Book 1
Chapter XIII. OF THOSE THINGS THAT ARE LEAST IN NATURE.
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EMPEDOCLES, precedent to the four elements, introduceth the most minute bodies which resemble elements; but they did exist before the elements, having similar parts and orbicular.
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Heraclitus brings in the smallest fragments, and those indivisible.
Chapter XIV. OF FIGURES.
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A FIGURE is the exterior appearance, the circumscription, and the boundary of a body.
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The Pythagoreans say that the bodies of the four elements are spherical, fire being in the supremest place only excepted, whose figure is conical.
Chapter XV. OF COLORS.
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COLOR is the visible quality of a body.
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The Pythagoreans called color the outward appearance of a body. Empedocles, that which is consentaneous to the passages of the eye. Plato, that they are fires emitted from bodies, which have parts harmonious for the sight. Zeno the Stoic, that colors are the first figurations of matter. The Pythagoreans, that colors are of four sorts, white and black, red and pale; and they derive the variety of colors from the diversity of the elements, and that seen in animals also from the variety of food and the air in which they live and are bred.
Chapter XVI. OF THE DIVISION OF BODIES.
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THE disciples of Thales and Pythagoras grant that all bodies are passible and divisible unto infinity. Others hold that atoms and indivisible parts are there fixed, and admit not of a division into infinity. Aristotle, that all bodies are potentially but not actually divisible into infinity.
