Alexandr Korol

and moves in circular motions.” Here it is — the conclusion about the sublunar and supralunar worlds, and from here everything must be deciphered further. And you see, here Aristotle directly emphasizes that “in the sublunar world they move vertically and horizontally,” which is exactly what I meant — that one element seems to transform into another, that they transform each other. And you see, there is a separate other world, just like this one, the supralunar, and there is Ether. But it’s like an entire world just like the world of the four elements, only opposite — yet there is no such division into four elements. It kind of exists and doesn’t, because they don’t move, they don’t transform — which is very curious.

• Read the Wikipedia article “Aether (element).”

One of the interesting things worth paying attention to as a clue to decipher all this even further, especially since Aristotle often touched upon the topic of the properties of the four basic elements, is the separate article on Wikipedia titled “Substrate,” specifically in the section on Ancient Philosophy: “During the period of natural philosophy and in later times, ancient philosophers assumed that the diversity of things was based on a single primary element. In the first scientific-philosophical Greek Milesian school: Thales identified water, the most ‘formless’ matter, as the primary element. Anaximander placed the apeiron (the boundless or indefinite), ‘nothing’ in itself but generating the four elements and the whole world of defined things, at the foundation of the universe. Anaximenes defined his uniquely understood air as the basis of all that exists, formed through rarefaction and condensation. Aristotle assumed that the primary elements are five: air, water, earth, fire, and aether (the heavenly substance). Each element represents one of the states of a single primordial matter — a specific combination of the basic qualities — heat, cold, moisture, and dryness:
• Heat + dryness = Fire
• Heat + moisture = Air
• Cold + moisture = Water
• Cold + dryness = Earth.
• The fifth element, aether, is the origin of motion.