In ancient cosmologies, paricularly Greek and Indian, the four basic, irreducible substances that constitute all matter: earth, air, fire, and water. The modern understanding of chemical elements—those substances composed of only one kind of atom—has in common with the ancient concept the basic principle of irreducibility.
在古代的宇宙观中，特别是希腊人和印度人，土、气、火、水四种基本的最小的物质构成了万物。物质只由原子组成，这种现代的对化学元素的理解与古代基本起源的不可化约性概念颇有相似之处。
In the Greek tradition, each element was distinguished by its particular motion: air and fire move naturally upward, fire more so than air; water and earth settled, earth more so. The first Greek to base his system on all four elements was Empedocles, in the fifth century B.C.E. Previous thinkers had recognized a single element as the fundamental principle of the world. The earliest, Thales, had considered it to be water, out of which the other elements were formed—and for this attempt to capture the multiplicity of the world in a unifying principle, he is sometimes called “the first philosophier.” For Anaximenes, the basic principle was air, which assumed other forms through “condensation” and “rarefaction,” and for Heraclitus, whose thoery stressed flux and change, it was five (an emphasis adopted by the Stoics).
希腊信仰中，每一种元素都依据其特有的运动而区分：气和火自然向上运动，火比气更向上；水和土则下降，土更向下。在公元前五世纪，恩培多克勒是第一个将他的哲学观建构在这四种元素之上的希腊人。早先的思想者已经认识到一种单一的元素是这个世界的根本起源。最早的时候，泰勒斯认为其他元素都是由水构成的，并且因此试图用一个统一的起源来表达这个世界的多样性，有时他被称作是“第一位哲学家”。对于阿那克西曼尼而言，他认为基本起源是气——以“凝聚”或“稀薄”的方式呈现为其他元素。而赫拉克利特的理论强调流动和变化，算是第五种元素（这一观点后来被斯多噶学派所吸收）
Water, air, and fire were also variously identified as a fundamental in the Indian Vedic tradition. The seventh-century Hindu philosophier Shankara ranked the four element according to their “subtlety,” or susceptibility to the senses, air being the most subtle as it cannot been seen, tasted, or smelled but only felt. The ancient Chinese distinguished five elements, or phrase: water, fire, earth, metal, and wood.
水、气、火也分别在印度吠陀信仰中被认为是基础物质。七世纪的印度教哲学家商羯罗根据四种元素的“微妙之处”或其受“道”的影响进行分级，气最为细密因为看不到、尝不到、闻不到而只能触到它。古代中国人则划分为五种元素或者“五行”：水、火、土、金、木。
Before Aristotle, the elements were considered immutable. He assigned them the contrasting qualities hot/cold and moist/dry—earth was dry and cold, air moist and hot, fire hot and dry, water cold and moist—and theorized that any element can change into any other with which it had a quality in common, for example, air into fire, as both are hot. The idea of mutability became the basis of alchemy, which sought to turn “base” metal such as lead into gold or silver. To the four earthly elements, Aristotle added a fifth, aether (ether), of which the celestial sphere was composed.
在亚里士多德之前，元素被认为是不可变的。他把元素区分出相对的性质——热或冷、湿或干——土是干和冷，气是湿和热，火是热和干，水是冷和湿。并且在理论上推测任何元素都可以转化为有相同性质的其他元素。比如，气可以转变为火，因为它们都是热的。可变性的观念成为了炼金术的基础，炼金术试图将如铅一类的“基本”金属转化为金或银。在这四种世俗元素之外，亚里士多德增加了第五种元素——以太——构成了天穹。
The Aristotelian view of the elements survived until the 17th century, when Robert Boyle proposed a theory of “primitive and simple, perfectly unmingled bodies,” many more than four, that combine to form chemical compounds. By the early 19th century this approach had given rise to the modern classification of atomic elements.
亚里士多德学派的元素观一直存在至十七世纪，直到罗伯特.波义耳提出了“原初的、简单的、绝对纯净的小体”理论——远远多于四种元素构成了化学混合物。到十九世纪初期，波义耳的方法导致了现代原子元素分类的产生。
———————不算很绝望的分割线——————
像是“四素说”这种描述性的概念还是容易理解的。只是在诸多被引用的希腊原典中，利用四素说附会出不同的世界图景或某些道德或伦理的概念，仅仅以物质的角度来理解四素说看来是肤浅的。从肤浅开始也很好。
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