SOUL AND MIND In this early period, inquiry into the nature of the soul in the present life seems to have been subsequent to speculation on its location in an afterlife All the earliest thinkers seem to have taken a materialist view: the soul consisted either in air (Anaximenes and Anaximander) or Wre (Parmenides and Heraclitus) It took some time, however, for the problem to be addressed: how does a material element, however Wne and Xuid, perform the soul’s characteristic functions of feeling and thought? Heraclitus oVers only a splendid simile: As a spider in the middle of its web notices as soon as a Xy damages any of its threads, and rushes thither as though grieving for the breaking of the thread, so a person’s soul, if any part of the body is hurt, hurries quickly thither as if unable to bear the hurt of the body to which it is tightly and harmoniously joined (DK 22 B67a) This paragraph is the ancestor of many philosophical attempts to explain the capacities and behaviour of humans as the activities of a tiny animal within—though later philosophers were more inclined to view the soul as an internal homunculus than as an internal arthropod Perception and Thought Empedocles was the Wrst philosopher to oVer a detailed account of how perception takes place Like his predecessors he was a materialist The soul, like everything else in the universe, was a compound of earth, air, Wre, and water Sensation takes place by a matching of each of these elements, as they occur in the objects of perception, with their counterparts in our sense-organs Strife and Love, the forces that in Empedocles’ system operate upon the elements, also have their part in this matching procedure, which is governed by the principle that like is perceived by like We see the earth by earth, by water water see, The air of the sky by air, by Wre the Wre in Xame, Love we perceive by love, strife by sad strife, the same (DK 31 B109) The process seems to take place like this Objects in the world give oV an eZuence that reaches the pores of our eyes; sound is an eZuence that 232