Air and Fire as Force
by Steven McCabe
Xenophanes is said to have argued against the thesis that the world breathes: he must have been thinking of some Ionian nature-philosophers. Possibly Anaximenes originated the idea.
Aristotle says that among older Pythagoreans was a similar belief; its advocates connected it with the theory that the world contained empty space.
Sextus says that the Pythagoreans and Empedokles based it on their creed that the fellowship of men is not merely with one another and with the gods, but includes animals: “For there is one pneuma which pervades, like a soul, the entire universe and which also makes us one with them.”
By adding the opposites dry and moist, hot and cold, to pneuma, thinkers were able to differentiate the pneuma of psyche, dry and warm, from the pneuma of physis (world of plants), moist and cold.
Orphic theology represented the psyche as entering the newborn child on wings of wind.
We are not sure how far air was active or passive in early formulations. There seems a confusion in Aristotle and later writers, perhaps through a linking of air and water-vapour.
Poseidonios makes moisture produce the chill of air over marshy ground; but his pupil Cicero stressed the caloric content of air.
Ploutarch pointed to the active role of air in freezing water, and assigned air a mid-position between fire and water.
The Stoics made air and fire active.
Ch. 6 – Air and Fire as Force
Blast Power & Ballistics: Concepts of Force & Energy in the Ancient World
by Jack Lindsay
I do not own the copyright to the original image
of the auto-insurance agent found in the Toronto Star.
I altered it for purposes of commentary
under fair use provisions.
poemimage 
Auto-insurance agent vs the philosophers linked by the internal combustion engine (I think)…esoteric surrealism wafting and flowing in here Steven. This is as far out and as far in that I’ve seen you venture…your words and images cast a spell, hypnotic almost…elementals summoned beneath a full moon in a used car lot…
Hi John, thank you so very much for this comment. More than a comment really. I think you put some thoughts into play that situate the post in a new light and certainly elucidate the ‘instinct’ motivating this post. I’m very glad this speaks to you. Thanks for adding the full moon and the used car lot as well as your opening image.
Steven, I appreciate how you have carried across the complexity of a world and the conscious efforts of men who, maybe understanding little from one perspective, grasped the un-divorced worlds of the spirit and of nature. -and how you in your part have lifted the mundane out of its place a little bit.
Thank you Jack. Perhaps we have nudged something along here a bit on its journey to being where it belongs. I appreciate your idea of continuity and the intersections we discover or describe or manifest. Thank you for contributing to this dialogue about force & energy in equal parts spirit and nature (including human).