. p. 8, note 3.
Perhaps, however, they will maintain that it was in the matter of logic that Erasistratus associated himself with the Peripatetic philosophers? Here they show ignorance of the fact that these philosophers never brought forward false or inconclusive arguments, while the Erasistratean books are full of them.
So perhaps somebody may already be asking, in some surprise, what possessed Erasistratus that he turned so completely from the doctrines of Hippocrates, and why it is that he takes away the attractive faculty from the biliary
Lit. bile-receiving (choledochous).
passages in the liver- for we have sufficiently discussed the kidneys- alleging [as the cause of bile-secretion] a favourable situation, the narrowness of vessels, and a
